Linux is the basis of many currently used unix-compatible systems. Although Linux is often used as the name for an entire unix system, it is actually just the kernel and some supporting tools. Most of the remaining packages of a Linux system, such as the GNU packages, are common to many other unix systems. Nevertheless it's a very fine platform both for work and development. Since early 1.x versions of Linux I have been experimenting with the development kernel branches. This small section of my site is dedicated to various information that people using Linux may find usefull.

My own workstation (dual Athlon system) is running Linux system and I'm using it for most of my work (along with my PowerBook which runs Mac OS X). It's reliable, fast and extremely nice for development. My system is based on SuSE 7.3 distribution (minimal text-based installation), but basically recompiled from scratch (kernel, utils, gcc, glibc, X ...). Just to mention it here, the latests SuSE 8.0 dist is NOT recommended. I have been working with other dists such as RedHat, Mandrake or Debian. There are minor differences and I prefer SuSE basically for historical reasons. Also I like the concept of a single central config file as opposed to RedHat's messy config structure and unexpected replacement of config files. Anyway go to the patches section for some useful patches to keep your soft running (also on development kernels). The links page contains some useful links if you're interested in Linux. Finally tips section contains some tips for both linux-newbies and advanced users.

If you want to have a look at fully functional Linux without touching your hard drive, go to www.knoppix.de. It's a beautiful live-CD based on the Debian distribution - and it's free. The nice thing about it is that all you have to do is to boot from the CD and you have a full featured Linux running, including latest KDE, Open Office, but also latest gcc, glibc ...

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