Dell may offer Linux as alternative to Windows

[cordex]

And I do somewhat resent folks marching (no pun intended) in here and stating that Windows is so buggy and infection prone.  I ain't Granny, but this machine I'm thwacking the keys on now is an IBM Intellistation M-Pro, dual Xeon 2.4, running XP Pro. It's one of the same 150 machines that WETA Digital did the "Lord of the Rings" graphic effects on, and have just come back in off of corporate lease for pennies on the dollar.

At work the boss bought up a handful SGI workstations of similar capacity (dual Xeon 2.8ghz, 4gig ram) for something like $450 each.  Similar situation.

[Gewehr98]

I love it when those professional machines come back in off of corporate lease.  I watch some of the liquidators fairly close, and bought 4 of those IBM zIntellistation dual-Xeon graphics workstations for $270.00 each.  I kept one, and immediately sold the 3 others to local businesses like the Real Estate Book. I just wish I had purchased more of them, or that more were available after I made my profits selling the first three.

I did the same when a bunch of Dell Precision 420 dual P-III workstations popped up, and before that, IBM turned loose a big batch of Intellistation M-Pro dual P-II 450 workstations - again, for pennies on the dollar. That's why you'll see more than a few local small businesses in the Satellite Beach, FL area running Dell and IBM professional workstations and fileservers.   

 If I had the warehouse space, I'd really like to get into the liquidator side of the house, although I'm sure the resellers have that agreement locked up tight with Big Blue, Dell, and HP/Compaq.  I bought my Sun SPARC workstation at a government DRMO auction (Had to buy a pallet of 'em), but the Feds hang on to their machines a lot longer than the commercial corporate lease folks, so reselling to me is more of a problem. 

[mtnbkr]

Gewehr, there's a company here in the NoVa area that does what you want to do.  I've purchased several computers from them over the years.  Their website is www.pcwarehouse.com, but I've always gone to their B&M store.  The website is down for some reason though.

They sell servers, PCs, various networking gear (cisco routers, switches, etc), Macs, and even SGI workstations.  I need to get to the one nearby and see if they have any decent Macs for cheap.

Chris

[Gewehr98]

Yup, that's one I've visited.  There's also www.pcsurplusonline.com and www.nwpcmall.com among others. Ebay user "Lapkosoft" in Lincoln, NE does a good business reselling corporate lease machines, too.

I want an older Mac, preferably one of the cute early models, to run a world-time clock and maybe display some data from a Heathkit weather station.  (I've got a "thing" for clocks and weather monitoring equipment) This would be fine:



Or even one of these:

[Gewehr98]

More on why Linux just isn't "there" yet:

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6087894103.html

Good discussion here:

http://www.2cpu.com/story.php?id=4324

But I do like my Knoppix CD-ROM, it comes in darned handy when folks have a crashed version of Windows.  I've been tinkering with the idea of running Knoppix from a CF or SD card, I see there are bootable versions of those card readers now.  I'd consider it a poor man's Palm Pilot or Windows CE application, if one could scale down everything external to the card reader.  Maybe a smallish palmtop?

[JimMarch]

Quoting Gewehr:

And I do somewhat resent folks marching (no pun intended) in here and stating that Windows is so buggy and infection prone.  I ain't Granny, but this machine I'm thwacking the keys on now is an IBM Intellistation M-Pro, dual Xeon 2.4, running XP Pro.

Read my post again: I specifically said that running Win.anything behind a professionally built hardware firewall is a workable solution.  Which is exactly what you're doing.

The "Grandma Millies" I'm running across on Windows are NOT.  They're plugged straight into DSL, cable modems or dialup.

What drove me off windows was a botnet virus that crawled right past a completely updated XP box with paid-up Zonealarm Pro firewall.  After two days of fighting it, I paid $100 for a 160gig USB drive and downloaded Ubuntu Dapper.

Right now the rate of botnet infection on all Windows systems is 11%.  The VAST majority of that involves systems with no hardware firewall.

-----

As stated I have a cellular modem (Kyocera KPC650 EVDO) and a KR1 router/firewall for it (with PCMCIA slot).  One thing I use it for is to bring up new Windows boxes, as it's hardware protected until I can finish "iron plating" the Windows install.  Which is typically 1/2 or so, during which their protection is inadequate.  Only once I've got 'em updated and protected will I plug them into a bare DSL/cable/etc. line.

Even then, I know from personal experience that they are NOT fully protected.  Sad, really.

[JimMarch]

One more thing:

You're correct about the lack of a good personal finance choice being a problem, esp. for the older users.  They have their fingers in so many financial pies that such things are near-universal.  The geek crowd doesn't care about that stuff mostly, so development there has been slow.

I'm wondering if Cedega or somebody like that couldn't spend some time doing a Quicken-specific port, maybe in conjunction with the Quicken shop, Or Transgaming, Codeweavers or the like.

[Gewehr98]

What drove me off windows was a botnet virus that crawled right past a completely updated XP box with paid-up Zonealarm Pro firewall.  After two days of fighting it, I paid $100 for a 160gig USB drive and downloaded Ubuntu Dapper.

I suppose that's one way to fix the problem.  The other would be to spend less than $100 on any NAT-equipped router from Linksys, D-Link, or the like.  I've watched the Linksys BEFXSR41 router go NIB for $18.50 on e-Bay, and $39.99 NIB from Amazon.com.  They're also pretty much Granny-proof, plug and play, "Insert Tab A into Slot B". Of course, they aren't as entertaining as the whole RedHat/Debian/Knoppix/Ubuntu thing, that little blue box won't let you tinker with Linux or putter with all the different distributions, so there's no fun in that.  Just a basic hardware firewall between your Windows box and the cable/DSL modem.  Oy, veh! 

[JimMarch]

At the time my Internet interface was the cellmodem card in a PCMCIA slot and I didn't know about the external routers such as the KR1 that just came out for it.  Cellnet is a necessity in my life as I live in a motorhome.

Now admittedly, when the cellmodem didn't work in Linux I had to score the external router anyways although being specialized and having a PCMCIA slot meant an EBay cheapie wasn't going to work.  Ooops. 

So yeah, you have a point as far as geeks go.

But, I still find Linux more stable and more fun.  And for the "Grandma Millies" of the world, even a hardware firewall isn't "all that" because they can still be suckered into going out and fetching something past the firewall.  Ask any corporate IT guy how often users do that sort of thing...

[Gewehr98]

I agree with you 100%, Jim.  Linux is a ball to play with, sort of an adult's version of Legos, Erector sets, or Tinkertoys. You can rip it apart, build what you want, and then add power to it and see how it works.

Just for giggles, I'm running this monster IBM graphic workstation on my Knoppix boot CD right now.  I'd almost forgotten about it until I typed about it earlier in this thread.  I usually save that distribution for recovering data from crashed Windows boxes, or making older P-II or P-III systems run smoothly.

I'd never considered running it in my dual P-4 Xeon 2.4 workstation.  Talk about FAST! 

My boot drive in this workstation is one of those GSA-issue removable cartridges sitting in the top 5.25" bay.  Looks like I'll be buying another cartridge and sticking a drive in it, then installing an efficient (aren't they all) Linux distro as a user-choice second boot option.  My Sun SPARC station can wait a few days.   

[JimMarch]

Try Zenwalk.  I am *seriously* impressed so far.  Fast, rock-solid stable, autoconfig was flawless, package management dead perfect.  And running the latest 2.6.20 kernel no less.

Dayum.

[Iain]

A couple things to keep in mind here.

Linux is still not "everyman's" OS.  You need a geek like Jim (not meant in a derogatory way) to set it up for Granny, and he'll have to tweak and load whatever he feels is best for Granny's specific purposes. 

I agree, it took me several weeks of determined work to go from being a total noob to having a working install of Ubuntu, part of that was because I first started with ancient laptops, and that wasn't a good starting point. Then it took me a couple of reinstalls to get /home and everything set up right. After that I had to fiddle a little to get wireless network working, and still haven't got 3d support because of my graphics card issues.

It's better though, and Shuttleworth is partly doing what Chris suggests needs doing but without removing the 'free' just yet. I'd be willing to pay for quality software on linux so long as it worked on multiple flavours. Couple of years back my university housemate, who was fully geek capable took well over a month to do a basic set-up with a linux distro and get it how he wanted it.

[mtnbkr]

It's a snap these days compared to when I first started in 1997.  Back then, installing on a laptop meant you were a masochist.  There was little to no information about getting XWindows to work properly with an LCD or to get a PCMCIA card to work.  Posts to Linux usenet groups usually earned flames or unhelpful suggestions.  There were no applications like OpenOffice or Wordperfect.  Asking for a word processor got responses such as "use Vi/Emacs/Latex".

Things got better quickly and I was able to use Linux as my fulltime desktop OS at home by late 1998.  I had laptops at work running Linux (mine and a few others dual-booting Linux and NT/95/98 or running Windows via VMWare).  By 2, Redhat's installer would give you a fully functional Linux system on a Dell Lattitude with no pain at all, including PCMCIA modems, etc.  My preference was Slackware because I started with it and knew it's init system better than the one used by Redhat.  I could more easily strip down and secure a Slackware based system.

Things are even easier today.  I use SuSE on my server because the installation media included a bunch of stuff I considered useful.  Among other things, it included Samba, an LDAP package, and a Certificate server.  If I got motivated, I could set up my own PKI. I could download all these things, but it's nice to have it as an option at installation time and to have the gui interfaces installed and configured.

That said, I stick with Windows on the desktop because it works for me and I won't have to worry about compatibility if I bought some new widget.

Chris