I know Solaris x86 is a good product, but today I tried an experiment. I got Red Hat Linux 6.0 and put together a machine from parts I had laying around. Linux recognized and had drivers for all the various and sundry junk, and was up and running GNOME at my monitor's maximum resolution and frequency in about 20 minutes. I had to pick a couple of devices off lists and press "OK" a couple of times. The only part that would be tricky for a civilian was this cheesy "Disk Druid" disk partitioning program. How should they know how to partition a disk for Unix? (And the funny thing is, you look in the Red Hat documentation and it basically says "How should we know?", and that's the truth<g>).
But it came up and ran without a hitch, turned my 64MB salvage box into a fast computer (I have 384MB on my NT machine and I think that's the minimum<g>), it's got an unbelievable amount of software including Apache, Samba, a CD player, all the Unix development tools, GNOME isn't half bad, Red Hat's website is a lot easier to deal with than Microsoft's, and the whole thing costs $60 (i.e., free). You add StarOffice (which I understand the 6.1 version includes) and you have a pretty damn good M$-free machine with twice the speed and five times the stability on the same hardware---for nothing.
I got a domain name a while back (twister it's SUNWBULL.COM...no it isn't) that I've never used and I'm going to put qmail on this thing and turn it into my mail server (although of course it already has sendmail).
I wasn't that surprised, but I was still pretty impressed, I must say. When I got the Red Hat S/W box, the guy at Fry's said "We're getting a lot more of these in tomorrow, we can't keep them in, they're flying out the door."
Why does anybody buy that Microsoft crap????? I'm not kidding. I think I'll try the same experiment with Solaris x86 on a similar machine if I can get hold of a copy without too much trouble.
--QS |
