OK, so I enjoy computer-related stuff at home as well as at work. At home, I run Linux (SuSE at the moment), on a box put together from parts from JDR Microdevices and my "junk box." It has a 2.8gHz Intel Pentium processor, 1 GB ram, 30 GB and 120 GB hard drives, SVGA video, and CD-RW. It is fun getting "under the hood", putting it all together, and keeping it running. It's not particularly bleeding edge stuff, but functional for what I need.
Besides this main "production" machine, I put my partner's machine
together (from replaced
components out of mine, of course: P233MMX, 128mB, 10G, etc.). It runs
Win2K and probably will dual boot with Linux one of these days!
We have Qwest Choice DSL Deluxe service. It's great: faster than
what we have at my work! Off of the DSL converter ("modem") is a
Linux-based
Linksys WRT54G wireless switch and firewall, through which everything
is networked. The printer is an HP 7310, accessible through the
network. No unusual problems getting it networked with my Linux box,
and through Samba, my partner's Win2K machine.
I loaded Knoppix onto a Compaq Presario 1800T laptop, with help from several web sites, and no help at all from Compaq ("that voids your software warranty"). In fact, this laptop had some kind of problem with heat and WinME such that it would totally lock up after about 2 hours on AC and 1/2 hour on battery. After loading Knoppix I had no trouble like this at all!
Unfortunately, this laptop died from a rather large static discharge
to the keyboard (from me, unfortunately). I replaced
it with a Toshiba A25-S279. Though this doesn't have the nice big
(pixel-wise) display that the
Compaq had, I have been able to get it to be dual boot with XP and
Knoppix Linux (Here's how). There are some
nice features about XP, especially the ability to hibernate to disk
(sure speeds the "boot" time). After I reloaded the Knoppix
installation with SuSE, I can "hibernate" (suspend to disk) on
Linux. My biggest challenge has been to get Samba access to my
main machine working consistently. More later...
I enjoy surfing the Web, and learning about all kinds of things from TCP/IP networking, to Linux Firewalls, to scripting languages (quite useful in my web work).