sliu
My experience with Linux began in the late 90s when I was a Physics Ph.D. student in New York University. In addition to the university and department networks of Sun/IBM/SGI workstations, every graduate student in our department can access a small cluster of about thirty Debian installations built by a talented graduate student on recycled Intel 486 machines that were too old to run windows 95. I also installed a Redhat in my personal Compaq laptop and later had a desktop Debian/KDE + huge 17" CRT from our research group.
With these Linux machines, I did computer simulation of Hall effects, built a framework for the department website in Perl/CGI with some open source goodies like ImageMagick.
Then I spend a few years teaching undergraduate physics in universities as a non-research assistant professor and left Linux and programming for a while.
I left university teaching in 2008 to explore using open source culture and web technologies to build an education framework for the social-network generation.
My reunion with Linux began about a year ago when I discovered VirtualBox, with which I can run VMs on my 24" iMac. Currently my working environment includes a 64bt Karmic 64bit in VirtualBox running on OS X 10.6 and a 64bit Hardy in the cloud so that I can access it with SSH+Emacs on my old PowerBook G4 running OS X 10.2.
I am in the early brainstorming stage of the learnr.net project.