I have been following your activities both on the PLUG list and
via live streaming from the meetings for the last couple of months, and
thought it might be time to introduce myself.
My name is Joseph Hart. I am originally from Niagara Falls, NY,
and have been working with electronics and computers since the late
1960's. I lived in Japan for over 14 years working as a scientific
progammer at a leading Kyoto area research laboratory in the fields of
artificial life (Alife) and robotics. My wife and I moved to Western NY
when they closed my section several years ago. I've pretty heavily
involved with Linux itself for over twenty years, having started to use
it when the lab began a changeover from the many other Unix systems they
were using at the time (ex. SunOS/Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, various
Connection Machines, etc).
I've got about 40 or so machines of various types (not all on at
the same time...:-), including a goodly number of SGI boxes, five Amigas
of various models, a number of miniaturized Japanese machines not
available in the US, and of course a Raspberry PI.
Many of these machines run a "distribution" of Linux which I
designed and built entirely from source code. I originally did this
about 10 years ago on an old 32 bit x86 machine just to see how far I
could get with it. I liked the result so much that I kept it, and have
since done a full X86_64 (64 bit) version, and an 32 bit ARM version for
my RaspberryPi. Everything was built from source, including the
kernels, glibc, Xorg (X11R6) , all the compilers (gcc, g++, f77, rust),
Firefox 57, Thunderbird email client, and many other packages. My main
machine has an X11 package which is configured to feed a quad monitor
setup, and I run an i3 tiling window manager on top of that.
As I mentioned earlier, the Raspberry Pi runs my custom Linux OS
instead of Raspbian. It uses a special UBoot configuration to boot a
vanilla kernel.org kernel instead of a patched Raspbian one. This ARM
version was built on one of my x86_64 machines using a custom designed
cross-compile tool chain also built from source.
I use the Pi to provide locally what for me are low bandwith
services such as DHCP, NTP, cron, DNS, Subversion, NFS, and a few
others. It also functions as the manager/scheduler for my network
backup system. That system takes incremental snapshots every hour on
the hour. It also powers up selected machines one at a time during the
night in order to handle machines which may have been on only
infrequently during the day, takes the requisite snapshots, and shuts
them down again if they were originally found off. This allows all the
machines except the Pi to be left off when not in use, which saves on
energy consumption.
I've also got an older Mac Pro 1.1 . This was originally a quad core,
but I have since modified it into an eight core machine. It natively
runs a 64 bit version I built for it. Since this was my first 64 bit
machine, the OS for it was built on one of my 32 bit machines using a
similarly custom built cross-compile tool chain.
That should be far more than enough about that.
I am presently still in Western NY. It's very much a Microsoft "town".
There's not very much of a Linux or technology market here so I'm
somewhat semi-retired these days, but looking to get back into the field
if chance permits. The wife and I are considering a visit to Portland
in the near future, with a view to possibly moving there some day. We
would like to try and catch a PLUG user group meeting if we can somehow
manage that while we are there.
My apologies for the lengthy message....:-)
Regards,
J. Hart
P.S. I also raise carnivorous plants for the fun of it.......
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