I have been a linux user for about 8 years now (my first distro was a RH Colgate -- lol while remembering those times ; ) and I have done tons of pretty cool stuff, to the point I have managed to make a living out of it and now people pay me to hack. I must say that one of the coolest things I've ever done in linux was to read this very thread and to realize how cool it was, it is and -most probably- will be for so many people around the globe. Keep having fun, guys!

j0s3

I set up what I call a Remote Interaction Server. In my closet is a slackware box currently running an rtsp streamed webcam, a motion detection system, and a whole lot of ways people can communicate with me through the box. For example, I use festival in conjunction with some cgi scripts I wrote so people can go to my site and tell festival what to speak, right from the browser. I've looked around and I haven't seen anyone else doing anything like this. If anyone has, please check out my site and I'de be glad to share anything I've written for it with you.

Check it out.

WOW
I admit, pretty cool stuff you got there, technical speaking :+)

Made a funny test,
made the system "talk" in your room and recorded it at the same time,
yup, it works fine !

The coolest thing I did for now ...

With NO KNOWLEDGE of linux whatsoever put up a webserver
with Apache 2, Tomcat 5, java (ofcourse), Postgresql.
4 weeks of sweat and long evenings ...

And now strugling with the new JDBC drivers that act different
on my code then standard ODBC drivers in windows,
so a real application is not yet there ...

Ahhhh so it was you that woke me up at 3 in the morning. Along with a few other people later in the morning. After you did the talk script I just shut off my audio system, so you're lucky you were the first person on or you wouldn't have been able to do your fun test.

Coolest thing I ever did was creating a half-lifeserver.

I started off with an old p2-233, scavenged for spare parts my brothers didn't use and put a box together. Then I installed debian on it.
Then I thought "How can I make this usefull?". My brothers and I are/were avid Half-life players at the time but we didn't have an internetconnection 24/7 to our small home-LAN. We didn't had a router so when my dad turned his pc off, no more Net for the rest of us. So, I thought "If we can't get to a HL server, why not create a dedicated HL server at home?" And so I started off downloading the dedicated HL server, the Counter-Strike linux server and Stefan Hendriks' Realbot. After an several hours we had our own fully equipped CS server running almost 24/7. Whenever my brothers and I wanted to play a game, we just had to join the bots which were relentless playing.

Later on I added psychostats so we had a live http-feed of the server with which bot was atm the best bot, which brother had joined in, etc.

But after several months, I had to abandon the idea. My brothers and I were playing less HL and stuff like steam - which was full of bugs at that time - forced to upgrade the entire structure. Besides, it had some performance issues though and steam wouldn't make it any easier on the machine.

Now I have it running as a fileserver/printerserver. It contains a lot of my MP3's and it's also a proxy for apt-get so I don't have to download every package three times when upgrading all of my computers...

rm -rfd /windows/warez_collection

Installing a complete working cvs of enlightenment

Kicking my old roommate's ass in quake 3, and afterwards saying, "Hmm... must be the os"

cpudyn

Well, after having used linux for about 6 months, these are the coolest things I've done:

Installing Gentoo from stage2. (Doing a stage1 this weekend, then with reiserfs

Getting ALSA, X, mplayer and all those other nifty tools to work (Although, with some helping on the X)

Getting fonts to work in fluxbox.

Yesterday I got my best friend too realize that linux is a great way to get rid of all those viruzes.

And probably some other stuff that I can't think of at the moment. =)

<3 Linux <3 =P

Since 2001, when I started with *nix.....Hmmm, I guess a lot of cool things I've done. Mostly learning ,of course. But
Mandrake - setting Server
Suse - getting UT to work
Debian Sarge - setting wine
FreeBSD - managing server
SLackware - getting ATI to work (Darn ATI!)
Installing Slackware altogether for me and friends about 200 times

Improving my C programming technique, understanding how the network works. Playing with the parallel port using LED's, resistors, NPN transistors and even buzzers.
Getting the root password from my high-school (which i got, but now has been changed by another more complex) in order to install eMule clients to download with its incredible width band. But the best one, was the design of a simple mini-board connected to the parallel port which gets the signal from the parallel port and makes sound a little buzzer (amplifying the signal with a NPN transistor and a 9v battery). You cannot imagine for what i used it.

install gentoo, hard enough for me :P

Coolest thing I did...hmmmm..let's see...............

OH, I know..


SWITCHED FROM WINBUHS.

Coolest thing is setting up Gentoo systems on many of my freind's x86s without the handbook.

Tricking a few people into thinking that I got Mac OS X to run on a dell laptop cause of Engage . I told them in a few minutes, and they'd've figured it out anyways.

Using six TTYs simoultanioiusly, 2 naim (Shell aim client), 2 for emerge, one for checkin stuff out, one for netstat. Until I had X up.

Realizing that I hate ati. Then, appreciating Mac OS X. You can't appreciate Mac OS X until you use *nix. Then you realize that Mac OS X's vast superiority to windows isn't opinion, it's fact.

A sexy fact :-P

run 3d desktop in front of windows users...........it just blow's em away

I don't mean to get on a rant here. . .

Anything that isn't windows, you can find a way to blow them away. What's that Fast user switching thing Mac's got going on ?

Hmm, you know how Enlightenment turns windows into a wireframe and spins it down into it's iconified windows bar dealy ? I wonder if they could change that to a genie or suck effect to copy OS X's way of minimizing windows. (since that is a great way to blow NT users away, especially when you hold shift for Slow Mo.

Enlightenment has copied a couple neat things of OS X's, the icons springing out "toward" you in Evidence, the column view in Evidence, Engage, all I have to say is the word "Engage" and if you've seen a screenshot of it:
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?scre...3f884&p=screen

You KNOW it's copied from OS X (which is not a bad thing, Engage is the first "Dock" that isn't painful to use.

The objectdock, a "dock" for windows (I have version 1.05) is PATHETIC with hardware accleration enabled, and process priority set to "real time" compared to Engage on Gentoo with NO hardware acceleration, and it never takes up more than 7 % cpu even then.

These are things NT users will NEVER have, since you are STUCK with what microsuck gives you as a file browser and such. The NT users will never be able to catch up to Unix, BSD (including Mac) or Linux.. I installed Longhorn this morning on one of my small partitions I keep handy, and it's CRAP. It's build 4074, so I will give it the benefit of not being judged, but the direction they're going in, it's crappy. So their coming years don't look too bright.

I think I'm credible to criticize it even though it's beta. I got Mac OS X.3 Panther beta builds as early as 7B68 when I was about 14 years old. Although many frameworks were missing or disfunctional, one could easily spot SOME improvement from OS X.2. I know what to look for in a beta to see what's worth investment.

NT will never catch up, I'm happy to say that, because once microsuck falls, hardware support for the best foundation an OS can have, Unix, will be %100. Since that will be all that is left.

Run Apache and Mysql servers on my Zaurus
Get LTSP to work.