3 Good Reasons To Buy an Open-PC (Linux)

PC World ^ | March 4, 2011 | Katherine Noyes

[decimon]

For many small business users, all the rational arguments for using open source software like Linux make a great deal of sense: It's free, customizable, compatible, and it's free of vendor lock-in, to name just a few.

When it comes down to the wire at purchase time, however, many fall prey to one or more of the frequently perpetuated myths out there, and vague fears of incompatibility or a lack of support or something else drive them right back into Redmond's waiting arms.

One way to make the notion of a Linux-based computer less worrisome for such users is to buy hardware preloaded with Ubuntu, Canonical's version of the open source operating system. That can go a long way toward ensuring that everything "just works" out of the box, and I've already discussed good ways and places to do this.

As of December, however, another option emerged that's well worth checking out--it's even better, in fact, from the perspective of software freedom. It's called the Open-PC, and it offers "a PC for everyday use built by the Linux community for the Linux community," in the project's own words.

With three models to choose from--two built and sold in Europe and one through ThinkPenguin in the United States--the Open-PC has several key advantages that could make it the right choice for your small business. Here are just a few to consider.

[scripter]

There's a company headquartered at 1600 Amphitheater Parkway which has over a million computers, spread across a couple of dozen data centers around the world, all running Linux.

Now that is a great post.

[Richard Kimball]

Microsoft is catching it from all sides now. Apple is cleaning up in the consumer end and Linux seems to be making huge inroads in areas where there's IT support.

[markman46]

Other than Ubuntu, what linux distros do you suggest for the desktop?

I use PCLinuxOS, it just works out of the box. I have it on one of my desktops and run win7 on Vbox, I also put it on my OCZ neutrino netbook, again just works

[scripter]

Thanks. I’ll check that out as well.

[MichiganMan]

Using Linux for business makes no sense at all, unless you do not plan on having customers.

Then there's the US Department of Defense:

“When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source,” General Justice continued. “It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is “the” single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer.”

The US Navy nuclear submarine fleet is using GNU/Linux

Linux headed into Boeing antisub aircraft

No customers there.  Piddly lightweight stuff, this Linux.  Just further proof of your point Wooly. 

By embracing the opinion of an English major, writing for a tech publication, but who would rather be writing for a mainstream media operation, you will be viewed as someone no one will want to do business with.

Indeed.  Isn't it funny when people write about subjects of which they know so little?  

[AFreeBird]

Why boot winders when you can use something like Sun’s Virtualbox?

[MalPearce]

Depends on the computers you buy.

I’ve got four Dell desktops (all of them cheap and cheerful but they all have awful onboard graphics cards - the card in the media center is so abysmal it can’t even obtain a 3dMark rating which is pathetic for a system that’s only five years old).

I have had 3 HP laptops for work and they’re all business grade - and are fantastic (the Elitebook is just excellent).

Best quality laptop I’ve ever had, bar none, was a Toshiba Satellite Pro 490xcdt, a work laptop I was given after it had passed its five year birthday.

By 2008 (a few months shy of its tenth birthday) it still had no dead pixels, and the original battery was still holding a 40 minute charge. Amazingly, it totally spanked my oldest Dell tower - a P4 3.2Ghz system with stock parts and only a RAM upgrade - in a benchmark test.

I sold it to a student who’s now a year from graduation and is still using it on a daily basis, XP + OpenOffice.

Some years back I compared business grade laptops and Dell certainly deliver more bang for buck than anyone else, but the build quality was nowhere near as good as the Toshibas and HPs. They’re fine if you’re only going to use them on a desk but if a laptop can’t survive serious punishment (e.g. a five foot fall from a shelf in a server rack, onto a solid floor) then it’s no use to me.

[zeugma]

Yeah, running an old windows box connected to a network means that eventually someone is going to go online, which means either paying for some goofy security software and or tech time or certain disaster.

Not anxious to put all of our financial transactions into the public domain!

Something like that is a great candidate for virtualization. You can make the VM have host-only networking so the only 'network' it can see is the local host it is running on. 

One of the really cool things about running a VM is that you can fire it up, do some work, then 'suspend' it to disk. If that disk space is on a shared network drive within your office, you can resume it from another workstation, and be right where you left off. It also makes the image insanely easy to back up.

[Calvinist_Dark_Lord]

I tried Open SUSE a long time ago and didn't like it, although why I didn't like it I can't remember. Maybe I'll try installing it and I'll remember. :-)

i've been using SuSE since 9.2 Professional. i found it to be more user friendly. It has since been split off into Novell SuSE Enterprise Linux and the OpenSUSE project. Novell Enterprise is less cutting edge and more stable. OpenSUSE is used as more of a beta testing platform for Novell Enterprise, and can be downloaded freely.

I"ve been meaning to try KDE again - I used it years ago under Solaris and liked it, but somebody else mentioned Gnome was superior to KDE so I went with Gnome this time. For the most part I connect to Linux/Unix via putty and never see the graphical interface.

KDE has two available versions, 3.5.x and 4.6.x. Gnome always reminded me of Macintosh OSX. While it was impressive, i always thought it to be somewhat limited in comparison to KDE.

The software I mentioned is Logos Bible software. I have a lot of money tied up with Logos and can't part with it, so I have to keep a Windows box for now just to run Logos. I might try setting up a Windows VM under Ubuntu...

There is a great deal of software available with the OpenSuSE distribution. Among that is an application called BibleTime. i'm certain that others have Linux versions. i don't know about Logos. If it does exist, you may have to download it as an RPM, and install it yourself.

[scripter]

IMO, Logos is the best Bible software out there and keeping a windows system around just for Logos is worth it, I just wish I didn't have to! Check out Logos here: http://www.logos.com/. If I had more time I'd do what I could to help port Logos to Linux. From what I understand the Mac version isn't all that great but getting better.