April 21, 2008
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With the public's general perception that the Windows Vista operating system (O.S.) is memory hungry, costly and inefficient,
some are looking more and more to Linux as a good and low-cost alternative to an operating system that has gained
a reputation as stable and, best of all free.
For those that aren't familiar with Linux, it's what called an open-source operating system, meaning that it's
free to use by anybody and, contrary to all other commercial systems, it can also be modified and re-distributed
as much as desired.
As far as Web servers are concerned, Linux accounts for about sixty percent of the global server population,
as compared to Windows which has less than about thirty percent of the total. Web servers are what makes the Internet
work, since the pages of a website need to be hosted on what is called a Web server accessible from anywhere on
the planet in order to be viewable by a browser such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox.
Linux was originally designed by a young computer student called Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki.
It was officially distributed to the public in 1991 and is greatly derived from the Unix operating system, which
is still very much alive and well today, as much as it was back in 1970 when it started to gain international
recognition as a very stable and efficient large-scale computer operating system.
In 2004, Reuben Davis, a consultant for Affiliated Computer Services, a large IT services outsourcer, began
experimenting with Linux, installing it on old (ie: memory-deprived and scaled-down) computers and stacking
various software on the machines.
The main and compelling interest for Davis was that there no licensing
fees or restrictions, and, best of all, an open source code that could be modified and adjusted to fit anybody's
special needs and as much as was needed.
Four years ago, Davis also made another interesting discovery in that large computer manufacturers such as
Dell began to leverage the power and flexibility of Linux. Like Dell, Everex (a much smaller PC maker in the U.S.)
began selling a Linux-based PC at Wal-Mart for US $200, billing it as an alternative to much costlier
operating systems offered by Microsoft's and Apple.
In 2006, Dell started offering its customers Linux-only PCs at a much lower-cost than comparable Windows PCs.
Currently, Linux is offered in many 'flavors' meaning that there is some small and minor variations between
them and those different versions are distributed by different open-source organizations such as CentOS, Ubuntu,
Free BSD, Debian, Mandrake and a few more.
Some Linux critics still say that there's always been a sort of a "computer geek factor" to Linux. While it's
true that it's not usually as easy as just putting in a CD-ROM and installing your operating system of choice, it
can be practical and certainly a lot less expensive than Microsoft's Windows.
In an increasingly "boxless" and Internet-based computing universe, applications such as Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice
and Mozilla's Firefox all run seamlessly on Linux. Not to be left apart, Google is even developing a suite of Linux office
applications that it hopes will be embraced by Linux afficionados.
For various organizations with fifty workstations or less that use computers mainly for Internet browsing,
some word processing and a few spreadsheets, getting multiple licenses for each computer using Windows can add
up very fast. Windows Vista is listed at $399 for one PC. Vista Home Premium is $239. Even Apple's Mac OS-X v10.5
(code-named Leopard) is priced at $129.
Generally speaking, Linux's open source alternative is offering a lot more choices for the average computer user.
As of November 2007, Dell had shipped less than about 50,000 Linux computers, proving that the O.S. is still
in its early stages in the mass market, at least from an average consumer's point of view.
To be fair to Microsoft's Windows and other commercial operating system vendors, there is at least one drawback to using
Linux, and that's the time spent learning an alternative O.S. which may lead to additional costs in training users, added
to the cost of some delays in re-learning something that was already done in the early days of Windows, with the added
costs of lost or lower productivity in the process.
If you need to compare the many advantages and strong points offered by Linux when compared to Windows, Canadian hosting
provider Sun Hosting has created an extensive section on their
website that clearly explains some of the benefits of Linux over Microsoft's Windows O.S. here.
Some of today's largest eCommerce sites such as Amazon.com, eBay and the popular Facebook social website
run on the Linux operating system. The NASA, the CIA and many banks and financial institutions also run their
mission-critical applications on UNIX and Linux, so it is a proven operating system that has now been universally
adopted.
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Source: Sun Hosting.
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