The 2009 Desktop and Environment

Today - July 11, 2009 - I'm sitting in front of 5 monitors of various sizes hooked to an AMD quad-core Phenom system with 8 Gigs of RAM and well in excess of 2 Terabytes of local disk. Networked to the system are several other systems from older 2GHz Intel machines to Core-2 systems with another 20+ Terabytes of disk. All run various flavours of Linux - from an older Red Hat 9 system to the latest Fedora Core 11 (FC-10 on the main desktop at the moment)

I believe in the "paperless" office - and believe that the only way to achieve this is if the computer screen real estate is at least as large as the physical desk real estate. Otherwise you find yourself printing out things just so you can refer to them while working on your computer desktop. The one and only printer in the house (an old Lexmark) is in another room and seldom sees use. A box of paper lasts me a couple of years.

On this system I have 3 dual-head video cards and room for a 4th. I have one spare port (5 used out of the 6 available at the moment) and will likely not use it until I put the 4th card in - at which time I'd go to a 4-wide by 2 high setup with all identical monitors. I don't expect to do this for some time - the current setup works just fine.

I do have a couple of laptops - one of which (Compaq Presario) still runs the Windows XP that came with it, although it also has Cygwin (open source software that runs on Windows) on it. The other (an older Toshiba) I just updated to FC-11. Aside from customer machines that find their way to my hardware table, there are no other Windows machines in the house. I do however have VMware with various flavours of Windows available as virtual machines. These are mostly for diagnosing friend and customer problems and for the odd time when Open Office just can't make sense of a Microsoft Office document of some kind.

I still make use of one of the old IBM keyboards. I have a couple of the Lexmark ones around too - but I'll have to start looking for a replacement at some point if another accident with wine happens :)