Matt Olander Uses BSD

1. Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Matt Olander. I'm the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at iXsystems, Inc. In addition to the typical duties of a CTO at a high-tech firm in Silicon Valley, I'm also a member of the FreeBSD Project, where I assist with public relations, marketing, and funding code development. Besides funding and managing various FreeBSD development projects, iXsystems is the primary sponsor for both the PC-BSD Project, our desktop endeavor, and FreeNAS, the open-source storage platform based on FreeBSD.


2. What hardware are you using?

What hardware am I not using would be an easier question to answer. Since our primary business is manufacturing and integrating servers and storage for many industries including today's modern Web 2.0 startups, we see all kinds of hardware pass through the doors here, which I am privileged to get to play with ;)


3. What OS are you running on your main desktop/laptop?

PC-BSD 8.x on most of my rigs and PC-BSD 9 Beta 1 and 1.5 in a couple of VMs.


4. What software do you use the most?

I definitely depend on a web browser day-to-day. It's sometimes Firefox and sometimes Opera with Meebo open for IMs, Gmail, some news sites, etc.. In addition, I have a console open most of the day as well where I have a mutt mail client running and irssii for IRC. At work, we rely on OpenOffice for all of our internal documents.



5.What hardware is your main system on?

I've got an Intel Sandybridge workstation at iX in my office running PC-BSD. We've also got a lounge with another Sandybridge workstation connected to a 52" plasma screen TV where I frequently work from a recliner with a wireless keyboard and mouse. That system is also running PC-BSD and after work, I often use it to watch some shows on Hulu or surf the web.

My primary laptop is an older Lenovo IdeaPad U110 with a Core2Duo running PC-BSD 8. It's small and light which makes it ideal for travel. I've also got a Macbook Pro that I use to run various virtual machines during release time.


6. What is your dream setup?

I have to say that I'm pretty close to having it at work. For while, I had dual Nvidia cards connected to 3 LCD's on my workstation. The only way that I could imagine it getting better is with a zero-gravity chair and a suspended monitor setup ;)

7. Care to share a screenshot of your desktop?