[PLUG] My Linux switch success story

John Purser jmpurser at gmail.com
Fri Nov 4 17:56:26 UTC 2005


On 11/4/05, Scott Van Hoosen <svanhoosen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In light of the recent discussion on difficulties with Linux, I thought
> I'd share my linux success story.
>
> I'd been using Windows, and before that OS/2 and DOS, and was never
> happy with Microsoft's poorly-designed software. I started using Linux
> 3 or 4 years ago, Red Hat 7.1 initially, partly because I wanted to try
> something different that wouldn't crash constantly, and partly because
> I wanted to learn it for work-related skills.
>
> The first couple of weeks were pretty difficult, as things were
> unfamiliar from the MS way of doing things, and nobody to hold my hand,
> but after a short time I had the basics down. I installed a couple of
> games (Quake3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein), and was happily
> surprised at the stability. RtCW in Windows would crash quite often,
> maybe once an hour, initiating a 90-second process until I was back at
> the desktop again. In Linux, I was able to play through the entire
> single-player game without a single crash, which was a miracle compared
> to what I was used to.
>
> I've got a Red Hat 9 server that hosts my website, the websites of a
> couple of friends and family, our e-mail server, and a file server. It
> has run flawlessly, currently with an uptime of 223 days. The last two
> times it was shut down were for a hardware change, and when we moved
> last December.
>
> I should point out that I have a wife and two sons, and we each have
> our own computers. My oldest is more of a computer-geek, so started
> using Linux soon after I did, in dual-boot mode so he'd have his games.
> My youngest is more into just gaming, so in the past was mostly in
> Windows, though his computer was also dual-boot. I wanted my wife to
> try Linux, but knew I shouldn't force her. Well, about a year and a
> half ago, her power supply died. I had a test machine running Suse all
> set up, so I stuck it on her desk, set up Thunderbird for her, showed
> her how to launch it, as well as Firefox, and showed her how to install
> games through Yast. This "training" took about 10 minutes. Anyway, I
> sat back and kept waiting for her to complain, but she didn't. After a
> couple weeks, I asked her how she liked Linux, and she responded "It's
> fine. Seems the same to me." I fixed her old computer, moved the Linux
> drive to it, so she had dual-boot, but she ended up only going to
> Windows for a couple of card-making programs. Her hard drive failed a
> couple months ago, so I again gave her the spare computer with Linux
> already on it. When I mentioned installing Windows again on her second
> hard drive, she said to not bother, she never used it anyway.
>
> Recently I did some major changes at home, creating an NIS server which
> hosts all our /home folders, as well as a public folder, games folder,
> and applications folder. The kids like how they can hop on any
> computer, log in, and all their stuff is there: their files, music,
> game settings and controls, bookmarks, etc. Also I've been installing
> game after game onto the server. It is really nice for me, because I
> only have to install the game once, on the network drive, then anyone
> can play it. The kids love it too, because now we have a dozen good
> games they can play: Quake2, 3 and 4, Doom3, Unreal Tournament 2004,
> Neverwinter Nights, Americas Army, Oolite, Return to Castle
> Wolfenstein, Cube, Eternal Lands and a couple others. I haven't seen
> either kid in Windows for over a week.
>
> The applications folder contains Firefox and Thunderbird, which makes
> my job so much easier. I can patch or upgrade it in one place, and then
> everyone is running the patched version. Another benefit is it is
> painless to try out a different distribution on any workstation,
> because all the user's data is saved on the network, as well as major
> applications. Also it is easy to back up everyone's data just by
> burning the /home partition on the server to a DVD.
>
> There is one drawback I've found with this setup: if the network goes
> down, everything goes down. I bought a cheap gigabit switch, which has
> crashed on me a couple times during multi-gig file transfers. But as
> long as the network is stable, things run really well.
>
> Our servers run Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 4, and all our workstations
> run Suse 9.2, 9.3 and 10. Our firewall is Linux-based IPCop.
>
> I hope this was interesting to someone. :)
>
> -Scott
>
>
>
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Thanks Scott.  I appreciated it.  I'm working on picking a desktop distro now.

John Purser



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