What runs on my desk?

(December 2000) My desktop system has evolved from my background as a Unix consultant and system administrator. I developed a taste for being able to multi-task while working on the DEC 10 systems at Dataline Systems. Putting a task "in background" while I did something else became a game - seeing how many programs I could keep busy, sometimes to the detriment of other users on the system it turned out.

On the SCO Xenix and Unix systems was a virtual console system that allowed up to 12 individual login sessions from the console keyboard and screen, albeit text mode "dumb" terminal sessions.

Some of the systems I administered had X-windows installed but many times there was simply not enough RAM to allow me to flex my wings with the windowing environment. Not until the early days of Wimsey when RAM started to come down in price and we started using Linux with its X implementations did I get an opportunity to fall in love with the multi-window capabilities of the desktop workstations that were becoming affordable.

The "mega-pixel" high-res color capable accelerated video card and large monitors were just appearing in the consumer PC arena. My desktop system was Linux with a 4 Megabyte ATI card and a 20" monitor that cost us more than $2000.00, but I could monitor the load and several log files on each of our servers and still have enough screen real estate to get some "real" work done dealing with e-mail and word processing and such.

During the mid 80's to early 90's I had only used MSDos to format PC hard drives for installation of SCO or Linux. The few times I had played with Microsoft Windows I had found it slow and effectively incapable of doing more than one thing at once no matter how much in the way of resources the machine had. During my Wimsey days I learned more about Dos, OS2, Windows, MAC OS, and all the other traditional PC environments simply because we had to be able to tell their owners how to get their systems to talk to the Internet. None of this endeared me to any of these non-Unix systems in any way, let alone enough to make me switch.

Then we sold Wimsey to iSTAR Internet and I found myself in charge of a company full of MACs and PCs running Windows 95, and no particular reason to personally administer any Unix systems. I had a laptop and a desktop system both running Win95 and both with Office and various other Microsoft products, and I had a stable full of people I was supposed to be able to support on this stuff; I had to learn it and had to find ways to make it work as well as my old X-windows and virtual console Unix systems had - because I still found a need to do more than one thing at once.

The first thing that irked me about Windows was the lack of any virtual desktop facility where I could keep more than one screen full of open windows and switch rapidly between the various environments. To the rescue came a little program called impVWM by   George H. Harth, IV of Kent University. If he is out there I'd love to send him his shareware fee but he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. The impVWM program allows you to have up to 3x3=9 virtual desktops shown in a little sizeable blue box that you tuck into one corner of your screen. You can drag windows from one desk to another with your left button down, and right clicking on one of the desks brings up that desk's windows while hiding the others.

With the IMP I can now have my e-mail in the upper left desk, my X-windows spread over the lower left quadrant, one desk per machine or task, my FrontPage in the upper right desk. My word or Excel go in the top middle and my browsers in the lower right quadrant. Not quite enough desks to match the 20-30 I used to have under my main linux system, but not bad.

Add to this the eXodus X server and the Cyberworks fax/voice software, the Logitech scanner feeding DocuMagix, the odd Corel program or other graphics program to create or fix images or graphics, and you can see that there can be a lot going on.

The interesting thing is that with the 128 Megs of RAM, I seldom see the system actually go into major swap. What I do see is the Norton System Doctor pop up telling me I'm out of graphic resources due to having too many windows open I guess. I also see the system hang about once every 2-3 days for no apparant reason, although I'm now careful never to start a Logitech scan job unless the system has been freshly re-booted since otherwise it inevitably hangs with an interesting line of garbage pixels across the top third of the screen.

Sometimes the IMP will do strange things like randomly moving all the windows until they are all one on top of the other in the open desktop, usually when I have a multi-windowed application such as FrontPage 98 up and again the system has been up for a day or two. The cure is to kill it and restart it, but usually I'll take the time to reboot anyway.

All the while that my desktop has been misbehaving, the Linux box network server sits in the wings working wonders with narry a reboot in over 6 months. With the eXodus X server I usually have many windows open to and through it to other systems via SSH and the outside network. I use the ImageMagick package to prepare large numbers of images for inclusion in web sites. The batch abilities of "mogrify" are wonderful.

Why don't I go back to Unix?

I find myself now doing more business administration than system administration. This leads to the creation and exchange of many and diverse documents and files with people, many of whom don't have my enlightened background where pure text files are just fine thanks.