P. Bournias
Management Information Systems and Networking Technology
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P. Bournias Management Information Systems and Networking Technology |
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Areas of Consulting Contact Main Design's |
LINUX If you are thinking about moving to a unix based system, Linux is a mature alternative to the Microsoft Windows gui environment offering either a tradition unix interface or an x-window interface within the same package. For the simple novice, Mandrake, Suse, and Redhat will easily set you up using a gui interface and for those who don't mind using the console interface and have no fear of a black screen any of these including Slackware are now at their prime as workstations. More advanced users that want to take advantage of their systems as file servers will find these even more powerful now. Most of the Linux packages on the market require a minimum of previous generation hardware and offer a vast selection of programs that are usually included in the installation to suite everyone's needs. Using a Linux workstation or server, you can have the advantages of a safe and secure operating system, your own in-house website and mail server. Some of the distributions that I have experimented with include:
Once last note regarding the installation is that of the 6 cd's that you can download for free, on #5 Slackware has included a very thorough pdf (almost 300 pages) that you can use as a pre-preparation to install your system. As this is a notebook, it is also a dual boot system now with both Windows XP and linux and I installed lilo (just preference) as the boot manager as it is one of the simplest to use and modify if needed. The system hardware used for the installation is: HP Notebook ze2000 AMD 2800+ (1.6 GHz, 256KB L2 cache) 15" TFT XGA color screen ATI Radeon Xpress 200M video card with 128MB 512MB DDR SDRAM memory 60GB 4200RPM hard disk 10/100mb network card Broadcom 54g Wifi 56k modem cd/dvd-writer Ports: 2 USB 2.0, 1 PCMCIA card slot, headphone, microphone, 56K modem, Ethernet LAN, S-Video out, VGA out The installation was very successful even though I had to locate a driver for the network wifi. Other than that, after some of the usual file changes, installation of the MySql databases, and other tweaks, Slackware was ready within a few hours from the start. Using Mandriva, formerly known as Mandrake, linux version 9, a number of applications such as blogs, databases, php/mysql, email and x-windows or gui programs are installed for testing purposes. One of the biggest advantages of using linux is that you can use some of that old hardware that you thought was totally useless. The system hardware used for experimentation is: Pentium 1 at 200 mhz a 17 inch vga color screen a Creative Banshee 3d vga pci card 16mb of video ram 160k of RAM memory 20gb hard disk 10mb network card cd-rom 16x cd-writer 4x and this runs applications under GNOME or KDE such as Open Office for word processing, visicalc / excel style spreadsheets, and almost any of the applications similar to that running under Microsoft Windows and Office. Time required to do the same setup as the previous one on this hardware was about 10 hours.
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