What do you use Linux for?

fwor

MythTV. This was the project that forced me to learn Linux basics, though almost 3 years later I've still got a lot to learn...

It's great if you want a PVR that supports multiple tuners and multiple "backends" (PCs with tuners installed) as well as any number of "frontends" (PCs that can watch live TV or recordings, or DVDs, or...).

The current Ubuntu distribution has MythTV so well sorted that (with the right hardware) you can get it working without needing to resort to the command line - it's all point and click - but you can do it the hard way if you want.

I've recently also been trying to get Asterisk working as a PC-based telephony system - primarily for incoming call routing and voicemail, but it's proving to be hard work. There are GUI-based Asterisk distros such as AsteriskNow!, but none seem to work well, so command line installation seems to be the only practical option for now...

elvch01

I have a whole bunch of linux machines (Virtual machines on a VMware ESX server)
2 email servers
2 proxy servers
1 VPN server
1 web server
1 Domain controller with Samba, DHCP & DNS
essentially, when I have a new "pet project", I simply "build" a new Linux server for it. In a virtualised environment such as I have, building a server is purely theoretical excercise since I have one HUGE server that I simply partition as desired.