What do you do with your Linux machines?

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I use my Zotac ZBOX as a linux machine.
Specs:
1GB DDR 2 Ram
40GB HDD
Intel Atom x2 1.6

Uses:
Web Development (Photoshop runs in Wine and I use Kate to code for PHP along with the HTML and CSS)
Low end gaming.
Hacking on my own network.

OS:
Kubuntu 10.4

It runs uber fast and suits my needs 5 ply.

2 of my 4 are Linux boxes. I mainly use the Linux Mint dual-booter for research, gaming, and other day-to-day uses. The older Slackware box is my "plaything", I guess. I got it cheap and I use it primarily to take it apart and learn about Slackware.

Specs on the first one:
Compaq CQ5504F
AMD Sempron 140 Single-Core Processor, 2.7 GHz (blech) x64
3 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6510SE Integrated Graphics
500 GB HD + 320 GB external HD
2 DVD-RW drives

Ick, factory defaults. Well, many Compaqs seem to suck at being upgraded (experience) and my parents won't pay for upgrade parts. One of these days I'll get a job and then I'll buy a few 4 GB sticks of RAM.

I haven't touched the second one in a while so I'm not sure about its specs.

I have Linux and Windows 7 (bah) on my laptop but I prefer Linux, I only have Windows 7 because I'm a high end gamer.
On my desktop I only have Windows 7 though, but it was free because there was a delay on the people who mailed it.

I have not really used Linux for anything lately. I tried it in the 90's just because I was curious to see what Linus had put together.

Both my laptop and desktop run linux. I use my laptop for everyday stuff: surfing the web, email, software development, etc. In my current configuration I use my desktop more as a server than anything else. I have the monitor setup in a bookcase for watching movies and listening to music. Mainly i just ssh to it from my laptop and use it to test some of the more demanding software I write as it is a quad core with a good amount of memory. My desktop also has several different servers running on it (lighttpd, mysql, a few custom things).

i use ubuntu installed on an acer one to work with and learn python, not that it couldnt be done in windows but it is nicer having a dedicated linux distro, freeing up my desktop for all the references needed at my skill level
the small size of the acer one also makes it a very nice travel companion.

I have a Dell Poweredge 2600 server that I use for testing and experiments as well as refreshing my knowledge

it's been through many a linux distro since I got it, among them: ubuntu server, Gentoo, Slackware, Debian, Fedora etc.

I use Debian as my main OS but I have a Windows 7 partition as well for the odd time when I need it (I can't use a virtual machine or Wine for various reasons. Well, I could, but it's just not worth the bother). I also have a VPS which runs Debian. The use of my main machine is:

- Uni work (which varies - typing up assignments, researching, emailing, programming, doing electronic designs)
- Multimedia (music and video)
- Internet, email, chatting (Skype etc)
- Reading (I read a lot of eBooks)
- Programming (I'm listing this twice because I do it for pleasure as well as for uni - mainly C/C++ of late)

My VPS is used to host my homepage with lighttpd and I use it to connect to IRC via SSH using irssi and screen.

The very smallest machine (Soekris 5501) is a Debian install, but the rest are Linux source distros. The largest is a self-built AMD system with enough RAM and disks to be a space heater.

Used as:
- residential gateway + vpn tunnel endpoints + occasionally filch an IP from my ISP for use at home
- kerberos server (all workstations and fileserver are krb5 clients)
- internal DNS, DHCP
- two big machines (each >= 8GB RAM; CPUs have on-chip virtualization support) for running virtual machines (qemu-kvm).

For a previous job, I brushed up on OSPF and BGP by building Linux guests inside the big boxes and virtually wiring them up, instead of buying obsolete Cisco gear on eBay.

I haven't had a linux machine since I crashed my bike and broke my personal laptop about a year ago. I don't miss it all that much, because most of the good software from linux has been ported to windows.

My work laptop needs windows to run SQL Server and Resharper. My home desktop needs windows because there are no good DAWs and few good embedded development tools for linux.

That being said, both of my windows machine have GnuWin32 because I really need grep, awk, sed, etc. I also use LaTeX for typesetting.

Windows Powershell + GnuWin32 is pure heaven. You can do tons of things just by piping around the output of .NET functions (so you can pipe the output of a SQL query straight to sed, for example). Just this friday I used Powershell + GnuWin32 to find all stored procedures in a legacy database that weren't referenced by code (or another stored procedure that was referenced by code) and drop them all. It took less than 10 minutes.

I have a desktop that runs Ubuntu 10.10 merkat. I use it to program TCP sockets in C and program in NASM Assembly Language. Here's my setup; I have a motherboard that supports both sata and ata technology. I have 4 HDD's. 2 of them are 160GB SATA drives and the otter 2 are 40GB ATA. I have a GeForce 7600GS VGA PCIe card with onboard DDR2 memory and 512MB of cache and has a s-video extension. I have a Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS peripheral sound card! A Wireless-G 2.4GHz 802.11g PCI Adapter with SpeedBooster made by Linksys. 3 sticks of DDR PC3200U 256MB with L3 cache. I have an AMD Athlon 64 2.8GHz 1MB main memory with onboard L2 cache single-channel DDR SDRAM mem controller 800MHz hypertransport link.

One of my exclusively Linux machines still has an old XP running under VirtualBox. I update the XP once in a while, and use it to verify how poorly IE performs on compliant web pages.

I've been doing a bit of online gaming, recently (OpenArena and Nexuiz), which is quite fun.

I use my machines for all sorts of obscure things.

I'm currently getting to grips with Joomla! - for the Somerset branch of the NAS. Not that doing that really requires Linux, but it's so much easier to test out such things when you can run all the important software locally - for free.

core 2 duo 2.53 ghz, 4gb ram, nvidia 9650 gt 1gb, running linux mint, I use it to work n stuff.

Since Einstein here forgot his password, it's mainly being used to keep a small section of airborn dust from collecting on the floor...