Introduction and Overview

For my desktop PCs, I use a Mac Pro and two computers built from components, running

• Red Hat Fedora Linux (on the home-built machines)
• Mac OS X (on the Mac Pro)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional (within VMware Fusion on the Mac Pro)

The details of these software set-ups are outlined below, and the specific hardware is described in later sections. I also have a MacBook Pro that runs basically the same software as the Mac Pro, plus VMware Fusion for running Windows XP and Fedora virtual machines. In principle, I can run all three systems on my MacBook Pro in this way, and in fact I no longer maintain a physical Windows machine, but the audio performance of Fedora under VMware Fusion is not useful (see Mac section below). The other problem is that it is not yet possible to buy an internal SSD hard drive for the MB Pro that is large enough for my needs.