The IT industry is shifting away from Micro$oft

[cjolley]

Anyone who believes in market forces already knows the answer.
Windows is lower cost than Lunux for most uses.
And at the rate people are building SQL Server ( ) databases, the patern is very unlikely to change much.
Except perhaps for one-off, special purpose machines or groups of machines.
chuck

PS And don't say that's just because of inertia. The cost of converting a large shop from Windows to Linux (or any thing else) is astronomical.

[Gurm]

It's simply a matter of economics, as Chuck just pointed out.

Will a Linux box, if set up correctly, have less issues than a similar Windows box?

Arguably yes.

If you take a tech who is NOT schooled in Linux, how long will it take for him to get good enough to set that box up so it's 100% reliable?

I have NO idea, because I've never met anyone who had that level of skill and wasn't a complete snot about it and unwilling to discuss the matter.

But let's just say that Sasq, whose skills I respect, has yet to set up a box with as much reliable uptime as one of my raw installs of NT4 Server - which are still running 6 years later with NO unscheduled downtime.

I'm not knocking Dan - I'm saying that it's DAMN hard to set Linux up to be super-reliable and super-secure... the two things it's supposed to have in spades over Microsoft.

Now you can all jump up and down and hoot and holler and say that it just ain't so. That's fine. Go on.

- Gurm

[spadnos]

Originally posted by cjolley
Anyone who believes in market forces already knows the answer.
Windows is lower cost than Lunux for most uses.
And at the rate people are building SQL Server ( ) databases, the patern is very unlikely to change much.
Except perhaps for one-off, special purpose machines or groups of machines.
chuck

PS And don't say that's just because of inertia. The cost of converting a large shop from Windows to Linux (or any thing else) is astronomical.

Um - that postscript is somewhat of a contradiction.

The cost of *converting* is high, specifically because of the "inertia" of existing installations. The cost of setting up a "new" system, assuming no outside forces (ie, we are only concerned with the ability to do whatever we need to do, not whether or not the rest of the world can understand it), is likely lower with Linux.

If you don't have to worry about MS Office compatibility (and users that MUST have the menu layout exactly match MS Office), then OpenOffice is fine (it's even pretty good if you DO have to worry about these things). If you don't care about Windows-specific networking (SMB, printer sharing), then Linux is great (it's still fine even if you do have to deal with those). If you have to train people to use your system who have no prior computer knowledge (say, you're getting people straight out of kindergarten ), you eliminate the cost of "retraining" that results from the inertia of existing Windows installations / education.

It's very easy to set up a machine that will connect to the internet via modem, ISDN, or some LAN device, do all browsing / email / instant messaging, has adequate word processing, spreadsheet, personal accounting, image editing, music playing, CD burning (and ripping/encoding) software, and to do it all for no more than the cost of the hardware. Certain things will take more time to configure than their Windows counterparts (DVD playing / accelerated 3D), but are generally still possible.

- Steve

[MultimediaMan]

I know quite a few Linux Gurus...some of them at least browse this forum, if they are not actually members.

Successful Case Study: 2CPU.com's colocated webserver. Read about the genesis of it Here.

Current Uptime? Read about it Here. BTW, this box has only been booted a total of like <20 times in it's entire life. Two of those boots involved shutting it down for shipment to the Colocation Facilty and booting it back up to actually release it to production.

That is the nice thing about Linux: Damn fine uptime if properly deployed. The bad thing here is that it doesn't have all the latest patches: it's a full two patches behind as far as kernel releases is concerned. But, since it's in a colocation facility, I don't think think this much of an issue.

Read carefully their article: they wrote it in like September 2002, but it wasn't sent to production until late January 2003. Yes, they tweaked and fine tuned it quite a bit to get it to do what they needed it to do.

We're eagerly waiting on the One Year Anniversary.

[MultimediaMan]

Now, after re-reading their article and looking at the Kernel release, this brings another serious consideration for businesses: A Level Configuration.

Microsoft sends out patches, and they mean for every patch to be installed, so that each and every box is the same as far the base operating system and normal software suite is concerned.

Linux is much the same, but the actual deployment of the patches can be quite involved. The tools to deploy those patches are far more refined in Windows, remote system checkers can accurately determine whether a patch has correctly applied: Unix systems, whenever they go through a Kernel or Database Engine Upgrade are carefully shepherded through the process. Linux systems are much the same.

I am very curious to see how a planned remote kernel upgrade goes when we update our new linux machines. I suspect, I'll be on the phones again for quite a while.

[cjolley]

Originally posted by spadnos
Um - that postscript is somewhat of a contradiction.

The cost of *converting* is high, specifically because of the "inertia" of existing installations. The cost of setting up a "new" system, assuming no outside forces (ie, we are only concerned with the ability to do whatever we need to do, not whether or not the rest of the world can understand it), is likely lower with Linux.

But people selling Linux act like it is Psycological Inertia. It's not. It's MONEY. Lot's of MONEY.

If you don't have to worry about MS Office compatibility (and users that MUST have the menu layout exactly match MS Office), then OpenOffice is fine (it's even pretty good if you DO have to worry about these things). If you don't care about Windows-specific networking (SMB, printer sharing), then Linux is great (it's still fine even if you do have to deal with those). If you have to train people to use your system who have no prior computer knowledge (say, you're getting people straight out of kindergarten ), you eliminate the cost of "retraining" that results from the inertia of existing Windows installations / education.

We have about 8 techs, all MS certified up the ying yang.
What do they know NOW about a Linux box?
1, Where the on/off switch is.
2, What the keyboard and mouse are used for.
3, oops, there isn't a 3


It's very easy to set up a machine that will connect to the internet via modem, ISDN, or some LAN device, do all browsing / email / instant messaging, has adequate word processing, spreadsheet, personal accounting, image editing, music playing, CD burning (and ripping/encoding) software, and to do it all for no more than the cost of the hardware. Certain things will take more time to configure than their Windows counterparts (DVD playing / accelerated 3D), but are generally still possible.


That's all stuff people do as a hobby, mostly at home.
None of that crap matters except that they DO need a good standard word processor and printer sharing.
Most of the WORK is done using purpose written software, either by me or outside vendors.
Do I have to write two versions of everything, or just rewrite the whole thing so that we can use Linux and be 1337?
How long would it take to rewrite our big DB apps, or our scanning apps?
It would be crazy for us to change, and we are not that different from most medium-large businesses.


- Steve

chuck

[The PIT]

Originally posted by Wombat
I think Linux wins in the drivers area. Download Knoppix, a "live" CD distro, and boot off of it. In a minute or two, you'll have a graphical desktop running, and it detects hardware quite well.

Rubbish unless your six months behind the latest hardware. Somehow most hardware manufactures don't write linux drivers or if they do it's only for one distro.

Redhat 9.0 in it's orginal release didn't properly support the network card on the Intel 875p chipset. I had to put another network card so I could upgrade the kernal.

9800 Pro although claimed to be supported was listed an an unknown device. Got that working now with the last driver release from ATI.

I've had Mandrake that didn't support promise controllers months after the release of the hardware. Yes Promise had drivers for Redhat only.

Still things are a lot better than they used to be and it's getting easier to find work arounds. May have a go at repairing my Redhat sometime this week it's gone funny after the last bios upgrade. Dunno whats happened unless it doesn't like 256mb of agp set in the bios.

[cjolley]

To put things in perspective, think about this.
We have about 1500 PCs.
The software that we own, whether in-house or off the shelf is FAR more valuble that all of those PCs put togather, let alone whatever just the OS and word/web/mail apps cost, if anything.
The OS and word processing software, web browsers and email clients are NOTHING compared to the cost of the software we use the most.
How many businesses do you know of whose main use of software is any of the apps you get for free with Linux?
chuck

[cjolley]

Ok, so we could use Lunux to drive our two web servers.
We have ~80 db and file servers.
Adding Linux to the mix for that one small corner of our operation would just add unneeded compexity to the administration of the system.
Why bother?
chuck

[Gurm]

BECAUSE LINUX IS SUPERIOR!

IT IS IT IS IT IS!

IT _IS_ DAMMIT!

YOU HAVE TO USE IT BECAUSE IT'S JUST F-ING BETTER!

*sigh*

- Gurm

[leech]

I think Gurm just said it best

About the Nasa clusters....

http://beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov/

"The Beowulf Project began at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in the summer of 1994 with the assembly of a 16 node cluster developed for the Earth and space sciences project (ESS) by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker, formerly of USRA/CESDIS. The project quickly spread to other NASA sites, other R&D labs and to universities around the world. The project's scope and the number of Beowulf installations grew at a fantastic rate during the late 1990's. As of mid 2000, the project continues to grow and it scope has expanded. The Beowulf community now influences almost every aspect of high performance computing and in many cases plays a direct leadership role."

Sounds pretty much like they're using it for all sorts of applications.

As far as ILM's CGI being young... uhm what? From a thread here a while ago, Pixar was spawned from ILM because ILM didn't know exactly what to do with the CGI element of their animations. Or something like that. I've seen several different articles about how Pixar has switched their workstations and render farms over to linux, as well as ILM. Why? Because it's 5 times faster with modern PC's and linux than their old SGI IRIX machines. Also because with the source code in their hands, they can fix whatever bugs they run into right away, rather than waiting for a proprietary OS maker to fix them. Simple economics and time scheduling fits in here.

Also, check here. http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html?tag=lh

Yup, that cost to switch over sure is amazing.... There are more and more success stories about people switching their companies to linux popping up than there are ads when you use IE... Ok, well maybe not THAT many. God, what an atrocity that program is... Lousy pop up ads. That's like if you were watching your cable stations and your TV would automatically turn the station on you to make you watch an advertisement, but only in the Picture in Picture part of the TV, or upper corner or something. It's F!@#ing annoying!!!

Leech

[cjolley]

That's odd
I'm logged into Win2k and NO popups!?
Oh, I just remembered: I browse using Firebird in Win2k!
Turns out you can have your cake & eat it too.
chuck

[Sasq]

OK, time to wade in.
It all realy comes down to what your requirements are.

If all you need is simple file servering - a couple of linux boxen and samba.

If your web hosting, go the linux route - sorry but I trust IIS as far as I can spit it. (Yes Apache - and a few others can be run on Win, but why?)

I have an MCDBA, thankyou, I'll take MySql or Postgre most days of the week for the web applications I write on a daily basis.

For my area of work, nix is the clear winner, but that also has to do with M$'s not so flash Japanese support.

as for desktop, well I still use Windows as Linux doesn't cut it for me yet on some of the dev packages I use.

However, some things are just a straight pain in the arse to set up on nix, yes as far as I am concerend it is more secure, makes a great firewall, cleans the toilet etc. but It isn't the perfect tool for all occasions - I still loath and detest getting USB products working correctly in nix - amonge other things.

If the TOC of X brand OS suits your needs use that OS, if it doesn't shop around.

Dan

[DukeP]

The december issue of Wired has a nice article/interview with Bill Joy about some of these issues.

Admittedly, he's a os X fan - but he has got some nice points.

~~DukeP~~

[leech]

Originally posted by cjolley
That's odd
I'm logged into Win2k and NO popups!?
Oh, I just remembered: I browse using Firebird in Win2k!
Turns out you can have your cake & eat it too.
chuck

Yeah, but if we're talking Joe Average here... He doesn't know about Firebird. (I also use Firebird extensively on Windows. I get pissed off when people use web code that only works properly under IE).

<sarcasm>But you can't use Firebird! It's Open Source, and that's like a virus in the almighty Bill Gates' view!</sarcasm>

Leech