Niche

The guestroom was originally designed as an office for a child psychologist, so it's soundproofed pretty well in addition to having a nice little niche for a desk. There's a shelf, and a hole in the wall I created so that the server that runs this website can whir away 24 hours a day in the box room, with it's monitor and keyboard here -- nice for guests. The shelf above the monitor holds the Linux install CDs I burned on my Mac upstairs, as well as a couple of balsa models I built at the hobby table.

I like Red Hat Linux - you can call it gnu-linux if you like -- it's an amazing amalgam, complex and confusing and improving all the time. I like the concept better than the execution, most of the time, but there are a few things that this OS does better than any other I've used: Web serving, automated 'net related tasks, and software compilation. Plus it's free, and the user community encourages learning!