[rescue] Linux help (was ZX coolness)

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

Thank you Al! Very good response!

Yes, some of us work in high performance computing, and yes we get work
done with Linux. People should not take the average Slashdot reader/poster
as representative of the people behind this OS. 

Linux is one of the ultimate tools for research because it was actually
born in academia. It is a great tool, because the code is there... and
more importantly it has a VERY active and responsive community. Sure it
has its flaws, and share of idiots associated with it, but I am sure that
is true for any other piece of software out there.

What is good about this OS, is that it is not only open sourced, but it
also has a LOT of 3th party support. Which in the end is the key for the
acceptance of an OS. Are the *BSD's better? Probably (I am a NetBSD user
myself) but only for certain things. Linux strenght is that in the areas
that is not as good as other free OSs, it is not bad enough to be
unnaceptable. So in the end vendors decided to bet for this OS because of
its potential, and the promise of the development community to improve in
the areas in which it is lacking.

At least for us in academia, linux is a great tool for certain challenge
problems. We can build cheap clusters very quickly. Sure MPI is not the 
best tool, and we have to put extra effort on how we design our code to
make it more decoupled. But the price difference between a new
SV2/SX6//Origin/Dome,etc. is so significant that the extra effort is very 
well justified. Sure I need supercomputer time, but for very specific
purposes then we go to SDSC or PSC. For the rests of task we can run our
stuff on our cluster (1024 procs) locally. The key is to understand the
tools one has, and to map them to their specific strenghts.

The main problem that commercial unix vendors are facing is that FeeCees
are getting in their turft way too quickly. Thankfully there is an
alternative OS for those feecees that is not M$ tainted, and most of the
time that OS is Linux. Wether we like or not, those *weenies* have
helped linux to gain momentum, and that is very important. That allows
soft vendors to notice it and port their apps to it. Sure any other OS is
so much elegant but with no warez for it, is of not much use to the
average user (sure one can be macho about it and roll their own programs
and that is fine, but what if you actually need certain tools to get the
job done?).

I do not know if this is the typical buying scenario, but situations like
the following have aroused many times in the few research labs with which 
I have been associated.

We need a CAD tool, vendor offers several platforms.. usually Windows,
Solaris, and HP-UX (at least for EDA). Latelly they started to offer Linux
versions. When doing the version purchasing, we look at the total cost of
the choosen tool. We realize that against our budget, the Solaris/HP-UX
solutions are usually way too painful. Since we do not only incurr on the
cost of the tool itself, but also on the cost of the machine associated
with the OS (plus the cost of HP-UX, solaris is usually free to academia).
NT comes close, but M$ always has shady deals with universities so that
they will sell their soul. However Linux now offers us a way of getting
away from the windows cancer. We can run the tool with almost no overhead,
since the OS is free, and the FeeCee used to run it is so MUCH cheaper
than the alternative workstation, that it is not even funny. And many
times the FeeCee offers better performance than a current workstation.
This is were the power of linux resides, at least for us in academia it
has been like a silver bullet against the infiltration of M$hit.

Is the OS ready for the desktop? I don't know. Is it ready for the
enterprise? no clue. However in my area of expertise/use, this particular
OS is more than ready. It is hard to justify to my boss the purchasing of
a new sun box, when a feecee that costs way less, running the same tool,
gets the job done in 1/2 the time. I love my sun, and I use it as my main
machine most of the time... but sadly the only justification that I have
to keep it on my desk right now, is the fact that I am dependant on the
type 5 keyboard =-), so I ended up with a very expensive X-terminal......

Back to work I guess... Cheers!