Thank you for wonderful introduction. You could teach us interesting trick or two.
Off topic, you write "raise" not grow plants. That, in my mind, entails education. Do they speak French, play an instrument or play with kids after Sunday's lunch? Tomas On Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 10:09 AM J. Hart <jfhart...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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....... > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > PLUG@pdxlinux.org > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
