Who is Mark Komarinski? Introduce yourself to our readers.

A nice open-ended question. Professionally, I'm a Senior Linux System Administrator for Harvard Medical School. I've been doing system administration for the past 10 years, usually without that actually being listed in my official job title. Personally, I live about 20 miles outside Boston with my wife, daughter, dog, and rabbit. Aside from Linux and computers, I enjoy cooking, refinishing old furnature and working in the yard.

How long have you been working with Linux, and how did you get interested in it?

I got started with Linux in 1992. I had just purchased an AMD 386/40 with a whopping 8MB of RAM. By this point, I had been using UNIX variants for the past three years: Xenix, Coherent, and UTX. Coherent was the most interesting, as I could run it on my local machine. By this point, 386BSD (or one of the BSDs) and Linux was available. One of my co-workers happened to have Linux on a stack of about 10 floppy diskettes and he let me borrow them. That was all it took.

What was it like working on "PTG Interactive's Training Course for Red Hat Linux: A Digital Seminar on CD-ROM 2/e"? Any major difficulties? How much did it take to complete?

This is my fifth project with PTG Interactive, so I was able to build on my previous experience in writing to help. The biggest problem was shooting the video of me introducing each course. The available places I thought I could use were not available and my house is too small to create a good effect. Fortunately, my wife's company allowed us use of one of their conference rooms.


Total time for me to write was about 6-8 months. Most of the time wound up being spent recording the audio and creating the screen captures.

You cover Red Hat Linux in your training course, which distribution(s) do you use on a daily basis?

Until a few years ago, it was just Red Hat Linux. For the most part, it works really well. More recently, I have been using Debian Linux on servers at work along with a few of my home servers. The 'rolling release' of Debian lets you keep the servers up and running while doing most upgrades. Red Hat has a solid foundation on the desktop, and most of the researchers I deal with ask for Red Hat more than any other distribution.

In your opinion, is Linux ready for the desktop?

That's a very broad question. I'll answer it two ways.