CityTV story about Dell and pre-installed linux, from linuxcaffe

[Mel Wilson]

Alex Beamish wrote:

> Linux has been taken up very quickly by geeks (OK, we're geeks -- deal) for
> a number of reasons:
> 
> [] It's not Microsoft (and there are multiple reasons for this choice
> alone),
> [] It comes with the source code,
> [] It's community based,
> [] It's free, and
> [] If you're keen, you can add a feature to a program you use and pass it
> along

[] It's real software, but you can still afford it.  I stopped playing 
with Linux when some people approached me for a bid for a web 
application.  I had my toys already, and I cooked up a LAPP prototype 
in a week, showed it, and got accepted.  After that, there was money 
around, and we could pay a couple of thousand for M$ tolls -- 
customer's insistence -- but without that available Linux, Apache, 
Postgres there would have been no project.  (Left out Python, not 
because there's anything wrong with it, but because there were/are 
easily available languages around; Python was one of them.)

This point is a lot like "it's free", but I want to stress "it's 
*real*".  The demo ran on production-quality code.  The final site 
could have run on the exact same software, had the client wanted.

> [ ... ]
> Getting Linux to the desktop is a challenge, but every year we get a little
> closer. My first encounter with SuSE 6.2 and YaST was brutal, and I didn't
> try Linux again for a few years. Now, having worked with Linux for close to
> ten years, I'm much moer comfortable with it -- and Linux has come a long
> way.

I just got a new desktop to support a new project, and Kubuntu simply 
slid on.  After installing, I saw a desktop that's just as easy (IMHO) 
as the standard consumer system my mother uses.  At some point some 
friend of mine is going to come to me one time too many with computer 
troubles, and come away running real software.

	Cheers,		Mel.
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