Posted on 08/28/2015 6:41:30 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Windoze may be great, but I'm not going to learn a new OS only to lose functionality of stuff that I can string on a command line. And I try not to take any of it too seriously. After all, we don't last forever. ;)
/johnny
Our new mainframe will be a Linux boxen. I hope my JCL runs on it.
As long as DistroWatch exists Linux will continue to be a Back Room / Infrastructure tool and a Hobbyist desktop.
Nothing wrong with that of course.
Every 5 years or so I like to load up Linux and play with it a bit to see how it’s doing. The last time I was able to download a copy of mandrake and run it off a thumb drive. What is the current most popular flavor of Linux that I can run off of a disk or thumb drive? It’s getting time to check it out again.
We run z/OS with zLinux guest images. The JCL runs on z/OS and the zLinux guests run apache and WebSphere, etc.
Let us not forget the massive contribution of Richard Stallman and GNU. Linux was developed as a kernel, not a complete OS. Regardless of Stallman's unsavory politics and personal style, his GNU software and licensing were absolutely critical to the success of Linux as an OS, and comprise the majority of the "Linux" OS software currently in use.
I met Linux when he was working on the early kernels.
Linux has been very very good to me. You would be shocked.
Given the increased size of thumb drives, just about any linux should boot off of it:) Ubuntu seems the most popular and mainstream lately.
Mint is my favorite. I use it everyday for work and school.
Didn’t someone post a similar article, what, every year for the past 15 years?
I remember being in college when Linus Torvalds posted in the old Usenet Minix group about an OS for the 386 he was working on. It was interesting times back then - Linux and William Jolitz’s 386BSD opened up a whole new world of programming fun for us coders, a non-trivial effect of the work that went into Linux and the BSD OSs.
Right now I have a Linux server, a Vista laptop and and XP desktop which is my main workday computer. I’ve obviously used newer windows versions, but for me I get zero added productivity from getting the latest and greatest.
The critical applications for me used to be Word, Excel, Access, Autocad, IIS for web server and Visual Studio. But LibreOffice removes the need for word and excel, I have Mysql (MariaDB) for access, Blender for 3d animation and video, Audacity for sound, Apache web server, and Netbeans to write Java GUIs. In short, the Microsoft thrill is gone and I’m going all Linux my coming computer upgrade.
/johnny
As an IT professional that designs disaster recovery solutions, I can tell you that I have seen over and over again, customer after customer a wide shift in the
Server farms. There used to be a lot of HPUX, Solaris, AIX, BSD, and other nixes. Now I see Linux (mostly RedHat and Ubuntu) as the vast majority and only a scattering of other systems.
There is still some mainframe systems still but that is rapidly being transitioned out in favor of large clusters to handle high volume transactions. I also still see a fair amount of MS Server, mostly for AD and for MS SQL. I am even seeing Linux on the desktop starting to creep into the work space.
If someone was to ask me what certification to start with in IT, hands down I would recommend the RedHat or CompTia Linux certifications.
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/jcl/jcl_environment_setup.htm
You will want to check out Hercules http://www.hercules-390.eu/
I would recommend Mint for those that are Windows oriented. http://www.linuxmint.com/
Ubuntu and RedHat are the two most popular distros. Almost all distros are able to boot and run from a USB. There are even specialty distros of Linux designed to make repair of Windows and Linux systems easier (http://www.supergrubdisk.org/rescatux/) Since I travel a lot and have to do a lot of my own support, I keep this distro handy.
Fourth vote for Mint.
You can use lightweight GUIs for it, or if you’ve got a relatively new computer (one that can run Windows 7, for example), you can just run all default.
It’s the closest to the old single taskbar WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interface from Win 95 to Win 7.
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