Alex's Programming

Alex is an experienced UNIX developer, having used most of the major UNIX operating systems such as SunOS, Solaris, Linux, and NetBSD. He has developed native applications using C/C++, built Java applications and servlets, installed, maintained and adminstrated systems remotely and locally, developed websites using PHP, MySQL, and Java. He has been involved with UNIX since 1996, when he switched from development on Microsoft platforms. As he had been developing on Microsoft platforms since 1993, he felt that he'd gone as far as he could, there were so much more he could do with UNIX. This happened in 1996, and he has never looked back since.

Alex is also a volunteer (provisionally developer/architecture tester) on the Gentoo Linux distribution, completely free and staffed by volunteers, for the advancement of Linux, growing from humble beginnings with support for many different architectures including UltraSPARC, ARM and MIPS.

His C.V. is available on request in various file formats, e-mail alex.buell@munted.org.uk for a copy.

Systems in use

  • Dell Inspiron 5150 (lithium)
    • Pentium 4 3.06GHz w/512K HT replaced with Pentium 4 2.8GHz w/1MB HT
    • 15" 1600x1200 display w/nVidia NV34M 64MB graphic adapter
    • PATA 2.5" 250GB hard disk
    • Two gigabytes of memory
    • Mini-PCI wireless-N card fitted
    • Stable Gentoo w/Gnome and KDE in use

  • Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 2000 (sodium)
    • Dual 1.2GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processors
    • XVR-500 (3dLabs Wildcat) graphic adapter (unsupported under Linux)
    • Two 73GB FC-AL disks (100MB/s)
    • Four gigabytes of memory
    • Unstable Gentoo w/Gnome

  • Sun Microsystems Sun Ultra 60 (fluorine)
    • Dual 360HMz UltraSparc IIe processors
    • Creator3D FFB graphic adapter
    • Two 36GB SCSI hard disks (40MB/s)
    • Two gigabytes of memory
    • Stable Gentoo w/Gnome

  • Asus A639N PDA (oxygen)
    • Intel PXA270 ARM processor
    • 64MB RAM, 1GB FLASHROM, 2GB MiniSD
    • Windows 6 Classic (5.2.1239 build 17746.0.2.4)
    • TomTom Navigator 6
    • (To be replaced with HTC Desire HD for both PDA and K770i)

  • Dell Inspiron 8100 (hydrogen)
    • Pentium 3 1.13GHz w/512K
    • 15" 1400x1050 display w/nVidia NV11 32MB graphic adapter
    • PATA 2.5" 80GB hard disk
    • 512MB memory
    • Unstable Gentoo w/Gnome and KDE

  • iMac G3 Summer 2001 (carbon)
    • PowerPC 750cx 600MHz
    • 15" 1024x768 display w/ATI Rage 128VR 16MB graphic adapter
    • PATA 3.5" 60GB hard disk
    • 768MB memory
    • Mac OS 9.2.2 (10GB), Mac OS/X 10.4 (10GB), stable Gentoo w/Gnome (40GB)

  • Unbranded Pentium 166 ()
    • Pentium 166MHz processor
    • Two 3.5" PATA 10GB hard disks
    • Millennium Matrix II w/8MB graphic adapter
    • 128MB memory
    • MSDOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11

All networked through a Linksys WRT54GS v5.1 router upgraded with dd-wrt firmware, supplied with broadband from a DrayTek Vigor 100 ADSL2+ modem. Not all the systems are in use (electricity prices being what they are :p)


There's LinuxInfo-1.1.8.tar.gz, an utility that displays the type of processor, system library version, and version of Linux kernel in use.

Alex has also written a HOWTO for using framebuffer devices in Linux.

For convienence, you can download gzipped versions - gzipped/tarred html file or gzipped/tarred text file. The SGML source is provided here - gzipped/tarred xml file.