Mac, Windows, Linux, other?

[CCFan]

Ubuntu and Fedora for home, along with PIX firewall.

Unfortunately, Windows rules at work. Win7 x64.... still have my holdout XP machine that has all my code on it just in case W7 takes a nosedive.

[gfost1]

Howdy, Y'all

My 1st whitebox, circa Y2K, still running Win98SE, has been really stable but gets out of breath on the internet nowdays.

My 1st Linux box, running Slackware 7.1 has been serving my network 24/7 since Oct of '03
My other server is a win2k box.

Most of my workstations are XPHE/Pro.

Have not had much luck w/Ubuntu, though my fist experience was impressive. I didn't bother to run the checksum on the disk I burned, so it started having errors during the install. BUT (i thought this was really cool) it had got past the network portion of the install, so, on its own initiative, it went online to download the packages it needed to finsh the install. Ended up with some video problems that I couldn't work out or live with. Tried a couple more releases over the years, always something I couldn't resolve or didn't feel like bothering with.

Couple of weeks ago I installed Slackware 13.1 on a donor box. The installation interface has not changed one bit since 7.1, and the 4G ISO comes with all the basics and then some: KDE desktop, Firefox, Thunderbird, and root logon. It even has a Vista-like UAC popup that will let me sudo to root from my user account when I need root permissions. I'm still tweaking the sw, but have had no hw problems. I highly recommend it to intermediate level geeks who aren't satisfied w/ubuntu.

Regards,

George

[gunderwood]

Have not had much luck w/Ubuntu, though my fist experience was impressive. I didn't bother to run the checksum on the disk I burned, so it started having errors during the install. BUT (i thought this was really cool) it had got past the network portion of the install, so, on its own initiative, it went online to download the packages it needed to finsh the install.

Always do the checksum. The CDs we use these days are cheap for a reason and it is not uncommon to have a bit errors on a burn. Many things don't care, but an OS does. I've had times it burns right the first time and other times I have to slow the burn rate way down and try it several times before getting a clean burn. Luck of the draw really.

Ended up with some video problems that I couldn't work out or live with. Tried a couple more releases over the years, always something I couldn't resolve or didn't feel like bothering with.

What hardware were you installing on? Intel graphics have a horrid reputation for Linux support in general. I've used ATI and Nvidia on Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers just fine. I do think Nvidia has better Linux drivers though. Although the difference isn't as big as it use to be.

Couple of weeks ago I installed Slackware 13.1 on a donor box. The installation interface has not changed one bit since 7.1, and the 4G ISO comes with all the basics and then some: KDE desktop, Firefox, Thunderbird, and root logon. It even has a Vista-like UAC popup that will let me sudo to root from my user account when I need root permissions. I'm still tweaking the sw, but have had no hw problems. I highly recommend it to intermediate level geeks who aren't satisfied w/ubuntu.

Ya, the last couple of releases of Ubuntu have had some issues for the first month or two. I usually wait to upgrade because of it. Ubuntu's focus has been on more modern hardware and easy of use so it would surprise me to see it have problems on older hardware.

[CowboyT]

Just installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a friend's AMD TurionX2-64 laptop with 2GB DRAM. This was due to major malware infections of Windows Vista (gee, big surprise there). Also, Ubuntu's ability to speak both Spanish or English, for each individual user, was very appealing to the parents.

Well, due to bad design, this particular model of laptop has an overheating problem. The result is that the box shuts down to keep the dual-core CPU from overheating, regardless of operating system (this happened with Vista, Ubuntu, and MemTest86). So, I simply threw the "maxcpus=1" switch in GRUB, and this box is rock-solid stable now. Maybe you can do that with Microsoft Windows, too, but on GNU/Linux, it's super-easy to do.

Result: stable laptop, users much safer from malware than before, and parents are very happy. I love it when a plan comes together.

[allingeneral]

HP-UX!! Solaris!

[Kuda]

I was introduced to Linux over the summer. I was a bit leery at first because I have been brain washed by Billy G. I now have two machines running Ubuntu and Ubuntu LTS. For the other two, one needs to be Windows until a few of our vendors change their software and the other to work on the Government's network. And since we are not allowed to change computer configurations, the machines will be returned to network support with reformatted blank drives, oops. If only we were allowed Macs.

[gunderwood]

Just installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a friend's AMD TurionX2-64 laptop with 2GB DRAM. This was due to major malware infections of Windows Vista (gee, big surprise there). Also, Ubuntu's ability to speak both Spanish or English, for each individual user, was very appealing to the parents.

Well, due to bad design, this particular model of laptop has an overheating problem. The result is that the box shuts down to keep the dual-core CPU from overheating, regardless of operating system (this happened with Vista, Ubuntu, and MemTest86). So, I simply threw the "maxcpus=1" switch in GRUB, and this box is rock-solid stable now. Maybe you can do that with Microsoft Windows, too, but on GNU/Linux, it's super-easy to do.

Result: stable laptop, users much safer from malware than before, and parents are very happy. I love it when a plan comes together.

I guess that works. I would consider limiting the frequency first or just making it stay on the battery profile all the time. Don't know if that would be enough, but it should run a bit better that way.

Good job.

[holepunch]

127.0.0.1 Get to work!

there's no place like 127.0.0.1

[CowboyT]

I guess that works. I would consider limiting the frequency first or just making it stay on the battery profile all the time. Don't know if that would be enough, but it should run a bit better that way.

Good job.

Thanks! That's a good approach, too, and I had actually considered that as well. I went for the single-core option because this end user is still doing basically one task at a time. If the user's running a single CPU-intensive task, he'll have both cores, yes, but the one of those cores running the task will take considerably longer to complete it, and he'll then perceive the slower operation. Full-speed single core, with auto-frequency scaling, isn't quite as likely to show that in this case, and thus Ubuntu doesn't get blamed for the "slower computer".

Now, if the box were being used as an inexpensive Web server or is otherwise mostly being used for multi-threaded apps, I'd definitely have gone for the frequency limitation.

[CowboyT]

HP-UsuX!! Slowaris!

Fixed it for ya.

OK, I'll get serious. I've used both, and while x86 Solaris really was "Slowaris" for a bit, Sun put a lot of effort into fixing that, and it's actually a pretty good system once you get the GNU compilation tools on it. Fast, well supported, solid, etc. Had Sun GPL'd it before Linus's kernel started getting momentum, Solaris would probably be the dominant server OS today.

HP-UX, back when I was administering it, was a royal PITA if you had to load anything "not HP" on it. A huge part of that was that the compiler that came with HP-UX was nowhere near ANSI C-compliant. It was just enough to recompile the HP-UX kernel, nothing more, because HP wanted to sell you their INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE ANSI-compliant compiler. Given its price tag at the time, "wasn't gonna happen."

What saved me was that some kind soul had cross-compiled the GNU compiler toolchain for HP-UX, thus allowing me to compile and install pretty much anything I wanted from that point.

However, HP-UX did teach me two very valuable things:

1.) Though there will be gratuitous grumbling about the crazy places that they put things, nonetheless someone who understands a UNIX-like OS can and will eventually figure out where everything is and get the task done, even going between totally different vendors. Having come up on distros of GNU/Linux and SCO OpenServer, the HP-UX experience gave me a lot more self-confidence. Let's see a typical Windows admin do that between Windows Server 2003 and 2008.

2.) HP-UX taught me about something called logical volumes. That's pretty much how you have to do things with HP-UX, so I was forced to learn it. Good thing, because when Linux got the trick a few years later with LVM, I was already prepared. It was then just a matter of learning the commands and syntax for the GNU/Linux distros (piece of cake once you've got the concept down).

So, as much as HP-UX (and SCO OpenServer, for that matter) was a pain, I have to thank it. I'm a better systems engineer for the experience.

[gunderwood]

I guess that works. I would consider limiting the frequency first or just making it stay on the battery profile all the time. Don't know if that would be enough, but it should run a bit better that way.

Good job.

Thanks! That's a good approach, too, and I had actually considered that as well. I went for the single-core option because this end user is still doing basically one task at a time. If the user's running a single CPU-intensive task, he'll have both cores, yes, but the one of those cores running the task will take considerably longer to complete it, and he'll then perceive the slower operation. Full-speed single core, with auto-frequency scaling, isn't quite as likely to show that in this case, and thus Ubuntu doesn't get blamed for the "slower computer".

Now, if the box were being used as an inexpensive Web server or is otherwise mostly being used for multi-threaded apps, I'd definitely have gone for the frequency limitation.

Possibly. Going from one to two cores IMHO was a huge boom for the average user. Things just were "snappier" even when some single threaded, usually poorly coded, application decided to have its way with one core. Granted you have less of an issue with that under Ubuntu, but FF doesn't always behave with some web content. I know, blasphemy.

It's a tough call either way, but this was my thinking. IIRC until Intel's Nehalem architecture, most laptops were not power gated at the core level (I'd have to google which AMD chips support gating a whole core). Thus, even if the core was idle you couldn't really shut it off; at best you could down clock it. The thermal loading is much more a function of voltage than frequency, but both matter. Usually you can't touch the voltage settings in most bios's, but auto-scaling features like speed-step do mess with the requested voltage. Lets say you have a 2.5 Ghz laptop. The power and heat is significantly reduced just dropping it to 2.0Ghz, a little bit by the frequency, but a whole lot by the fact that it *should* require less voltage to run at 2Ghz than 2.5. You'd have to do some research about the specific CPU to understand how the clock, voltage and power gating is handled.

In the end, if it works for them great. However, the engineer in me wants to find a way to spend 10hrs figuring out how to optimize it and get 6% more performance...

[CowboyT]

I hear ya, man. The engineer in me wants to do the same thing. Unfortunately, I'm still in home renovation mode and studying for exams, so the time just isn't there on this one. But yes, it would be a fun little project.

So far, the box seems pretty stable with this cheap hack (and it is a cheap hack). The true test will be come summertime when he's working with this thing outside in the sun.

[Wolvee]

I was using Ubuntu for the last 3 year exclusively until recently. The 12.04 release worse than Luke Skywalker whines. It sucks harder than Will Wheaton's acting. It sucks so bad, I would be willing to sit next to JarJar Blinks on a train ride the entire distance of the Trans-Siberian Railway then to ever install it on my system again.

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