Dave Plonka's %body

Dave's DeskTop

Generally, I don't waste a lot of time advocating specific technologies; use what you like, don't use what you hate, don't tread on me. That said, the stuff below falls under the category of "advocacy", but hey, I'm not forcing you to read this.

My desktop would be sub-optimal if I weren't running the following:

http://www.debian.org/

Debian GNU/Linux is the OS distribution of which I'm currently fond due to both its features and philosophy. It's the only distribution that comes close to never having to be re-installed from scratch to keep it up-to-date. (Honestly, though, I've never managed a successful upgrade of a major Debian release.)

http://www.kornshell.com/

The shell I've been using 1990.
Quite often, I alternatively use pdksh: http://www.cs.mun.ca/~michael/pdksh/.

http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wmx/

Do you waste too much time configuring your window-manager?
wmx is the antidote.

http://www.darryl.com/vi.html

vi - the editor. I've used it since 1988 or so. My brain is probably now "hard-wired" for vi, so I assume I'll use it forever.

http://www.mutt.org/

My favorite Mail User Agent.

http://www.exim.org/

My favorite Mail Transfer Agent. If you don't think an MTA is a part of one's desktop workstation environment, consider that exim has wonderful filtering features (configurable in the user's ".forward") which generally makes procmail unnecessary, and RBL and support for SpamAssassin.

http://www.mountaindew.com/

While my desk is often cluttered with Diet Mountain Dew cans, that's not what this item is about.
I found some nice wallpaper images on the Mountain Dew site.
They're all small GIF images suitable for use as a backround under X11 desktop like this:
xv -root `perl -le 'srand; print splice(@ARGV, rand @ARGV, 1)' *.gif` -quit
There are some nice ones here as well:
http://www.gla.ac.uk/Clubs/WebSoc/graphics/backgrounds/
http://www.mikebonnell.com/wallpaper.html

http://www.sun.com/staroffice/

Still thinking about this one, but it's been useful.
Perhaps http://www.openoffice.org/ would be of interest as well.