Even more reason to have a PowerPC Linux installed... or at least A version of BSD... REAL BSD not thier gummed up version polluted with Darwin. Now granted Darwin is Cool, but as a "server" OS... it just ain't got it. Eye Candy for the Admin's Managers to oogle about. Nothing that can't be or hasn't been done with FREE packages as of right now.

Also, about Appletalk being dead... Yeah right. When Adobe, Quark and Macromedia abandone it... THAT is when it'll be dead.

SO just how many Graphics design departments have YOU supported lately??? Mine still have 7300s in production... ain't now way I can wrench them from the people using them. They just WILL NOT give em up. Not only that, but when they actually use AFP-over-TCP it really rocks.

Have tried OS X and it starts a choking at about 15 users mounting the apple volumes.

Now, Linux and Netatalk... Great gumption Batman... 100 student users with HEAVY classroom usage, transfer of 100s of GIGS an hour... no problem. Using LVM, reiserfs, netatalk, Kernel 2.4.18, GBit Intel E1000 NIC and SCSI arrays it just keeps a cranking. Funny how our 140 MACs (out of 2200 systems campus wide) account for over 2/3rds of our Disk Space total being used on enterprise systems. I guess it would be that streaming video editing, or the music compilation editing... etc...etc...etc...

Now, you'd actually run Oracle on that Box??? Wow! Production?? I mean REAL DATA... not some "project people are playin with" data. I mean Financials, er something close. And if you gonna do that... why not use RS6000s. They use PowerPC chips (G4's included, well not THE G4s, but the IBM RS6000 version of them). You can get upto (I believe) 64 of them in a single machine now... with UPTO 256GB of Memory... and Disk galore, real disk, like SSA, or FC, or u160 SCSI... Expansion slot galore too... if you run out ... buy another backplane... and keep going.

Well, I guess I really done NOW!!! ;-)

I only deal with the people that do. I support the lab engineers. And on the subject of environments... I have posted long and hard about integrated unix/linux/bsd/blahblah environments. I use remote X displays all the time. XDMCP is your friend.

As far as Linux being ugly, let's look at the libraries in Solaris. At least you can navigate the different versions in Linux. Solaris, hmmm, depending on what team worked on the specific libraries last is where they end up, Symlinks ALLLLL over the place... I call it Symlink HELL. OSX... I can see endusers liking it. One thing I don;t like about it... No real way to have remote desktops... on say an X-Terminal. The hamstrung Accelerated X is evident.

Just gonna shut up now.