Linux-Ottawa (OCLUG) Wiki

2019-6-4: My (John Nash) current primary “working” machine, called J6, is a Sept 2011 tower, which has served me well and is still a useful and well-balanced computer for my needs. These are:

• a lot of management of files, since I have a goodly collection of computer archives, having been involved with building and using computers since 1961, and I have managed to preserve many of the files, as well as materials from my academic career, my creative writing, folk dance, and personal and family history material.
• some computation (i.e., scientific computing), as well as specialized text processing, which can be intensive but is NOT gaming; I also do some scripting as well as programming for math/stat.
• much communication activity (web, email, video chat, ftp/ssh)
• some investigation of other distros (even –horrors– non-Linux) using VMs under VirtualBox
• some photo, audio and video editing, but mainly of the snip-and-glue variety

I like a fairly big screen. At one time J6 had two monitors, a 24“ HDMI and a 20” VGA, but I've found just the 24“ is fine. Smaller screens (as on my laptops) are not as helpful for writing and programming. I use headphones for audio – no fancy speakers.

J6 has the following very edited setup:

• Motherboard GA-890GPA-UD3H
• AMD Phenom™ II X6 1090T Processor
• 16GiB System Memory (4*4Gib DIMM 1600 MHz (0.6 ns))
• display RS880 [Radeon HD 4290]
• multimedia RS880 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4200 Series]
• RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
• 2 * 1TB WDC WD1002FAEX-0 in RAID (mirrored) – used as data storage
• 500GB ST3500630AS used for OS and home directory
• 250GB ST3250820A used for holding VM images and similar material
• BD-RE WH16NS40 optical drive (CD, DVD, BlueRay)