GPL and Linux/BSD InstallFest

[Alan DuBoff]

Rick Moen wrote:

> Ale is good food!
> 
> Yeah, what with the local economy, and then friends suddenly and
> unexpectedly shooting me in the foot (not you), it's been bad crazy
> in my vicinity (not to be confused with BAD crazy, which is always
> much to be preferred).  But this too shall pass.

I completely understand...I haven't really worked for a few months...:-( I've
had a couple short contracts, but there is very little work around town...it's
like a battle zone. Most people are trying to hang on to the jobs they have,
let alone hire people...not to say people aren't hiring, the projects just
don't sound interesting to me...

> Linux-Mandrake, actually.

Yeah, I consider that Red Hat for the most part, and it's RPM infested...:-/

> I try to stress to people, if they don't already know, that they have a
> chance to try any of a very wide range of freenixes -- and might
> consider trying quite a few of them consecutively, as the only
> reasonable way of determining what they like.  If they seem technical,
> I point 'em at Debian, Stampede, Slackware, and the *BSDs.  If they
> seem to be mildly adventuresome "desktop" users, I describe Libranet,
> SuSE, and Linux-Mandrake.

That seems like solid advice to offer.

I try and talk all of my clients into Debian. Usually I talk until my face is
blue, and they want Red Hat. Not always, but *usually*.

FYI (and any others here on BAD), I talked to one company recentely that is
moving all of their workstations over to Debian (at least the impression I
got), with Solaris disk arrays on the backend. The company is Walmart.com, up
in San Mateo/Brisbane. They seem like they've done their homework, and I only
mention this because I think it's good for others who might be concerned with
whose using Debian around town to know whose using it. One thing odd I noticed
when I checked their site out with Netcraft was that it says they're running
Microsoft IIS on Linux. Isnt' that odd? Do people run the IIS webserver on
Linux? I can't imagine why...<sigh>

-- 

Alan DuBoff (will clean embedded, err, *ANY* toilets for food!;-)
Software Orchestration, Inc.