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My main operating system is Linux - a RedHat 9 system with some updates with VMWare in which I run Windows2000 almost all the time, and other versions of Windows and Linux when needed to do diagnostics and testing.
I run 30 virtual desktops on each of the three monitors for a total of 90 (the squares in the lower left corner of the screen) under FVWM2 (the X-windows manager of my choice) and when in Win2k I run:
Which I find is the absolute best desktop manager for Microsoft's products (the little gray 3x4 grid overtop of Yahoo Messenger in the Win2k screen) The desktop managers allow me to keep everything up (non-minimized) at all times, and have keystroke access to most so can switch easily. By convention I keep e-mail in the upper left (in Linux), monitored server systems on the right, and active projects along the bottom - with VMWare and Win2k in the bottom left. The grid on the bottom right has some frequently used program start buttons (mozilla, gnumeric, abiword, Netscape) as well as a load meter for the machine and 6 clocks with various timezones in them for places I talk to frequently. In the center bottom is a console I use to start up various other windows. It is actively running ssh-agent so I can start up a window on a remote machine simply by typing its name (thanks to Stuart Lynne for the basic startup script). CNN or some other news program runs on the separate Win2K box to the left of my desk - also used for video capture and editing. One of these days I'll get this all running under Linux and put the monitor on as another head. We're close now. My latest acquisition is a Toshiba laptop. The Satellite A10 system is not the fastest or the biggest, but with a P4 2GHz it is no slouch. I've pushed the RAM to 1 Gig (up from the 512M it came with) so I can fairly easily run VMWare on it too. The screen is not nearly high enough resolution at 1024x768 but it is more than useful for the types of things I end up doing remotely. The Toshiba also has a wireless card inside - 802.11b (11Mbps). I splurged and picked up a wireless access point too so now I have real production (as opposed to the various test systems I've ended up with over the past few years) wireless environment. As an aside, my main firewall is still a Fireplug EDGE router software equipped '486 DX2/66 with 32Megs of RAM and 2 Ethernet cards in it. Mine boots from hard disk but it used to boot from floppy. This software was put together by us in our previous company back in 1997 and still works as well as ever. richard |
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