On Feb 13, 2004, at 7:37 AM, John Ferrell wrote: > I had a brief affair with Linux a year or so back. Here is what I > learned: > The Red Hat package that is available for $50 or so saves a lot of > time. It > will require a lot of updates from their website but that is relatively > painless and is included in the price. This is outdated information. RedHat is not going to support their desktop Linux after April. Better options for desktop Linux are available, especially for newbies. MEPIS, Xandros, and Libranet all come to mind, as well as the CD-ROM based stuff like Knoppix which can be installed to a hard disk after launching from CD with a simple script that's included on the CD. What motherboard was that anyway? A year ago a 600 MHz machine was relatively "old". Was it super-cheap or an off-brand? It's good to stay away from that level of hardware when using an OS that's developed by the masses, for sure. > All hardware is not supported. This was a problem with motherboards > and with > video cards. The hardware runs, but very slowly! The mother board > needed to > have its supporting software loaded and there was simply none > available that > would run with Linux. Although it was a 600 mhz machine with an 8G hard > drive it was very limited due to the performance. I wanted a full > featured > machine so I had installed everything in the package. I have set aside > the > machine for now and it will soon be loaded with Win98 and go to my > grand > daughter. The Win XP PRO machine that I put together last year has put > to > rest most of my Microsoft complaints. It is tough to hang it. I have worked with Linux since 1995 and can say that I'm finding it very hard to believe your statement that a 600 MHz motherboard didn't have proper hardware support, or at least by now it would be built in to most distributions. Usually driver support does lag by about a year while the companies get open-source drivers available or someone reverse engineers the hardware without proper published specifications by trial and error. To say that "all hardware is not supported" gives people the wrong impression. By definition, if the hardware manufacturers only open their documentation to Microsoft prior to a release of new hardware -- yes... it'll be a while before that hardware is fully supported on Linux or BSD, or anything else. An example would be modern video cards. The manufacturers are so competitive with each other they feel that opening any of their documentation about how to interface with their hardware would give away their "secrets". Luckily most of the clueful ones (like Nvidia) do release binary-only drivers that can be loaded as kernel modules... but for the newbie or uninitiated this is daunting in that it means they have to use the command line to get their system to a state where it can run X and a graphical desktop environment. Of course anyone who really knows that Unix is Unix knows the command line and just "gets it done" as part of a new machine build... thus scaring away a lot of easily scared people. > If you have a limited number of applications to run, Linux works fine. > If > you have a lot of machines needing an OS, it is an economical solution. This is too broad a statement. There are literally tens of thousands of applications available for Linux -- what were you trying to do?? -- is a more important question than what specific software package you needed to run. There's almost always a reasonable alternative. Debian Linux's testing branch (the branches are "stable", "testing" and "unstable") has over 13,000 free applications all available for installation with a one-line command and a decent network connection from hundreds of mirror sites on the web. I do agree with you that XP also quelled many of my Microsoft quality complaints, but the legacy of Outlook and Outlook Express and their rampant security holes means that the average Joe loading those applications (who doesn't know to properly patch his system nor run anti-virus software) is nothing more than a menace to the network-at-large. The first thing they should teach new Windows users is repaeat-after-me... http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com. Of course, they automated it in XP, which is nice. I think the T-Shirt I wear says it well... Mac for Productivity Linux for Development Palm for Portability Windows for Solitare ;-) Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.