[UCLA-LUG] Linux vs Win2000

[Frederick Lee]

On Fri, 28 Apr 2000 14:48:59 -0700 (PDT), said Dimi Shahbaz <dimator@fire.csua.ucla.edu>:
>You brought up a very thorny topic, since comparisons between the two can
>be made on many levels, many of them subjective. Luckily, you narrowed 
>it down to web servers.  Direct your freind to:
>
>http://www.netcraft.com/survey/
>
>Despite the Microsftian propoganda machine, Apache has remained the
>dominant web server (in fact, it has only gotten more popular!) at 61% of
>the market.  This can't be for no reason, or "hype", as your freind
>would probably say.
>
>I know, I know, a site running apache does not mean its running linux,
>but a lot of them are.  The more important idea to take away from the web
>server comparisons, I think, is that open source software /can/ be
>superior in quality to closed source.  And this is at the very heart of
>what Microsoft, and people like your freind, dispute most!  (I hope
>that's not too offtopic).
>
>This post could have been a lot longer, with many clever misspellings
>of "Microsoft", but I'm trying very hard to show some restraint. :)
>
>HTH,
>Dimi

Well, I'd also like to bring up the point about interoperability under Linux
and most other Unix-ish.

For example, Linux was (among?) the first to be able to read ALL of the
filesystems created(?) by Microsoft:
  FAT12
  FAT16
  FAT32
  VFAT extension (Windows LFN)
  NTFS

W95: unable to read NTFS, early ones unable to read FAT32.
W98: unable to read NTFS.
NT4: unable to read FAT32 until way after Linux did.
W2K*: probably all those now, but WAY after Linux did back in ... 97? 98?.


I have a single PII/266 in the CSUA lounge running Debian GNU/Linux Potato
being a web server, ftp server, SMB server, AFP (AppleShare) server, NFS
server, print server (across Unix LPD, SMB, and AppleTalk), XDMCP server, an
ethernet bridge, and a dumb terminal server.  These were all standard packages;
all part of the stock Linux kernel (read: available by default - no hunting
on the web).  Serving twenty machines.  Holds up nicely, except the shortage
of RAM gets to be a bother when I'm compiling stuff on it.

At the opposite end of the software load spectrum, the router+firewall is a
K6/233 with 64MB RAM running Red Hat 6.1.  Being the frugal admin I am
(*cough*cough*), I killed off all unecessary services... such as GUI, file
serving, printing capabilities, etc.  It's routing 100baseT network for the
20 machines mentioned above.  It gets bored.  Even heavy traffic doesn't push
the CPU load past 30%.  I'd love to use it in the compile farm, except I have
security issues to worry about.

What was I rambling about?....   oh yeah.  Interoperability.  Portability.

Apache also runs on a ****load of OS's.  Heck, Apache has even been ported to
Windows NT (but with much difficulty; iirc, something about looks-like-but-isn't
POSIX subsystem in NT).  I have yet to see MS-IIS run on anything but Windows.
Although Apache isn't Linux-specific, I'm just ragging on MS here ;)
(Here's something that blew me away: Apache under MacOS.  MacOS X also, but
that's expected.)


Hrmm... maybe I'll start rambling in reply to the original post now...


-Fred