08-07-04 10:50 PM
Okay Folks:
I have been a Windows/Mac/Netware guy for about fifteen years now and I have
my issues with all of these puppies, not all are my favorites and not all
are my worst. . . its like kids when they destroy your house, which one do
you want to beat the most?
Okay, first impressions on this Fedora 2 which my wife got me as a goof with
a magazine that included a DVD with the product on it. At first, I had some
trouble getting onto my laptop so I had to disable acpi and, to be honest
with you, thats about as far as I got. It pretty much picked up all my
hardware off the bat, but, alas, where it fails is when it comes to wireless
network cards.
Dont get me wrong, the wireless network card will eventually work, and let
me underscore that, eventually will work.
My point here is simple and geared towards the development people. Linux
without doubt has the price point over Microsoft and the rest of the gang
over a barrel. After all, setting up fifty, a hundred or a thousand
desktops in the Microsoft world can run into the millions of dollars in a
heartbeat, not to mention the enigmatic licensing of their server products
but what Microsoft did from the early days was to make the install process
as easy as they could. Today, installing XP or 2003 server is a question of
a few ugly screens and then, when you want to install drivers, a lot of
times its double click and away we go. In linux I still see the need for
something like it, a form of gui built right into the kernel that says
something along the lines of "hey, I found new hardware, do you have
software, please let me know where it is" The day we see this as a
mainstream in Linux is the day that the MS folks are going to start to shake
in their boots.
To give credit where its due, I like the update feature of Fedora 2, so far,
its a neat toy. I also like that some of the advanced power features for
laptops have been tweaked and now on one of our Gateway 450's the thing just
shuts down beautifully.
I would like nothing more than to deploy a bunch of linux boxes on our
totally Microsoft campus and I think that such could be the case if not for
the ridiculous amount of people out there who "need" their microsoft
applications, hell, playing with Gimp I was pretty impressed although
Photoslop 8 (aka CE or whatever they are calling it this week) has a slight
edge but since the latter of the two was bootleg I never had to worry about
the price.
So, in short, I am going to dump Redhat fedora on a server or two here on a
few dual PIV servers that have nothing better to do and play with some of
the features and as far as the laptop, well, I am doing the update now and
hopefully I will be able to solve this Netgear 54G 511 card issue which I
wish would just light up.
The day that Linux gets its installation simpler than Microsoft for a really
serious range of PC hardware and then have the ability to click a single
button and update all of the firmware from sites transparently is the day
that we are going to see Microsoft really hammer down on their licensing.
Personally, I wish that day would come sooner rather than later.
Thats my humble opinion, I have to go back to eating fish now.
The Patagonian
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