Pablo's Linux Page

"Backups are for wimps. Real Men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." Linus Torvalds
"When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*'" Linus Torvalds
Sort of an index
Why Linux?
As Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, wrote on an email: 
> Other than the fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain why I
> should use Linux over BSD?

No.  That's it.  The cool name, that is.  We worked very hard on
creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it
certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able
to say "OS/2? Hah.  I've got Linux.  What a cool name".  386BSD made the
mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the
name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too
technical.
Let's start somewhere....
What do I use in my desktop? Linux, currently (22/Feb/2008) kernel version 2.6.21. icewm is my window manager, nice, light, fast, has keyboard shortcuts so I can open an xterm by pressing Ctrl-Alt-x, rather than clicking on some mouse button.

Below are some screen-shots of my desktop; click on the image to get a bigger resolution version. The background image is a photo shot by me of VT/CST station in Bombay/Mumbai; you can see it here.

Screen shot with background image   Screen shot with background, xterm and firefox   Screen shot ith background, xterm, thunderbird and firefox

My key-bindings file for icewm is here.

Help
Here I will make available things I try and might be of help with your Linux machine. Let's see if I have the energy to do it :-) The following is just a tentative list.
Which distribution?
Personally I like Debian the most; the amount of packages available is just incredible. I have Debian testing on my laptop. However I started with Slackware and I have/had machines with Fedora and SuSE (before it was acquired by Novell).

A good list of (all?) distributions is available here. If you like rankings and stuff like that then check distrowatch.

Software
Here is a list of software I use regularly.

Browsing: iceweasel/icecat, the Free version of firefox.
Email: icedove, the Free version of thunderbird, or Mutt (and remember: "BUGS: None. Mutts have fleas, not bugs.", from the manual page of mutt).
Text formatting: LaTeX
Windown manager: icewm as mentioned above.
Image display and manipulation: ImageMagick and gimp respectively.
PDF files: I read them with xpdf, a PDF viewer for X, nicer and better than acroread (IMHO).
Network access to other machines: OpenSSH
Administration
apache, the http server
As proxy for speeding up web browsing I use squid
Kerberos for security.
Some info
The image in the background is by Joe Moe, website.