The reason for the work am doing re Linux is because a group of us are recommending it as a preferred platform for internal & recommended external use.

The company I work for is HKs largest ISP (was HK Telecom) and so we have substantial influence.

We can *only* recommend products & proceedures 'out-of-the-box' and can only train our people to work with the same. Reason is that if we start *trying* to tell them to get this bit from here & that from there (such as Mandrake dist) we will lose our audience as none of our analysts, project managers & developers will be working constantly with Linux.

I have worked with Linux RH since 3.x came out, but only really got excited about Linux's future with RH5.2 but that was almost 4 years ago. With Linux 6.2 I was happy to recommend people look at it but there were so many difficulties when it came to running serious products (such as DB2, Oracle, WebSphere etc:). Had the opportunity to go to IBM in mid 1999 to write a redbook on implementing IBM enterprise products on RH6.2, Caldera OL2.2/2.3 Turbo Linux & SuSe Linux - even spent a week at that years San Jose Linuxworld demoing these prods on the Caldera stand (for IBM).

What has now given me the confidence to push Linux is that the 'out-of-the-box' product is almost as good as Windows for putting in the hands of novices. We get to hand Linux to newbies & ask them to install the types of prods 1st mentioned & if they can do it without crying we know Linux has come a long way.

RH7.1 is very slick by comparison to previous Linux versions. I have worked with Mandrake & have Mandrake 7.1 but I wouldn't give it to my dog as it is so
erratic and downright unfriendly when it goes wrong (as it has done many times for me) also Mandrake isn't supported by IBM etc so if you have troubles you are truly on your own - fine if you are a Linux techie - fatal if you are a non-tech drone being asked to install a system as part of a project.

So I sure appreciate the pointers to other tools but anything that isn't out-of-the-box is of little help in the corporate IT world *until* we reach a time that hiring Linux skilled sysadmins becomes the norm *but* even then - If I were managing such a team, they wouln't be allowed to create any types of dependancies on tools or products not specificly in the base distro or aqquired as a policy, to extend the bas function.

Sadly we have to set guidelines & levels for usage in large shops else we run the risk of discovering to our horror that no one knows how to recover from a disaster crash or failure, because freddy added some changes that only he understood & he left for Afghanistan 3 months ago.

Cheers

Doug
(I upgraded my home install to RH7.1 last night - so fast - is on a P4 1.5GHz with 512MB 266bus RAM & 2 x IBM IDE 7200 60GB disks - with a 32MB AGP x4 video card. Runs like a scalded cat - the CD speed is nearly as fast as the hard disks - what a treat)