State of Linux. 13332

Grug

Get a few dozen third party applications and about 30 Microsoft security fixes, and Windows XP will BSOD. I had about 40 big ticket applications including; WSAD, WSADIE, MQSeries, DB2, 2 versions of OpenOffice, Lotus Notes, SmartSuite, FireFox, Netscape, and a few others. In addition, I had maxed out my 80 gig drive about a month ago. Bad things happen to NTFS once you completely fill the hard drive.

Typically, I have to "re-image" the hard drive with XP about 2-3 times-year. This is better than the 3-4 times-year with Windows 2000, or the 6-7 times-year with NT 4.0. Windows 9x was worse than useless as a consultant's laptop OS, but it was the best version of Windows available.

I really do torture machines. I do systems integration and usually go through airport security with AT LEAST two PCs, sometimes three PCs. I've been gradually using VMWare to improve my ability to back-up-recover different images. It's really nice to be able to put a compressed Linux Image on a CD-ROM and use it later.

How many copies of XP Pro are ACTUALLY SOLD at $150 each. Most of the copies sold at that price are for "Emergency Recovery" of a machine already licensed by a corporation.

Not so funny. Microsoft has pretty much told the 5000 largest companies in the world that unless they had more Microsoft XP-Pro licenses than employees, that they would be subjected to software license audits, which for most of these companies can cost over $200-employee even if NOTHING IS FOUND. Several companies are now offering "security audits" which also audit software.

And by the way, there were roughly 100 million PCs sold world-wide last year, and nearly 50 million Linux licenses downloaded, shipped, or registered by Linux users last year (based on browser surveys). This would indicate that lots of Windows PCs are getting converted to Linux. Furthermore, most 64 bit Windows machines powered by AMD-64 or Itanium chips, are now being designed to quickly and easily be reconfigured as Linux machines, and are usually shipped with Windows Installation media. This is so that Windows can be reinstalled as a Linux CLIENT under VMWare, Xen, or Bochs.

It depends on how it is used. If you only use MS-Office, and you run each application in full-screen mode, like a fancy MS-DOS box, then you might not ever have a BSOD. On the other hand, if you run lots of applications, including services and third-party software, and you use windows sitting side by side, so that you can see alerts and information the second it pops up, if you have 45 windows down in your system tray, and 15-20 services in your language bar, you will eventually see BSODs. The bane event is when you completely fill your hard drive. NTFS seems to want to allocate more space than it actually has, and when you delete the "extra" space, it corrupts the allocation table.

When you get the "disk full" error, start backing up your hard drive, because your hard drive will be going bye-bye within a month or so.

Keep in mind that Microsoft has nearly 20 years of monopoly legacy and nearly 10 years of market power, which has enabled them to expand their market to nearly 1 billion PC users. Linux has been growing slowly and steadily and is now selling about as many license units as Microsoft sold back in 1996.

Linux has gone from less than 1% of the market to roughly 12% of the market globally in less than 6 years. And they've grown from 6% to 12% in the last year (based on browser stats). That nearly 60 million new Linux installations.

There are many good reasons to purhase a Windows license for a machine that will ultimately run Linux as the primary operating system. You need a Windows license to use certain Microsoft dlls with WINE. You need a Windows license to access Windows using Remote Access from Linux. You need a Windows license to run Windows in VMWare VMs. The cheapest way to get Windows is to let the OEM go ahead and ship the OEM copy of Windows he has already paid for. You can then use OEM

It's possible. Remember that Windows 2000 was actually a "Free Upgrade" to nearly 40 million corporate users, who were notified that they had "received shipments" - effective the first day of sales. Microsoft then claimed that they had sold 40 million copies. In their SEC filing however, they made no such direct claim. It took almost 2 years for most of those copies to be installed. Most corporate customers didn't install Windows 2000 until at least SP1.

When Windows XP first came out, Microsoft tried to force all corporate customers who had support contracts to immediately purchase Windows XP. Of course, Microsoft also tried to triple the support price and added a number of anticompebreastive clauses to their licenses. Microsoft's REAL goal was to get as many PCs as possible covered under the new XP license, even if they were running Windows 2000.

Of course, this tactic also backfired and most corporations began developing Linux migration plans. They began ordering ONLY machines capable of running Linux as well as Windows XP. As a result, there was a surplus of PCs configured to run ONLY Windows XP, such a surplus that the prices for them fell to below the manufacturers manufacturing cost.

Well, I had to download 36 security fixes. The version of Windows XP I was running was using SP1 not SP2, because the company doesn't want us using SP2.

Sure, if you have a machine which comes with an XP installation disk tailored specifically for that machine, and sold within the last few MONTHS, which includes all of the service packs preinstalled, you might get a much faster install, but you might still have to reboot a few times to take the security fixes to Windows DLLs for programs that are ALWAYS running.

My installation media was about 1 year old. There were only about 8 patches that didn't need reboots, which meant that I had to reboot XP over 20 times, once for each of the major patches to DLLs.

We'll see who responds to what. I have a feeling that there are more than a few XP users who have had the same experience I have had. In fact, I recently read an article, which was reposted to COLA, which pointed out that it was more cost-effective to simply REPLACE the entire computer, than to try to reimage it with XP. Given that my Billing rate is over $200-hour, and that I lost nearly 20 hours of billable time rebuilding the flaked out XP machine, it certainly would have been cheaper for me to order a new XP laptop than to reimage it. Unfortunately, new laptops are a capital expense, and my overtime costs the company nothing.

I have roughly 500 hours of Windows related unpaid overtime for this year. The company sees this as "Admin Time" which is tracked, but not itemized or costed.

Even at $100-hours, thats nearly $50,000 in non-billable overtime costs, from using Windows instead of Linux.