Arthur Fuller
artful at rogers.com
Thu Oct 7 08:49:07 CDT 2004
Mark Breen wrote: >Hello Francisco, > >Thanks for your reply. > >I was not expecting or even demanding of Linux to be proficient or for >it to do everything that XP can do. > >I was becoming more and more curious about what this Linux thing is. >Having loaded a version of it, I just came away with the impression, >that it was three or four generations behind what we currently have. > >I have the perception that there are hundreds of tools out there, and >many, many flavours of Linux, and obviously different ones are >preferable to different people. > >My main question was however, do you guys, my peers, consider it also >a few generations behind where we are with XP, Office, VB.Net, SQL >2000, ADO and IE with SP2. > >What I was really, really curious about was, whether there are some >people that can give examples of where it beats using the more common >OS's. > >I am not fanatical about either, and I have to say, I have been >intrigued by Linux for a few years, but I was really disappointed when >I first played with it last Sunday night, albeit for an hour or two >only. > >I will look at Knoppix once I click Send :) > >Mark > > > >On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 10:09:14 -0700, Francisco Tapia <fhtapia at gmail.com> wrote: > > >>Mark, I think you are comming off this the wrong way. I will bet >>money that you were not as proficient in the Windows OS as you are now >>back in 92. Linux Desktops will take some getting used to... You'll >>want to observe some of the current distros out there for Desktop >>Linux as opposed to Server Linux distros. >> >>My favorite for home users is Knoppix. It runs right off the CD and >>is a breeze to set up. (install). I don't think you can just get up >>and expect to begin running over night... >> >> >> >> >>On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 09:02:10 +0200, Gustav Brock <gustav at cactus.dk> wrote: >> >> >>>Hi Mark >>> >>>If you are looking for Linux on the desktop, Xandros may be more what >>>you are after: >>> >>> http://www.xandros.com/ >>> >>>/gustav >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>>I just loaded Mandrake Linux for the first time. >>>> >>>> >>>_______________________________________________ >>>dba-Tech mailing list >>>dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com >>>http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech >>>Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com >>> >>> >>> >>-- >>-Francisco >><a href="http://pcthis.blogspot.com">Pc This! pc news with out the jargon</a> >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>dba-Tech mailing list >>dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com >>http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech >>Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com >> >> >> >_______________________________________________ >dba-Tech mailing list >dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com >http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech >Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > > > My favourite distro is Mandrake. I'm on version 10 right now. You may have noticed that many of the vendors now have both a free and a commercial distro. In Mandrake's case, you get a bunch of commercial applications with the at-cost version that are not included in the free version. In some cases the at-cost versions also include drivers for various hardware. A friend of mine taught me a new trick when I installed Mandrake 10. I was used to creating 3 partititions but he said to just format the entire disk as one Linux partition rather than trying to allocate a certain amount of space to each of the three partititions. I tried it and it works nicely. As to your question of where Linux shines as well as WXP + Office etc., there are two areas -- on servers and in licensing costs. Linux servers running Apache are far and away the dominant web servers worldwide. On the desktop, office-type applications are a good place to compare, but so are dedicated boxes. A lot of people are running Linux at work without even knowing it -- i.e. people working at cash registers in supermarkets and so on. Linux is widely used in this kind of hardware because it's cheap and once you've got it set up right, almost indestructible. When was the last time you rebooted your windows machine? Linux machines typically go years without a reboot. HTH, Arthur