The Linux Home Office: What’s In Your Cyberspace?

What does your home computer lab look like? Do you have a dedicated office, a corner of the living room, a lounge-in-bed setup? Maybe you’re set up more like an old-fashioned terminal server, with a big workstation in a closet and several remote PCs. Maybe you have whittled your computing herd down to a single sleek laptop.

Every time I help a friend with their Mac or Windows computer it’s a good reminder of how restricted those platforms are. Every little thing is a big hairy deal, and the only flexibility you have is do you want to pay through the nose now or later, and how many times do you want to hear “No, you can’t do that”?

My home setup has evolved. I used to keep everything in a single room and it was a nice setup. Lots of shelves, lots of tables, lots of computers, and a big closet for storing the usual herds of parts and manuals that breed and multiply over time.

As time went by I got tired of spending so much time in that one room. I got tired of hanging on to old parts that weren’t any use to me. So I did a major cleanup and adopted out all the old gunk to happy geek packrats, and bought a nice laptop for wandering. Built a good secure Linux wireless access point on a PC Engines WRAP board and lo, I could roam freely about my premises. I have a little farm so there is plenty of nice premises for roaming.

For awhile I considered converting the computer room to something else and having only a nice laptop. But in this modern red tape era it is convenient to have a dedicated office for taxes, record-keeping, and all that crud that will someday devour us entirely.

Then I got back into music because my excellent significantotherperson is a musician, which evolved into setting up a little recording studio and music room in another part of the house. Of course this room required its own computer, which became the photography and audio production computer. So we have as many computers as ever, they’re just spread out more.

This all reflects my own evolution as a computer nerd, progressing from enjoying the technology for its own self, to putting it to work in all kinds of creative and satisfying ways.

So how has your tech life evolved?