A Bit About Me

I’m a developer, technology consultant and student who enjoys Rock Band, good times with friends and the occasional rum and coke… well, there’s nearly always an occasion.

My Past Computer Experience

I’ve been using computers in one form or another since early elementary school – and helping people troubleshoot their problems with high-tech wizardry ever since. In high school, I began building my own systems and performing software development for local businesses. I currently provide internal pre-release support for a smartphone manufacturer.

My Past Experience With Free Software

While I have significant experience with free software, I don’t believe in a complete hippie-like communist worldview. Crusaders for a complete F/OSS (Free/Open Source Software) ecosystem often do more harm than good. Commercial software has its place in the ecosystem and can serve different needs than free software.

I’ve used several Linux distributions (including Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake, and SuSE) and software packages (Apache HTTPD, Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC), and have enjoyed my experiences with most of them.

Why I Agreed To This

My normal workflow in the office involves mostly free software, and I believe it’s not too much of a stretch to migrate to totally free software for nearly everything. It should be an interesting challenge that might show my remaining dependencies on proprietary applications.

What I Hope To Get Out Of It

To gain additional experience with Linux and figure out which open source applications make viable alternatives to commercial software. Being platform-agnostic, while maintaining as much data out of the privacy-reducing “cloud” as possible, is one of my top priorities.

My Experiment Computer Setup

For the purposes of this experiment, I used my reasonably beefy desktop setup:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, running at 3.0GHz
• 4GB DDR2-800 SDRAM
• OCZ Vertex 64GB SSD, WD Raptor 72GB 10K RPM and Seagate 7200.10 300GB SATA hard drives
• Asus P5K-E motherboard
• eVGA nVidia 9800GT graphics card, 512MB RAM – driving 2×24″ BenQ FP241W monitors at 1900×1200 each

What Distribution Did I Select?

Gentoo, using the AMD64 build on the amd64/10.0/desktop Portage profile.

What Distribution Am I Running Now?

My preferred option is Linux Mint 9, x64, GNOME-flavoured.