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About This Month's Authors
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About This Month's Authors

Bill Bennet

Bill, the ComputerHelperGuy, lives in Selkirk, Manitoba, Canada; the "Catfish Capitol of North America" if not the world. He is on the Internet at www.chguy.net. He tells us "I have been a PC user since 1983 when I got my start as a Radio Shack manager. After five years in the trenches, I went into business for myself. Now happily divorced from reality, I live next to my Linux box and sell and support GPL distributions of all major Linux flavours. I was a beta tester for the PC version of Playmaker Football and I play `pentium-required' games on the i486. I want to help Linux become a great success in the gaming world, since that will be how Linux will take over the desktop from DOS." It is hard to believe that his five years of university was only good for fostering creative writing skills.

Jim Dennis

Jim is the proprietor of Starshine Technical Services and is now working for LinuxCare. His professional experience includes work in the technical support, quality assurance, and information services (MIS) departments of software companies like Quarterdeck, Symantec/Peter Norton Group and McAfee Associates -- as well as positions (field service rep) with smaller VAR's. He's been using Linux since version 0.99p10 and is an active participant on an ever-changing list of mailing lists and newsgroups. He's just started collaborating on the 2nd Edition for a book on Unix systems administration. Jim is an avid science fiction fan -- and was married at the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim.

Bill Mote

Bill is the Technical Support Services manager for a multi-billion dollar publishing company and is responsible for providing 1st and 2nd level support services to their 500+ roadwarrior sales force as well as their 3,500 workstation and laptop users. He was introduced to Linux by a good friend in 1996 and thought Slackware was the end-all-be-all of the OS world ... until he found Mandrake in early 1999. Since then he's used his documentation skills to help those new to Linux find their way.

Mark Nielsen

Mark founded The Computer Underground, Inc. in June of 1998. Since then, he has been working on Linux solutions for his customers ranging from custom computer hardware sales to programming and ne of the greatest benefits we enjoy as Linux users is X11. The various X servers in use on Linux were uniformly more stable, more complete and offered better performance than the NT-based X11 servers. While I found one of the Windows-based X servers acceptable on NT, it did not perform as well as either of those I tried on Linux (on the same machine).

The built-in support for NFS was another big plus. When we received distribution media for software, I could mount the CD on my drive and all the UNIX/Linux-based computers in the project could install without a need to keep track of who had the CD last. This was particularly helpful for installing software on our HP server. This machine is in another building and I do not have ready access to it. Thus, mounting a CD as an NFS volume was an important capability.

The Linux users installed Netscape Communicator, giving us a familiar and easily configured communications suite. (We had already been licensed and using it on MS Windows.)

The biggest benefit for me, as a UNIX system administrator and Perl programmer, is the ability to write and test programs locally. Some of my programs have the potential for bad side-effects. If tested on our HP server, my team members could be (and I'm afraid have been) adversely affected. With Linux on my desktop, I have a dual opportunity. First, I can write and test programs on my desktop machine. If I accidentally make the root directory permissions ``drwxr--r--'' (which I once did when invoking a poorly written Makefile), only I am unable to use my machine, rather than 20 users being locked out. Second, I am motivated to make my programs more adaptive by making sure they will run in the BSD-like Linux environment as well as the SVR4 worlds of HP-UX and Solaris.

Our team presently has Linux installed on four PCs with two others as likely prospects. We also have it installed on three Sun Ultra 5 desktop machines. Linux performance (particularly X11) is breathtaking on the Ultra 5. Several people on our project and neighboring projects have installed Linux on their home PCs after seeing it the workplace. For these people, learning UNIX has accelerated markedly.

The accelerated UNIX acclimatization is a plus for the company. Any company involved in migration from legacy systems to a UNIX platform will have a significant cost in retraining. We saw people learning UNIX at an accelerated pace after becoming Linux enthusiasts. This certainly appeared to be a productivity boost and training cost reduction.

If your company could benefit from having UNIX workstations on employee's desks, look at the low cost of entry into Linux. All it takes is a PC (you've probably already got that) and a Linux distribution (not very expensive). Make life better where you are--get Linux.