On Mon, 25 Sep 2006, Joel Kolstad wrote:

"ken scharf" wrote in message
...
The advantage of Linux is that the development tools are free

Not true. A fairer statement would probably be something like "there are
significantly more free development tools for Linux than there are for
Windows." On Windows, the "express" editions of the Microsoft compilers are
free, older Borland tools are free, GCC is free, etc. On Linux, there are
plenty of commercial development suite, which in many cases are well worth the
money.

I'm not that aware of how many (and how good) developement tools are there
for Linux but...see bellow...

and Linux
will run on any computer that runs windows.

Also not true. Especially with laptops, drivers for Linux are often
non-existent. In fact, where I start thinking, "hmm... I should do something
with Linux..." the *first* thing I have to consider is whether or not I have a
PC around that'll have its hardware fully supported.

My little story....

I have been told that there are laptops out there, with Windows
pre-installed, that will not even run DOS or Win3.1 any more.

Laptop support for anything other than what software the laptop was
designed for is a major problem.

I have had vastly more success intalling the earlier versions of Linux on
"any" PC laying around. Just like Windoze, Linux has also tightened up its
hardware compatibility requirements and particularly in the driver
category.

I've had, and installed, from Red Hat 4.2 to 5.2, 6.2, 7.3 (problems with
7.4, very buggy GUIs in 7.1,7.2), and mostly failure with one of the
Workstation (Taroon, version 3.0) versions (based on the 3.5 inch
boot disk with included CD-ROM driver portfolio was changed from a small
number of prior CD-ROM drivers to new RAIDs, etc, and the new drivers
don't recognize anything older than about 4-5 years, now). And, I was
profoundly disappointed. Also, that same Linux (Taroon) required 256 MB of
ram to run. It would boot with less (32 mb), but barely get the GUI up.
Anything beyond that would run into the swap partition and be slow as
hell. Actually both 6.2 and 7.3 (which installed sucessfully less often
than 6.2 or 5.2) are pretty good (eg. drag and drop file manager, gFTP,
automount-dismount drives, etc). StarOffice 5.1 & 5.2 installed well on
5.2 and 6.2. The problems with 7.3 and prior were the buggy web browsers
or they would crash on moderate to advanced websites.

I never set up the firewalls, IP chains, or whatever, and some months
after I was running it on the intenet, I got hacked (I actually witnessed
it as it was happening: hard drive started cranking like mad, and lots of
bytes were being downloaded (as could be seen on the download bytes/sec
rate meter and graph). By the time I could get to the phone line to
disconnect, the bugger downloaded a rootkit somewhere and every time I
booted it up, I could see a package of outgoing data (red bars) leave my
box (and without confirming green bars) to some unknown point on the
internet. At a later point, I nuked the HD and re-installed.

As an aside, I still run DOS & Win3.1 for a lot of internet aps. At one
time, www.securityspace.com ran free vulnerability tests with hack attacks
(I think www.grc.com does too) and could not hack my Win3.1 with Netscape
2.01 dialer (probably because it has no ports for anything but email, ng,
ftp, and http protocols), but it could hack my Linux and Win98SE boxes
(without ZoneAlarm). Most of the time I access my shell account with a DOS
terminal program (dialup terminal mode, not ppp). I think my home box is
pretty safe that way (not much is going to cross from Unix to DOS, and I
don't keep any vital info in files/folders on my shell directory.