TubeNet

I use NetBSD and FreeBSD on several boxes around here. They tend to be very stable--and NetBSD will run on almost anything.

I've got RedHat on the mail server, but I haven't updated or changed it in about 4 years. New distros are getting bloated, which wasn't the point of Linux originally.

http://www.netbsd.org
http://www.freebsd.org

I had a customer with a pile of old QIC02 tapes. The Linux driver (which hasn't been updated for several years and left in a very buggy and incomplete state) died immediately. The NetBSD just worked without so much as a peep. That sold me on NetBSD.

<img src="http://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-smaller.png"><img src="http://www.freebsd.org/layout/images/beastie.png">

I'm a Slackware man! Slackware is GREAT....IF...you know what you're doing with Linux. Ubuntu seems to be the most popular these days for those looking for a user friendly desktop oriented distro.

TubeNet is powered by Linux. But I have also worked with Solaris, Irix, BSD's of some flavors, OSX, and some others. I am most at ease on Linux, but am a fan of Solaris also.

Although I much prefer the stableness of UNIX over Microsoft Windows, there are just too many applications I need that aren't always available on Linux. So for a desktop I use Windows. For server stuff hands down UNIX. Windows NT does not even come close to the versatility and robustness.

XP professional at the house. No complaints about it. But about the only two things I use a computer for at the house are web browser and Finale 2006.

I've been testing a couple of RedHat EL 4 on Dell 2850 at work running Oracle 10.2. So far it looks solid. The up2date utility (kind of like Windows Update) has worked without a problem so far. I've done backup with cpio to tape; blow the OS away; repartition the disks (0+1 RAID set); and restore the backup. Worked OK ... other than requiring a little bit of fiddling with the journaling file system (ext3) stuff. I decided the journaling wasn't worth the hassle, so changed it all to ext2. The Oracle data file system needs to be non-journaling anyway for maximum I/O speed.

The majority of our Oracle boxes at work are AIX and old legacy Alpha/Tru64.

Unix has a lot of built-in utilities the make scripting easy and powerful. You can Unix-ize Windows, but not much point in it that I can see for running a database.

Two of my favorite quotes regarding Linux/Unix are:

"Linux is only free if your time has no value"

and

" . . . I'd rather run Unix than Windows or MacOS any day, because Unix sucks less."

Both attributed to Jamie Zawinski and accurate, IMHO.

--paul;

I will second the recommendation for Ubuntu. I recently installed Ubuntu on my new Toshiba laptop and it was unbelieveably easy to setup and configure. It's not perfect (don't have my 5-in-1 reader working yet) but Ubuntu has been AMAZING!