Re: Linux interest group

[Norris Preyer <npreyer@eou.edu>]

Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca> writes:

> It's absolutely standard on those of our students, and I'd put it on
> mine if I needed to. I spent the 94-95 school year in a laboratory
> in Cambridge where I only used Suns operating on Solaris. The GUI
> certainly makes unix more palatable, but I sure was glad to get back
> to my Macintosh at home after that year of enforced unix. I use C in
> the Code Warrior Integrated Development Environment on the Mac. It
> is wonderful, but if some of you folks enjoy Linux it will be no
> skin off this nose. You'll never experience System 8, so you'll stay
> happy. (And yes, I have used Linux on a machine at the Cavendish
> which was set up by one of the research students. I did not think it
> was quite as nice as X-Windows, but there may have been improvements
> since 1995.)

Umm, this sounds like the students didn't install X on the Linux box.
There are a variety of very nice graphical applications that run under
X and make Linux a very nice platform. 
 
> If I might be permitted to ask, just what is it that one can do with
> a PC running Linux that can't be done with a Macintosh?

Two come readily to mind: I'm using three linux boxes to do some
distributed parallel computing (using PVM to pass messages).  *Very*
easy to set up, and not available for macs.

A second, touchy point: stability--I've had boxes running for more
than three months continuously without crashes, reboot for software
installation, etc.  I've never had this kind of stability with mac
or windows operating systems. 

> Leigh

-- Norris

-- 
Norris Preyer			(541) 962-3310 (office)
Physics Program			(541) 962-3873 (fax)
Eastern Oregon University	npreyer@eou.edu
La Grande, OR  97850		http://physics.eou.edu/npreyer.html