On Nov 29, 2007 9:48 AM, Shawn Tan wrote: > On Thursday 29 November 2007 01:36:58 Xiaofan Chen wrote: > > Some universities do support Mac OS X and/or > > certain Linux distributions. > > The whole engineering department at my present university is running on the > latest OpenSuSE. Most of the engineering tools used are available on the > platform. That is true. Commercial programs like Matlab/Maple/Mathematica, Synopsis/Cadence/Mentor, and a lot of higher-end tools (which universities enjoy academic pricing) are available for Linux. And there are many free tools (for academic purposes) under Linux. What lacks is those lower end tools (something like cheaper electronic simulation tools and PCB tools) which are a bit better than the free alternatives. It is hard for small ISVs to compete with free alternatives in a relative small market (Linux desktop). I feel OpenSuse is quite good for business desktop (better than Fedora and Ubuntu). And today I read one article here which has the same view. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2223115,00.asp -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist