To the uninitiated, Peter Giorgilli looks like the normal office worker. Neat, clean, tie knotted and shirt sleeves buttoned up, Pete wouldn't attract much attention in a crowd.

But in the office, it's a different story. There are a multitude of green screens on the desks around his workspace -- which, to any computer user means just one thing -- and after just one look, it becomes obvious that what Peter has going on his machine is slightly off the beaten track.

Pete is one of the rare blokes in the field of computing who uses Linux on his machine for all his regular office work. While many others would be proud to announce their acquisition of the latest hardware, Pete is one of those who is proud to say that he runs what is probably the oldest machine in the company -- a Pentium 75.

Signs of the future? Peter Giorgilli walks the Linux walk.

Pete works as a contractor for The Age. He functions as a Perl and HTML programmer and uses Red Hat Linux on his computer. When he joined, a little over a year ago, he was given a regular PC with Windows 95 running on it. Hereformatted the disk and installed version 5.2 of Red Hat with which he was familiar.

His work mainly involves maintaining Perl systems running under IBM's flavour of UNIX (AIX) which under Windows meant spending loads of time in telnet.

"The main motivation for my wanting to run Linux was that it provided a superior Perl development environment than did AIX. To start with, I could run Emacs. Plus, I could install any GNU (open source) software I needed -- not always a simple matter under AIX. Finally, with Linux I had a complete UNIX development workstation."

Fortunately, Pete works for an organisation which is bothered about productivity, period. Once his boss realised that he would be able to do his work much better using this interface and that he knew what he was doing, he left Pete to his own devices. His colleagues have come to accept his use of Linux and his occasional evangelising. Though, says Pete, with a smile, when the anti-virus folk turned up recently during the I Love You virus scare, they were a bit fazed to come up against a bloke using Linux in a production environment! "They just didn't know what to do on my machine," he said, laughing.

Pete got off the Linux blocks with Slackware 3.0 in 1996. "Probably kernel 1.2.13," he says. He started working with OS/2 as a development platform but when he wanted a web server, chose to go the Unix route - even though IBM's web server was free at that time. He began hosting sites in 1997 and took out a permanent Internet connection so that his clients could see what he had developed. His brother runs a design business so they can work together on projects.

Pete is firmly of the opinion that while Linux has some way to go before it can be used on huge industrial projects -- "the commercial Unices have some advantages in those situations," is his opinion -- it can be easily used as a desktop platform for office use. "It is an ideological thing more than anything else," said he, over lunch. "There used to be a dictum that people would never get fired for buying IBM. Now that can be extended to Windows."

Says Peter: "Linux is stable and the total cost of ownership is very low. It has good applications for office productivity. It may not have all the bells and whistles which Windows has but why do you need those things in a production environment?

"Believe me, generally management do not know what is good from a technical point of view - they are often behind the technological edge by two or three years. So the safe choice is the thing that everyone uses."

Methadone is used to cure addicts of addiction to heroin, and Peter feels that one has to use similar methods to get people to use Linux. "It is a mental and cultural thing. But it will slowly seep in, have no fear," says he.

Pete is one of the few who have put their operating system where their mouth is; he talks Linux and works with it too. And he does it for one reason: he doesn't want to use an inferior product when a good one is available and at very little cost. A good example to the myriad folk who talk the Linux talk but quietly retreat behind the green screen when it comes to walking the walk.

This article remains copyright to the author, Sam Varghese. Sam can be reached at sam@gnubies.com.