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I never could get everything to work that I wanted to on a Linux platform. I would spend all my free time on weekends trying different versions of Linux and desktops, but there was always something lacking.

One day I took a step back and realized that most of the open source applications I wanted to use (Apache, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firebird, MySQL, etc.) had Windows ports. So I bought a retail copy of Windows 2000 Professional and installed all the open source applications I wanted to play with.

Now I spend my free time playing with the applications, rather than the operating system. I would agree that Linux is not yet ready for home prime-time.

Try http://www.qnx.com as a start. You can download a free, non-commercial version of QNX 6.2.1 that comes with compiler, browsers, support for a variety of video cards, networking (IPV4/IPV6). All you need is a CDROM burner and some patience to download the CDROM image.

The folks at QNX decided to change their distribution model when the moved from QNX4.25 to QNX 6. I paid over $10,000 for my initial QNX4 commercial development licenses and deployment licenses were nearly $1,000 per node. The QNX 6 release offers free non-commercial code to encourage developers to use it and become proficient. Commercial developers can buy the Momentics Standard Edition or Profession edition packages to deploy custom kernel images for commercial use. The deployment price is $80 per node. Much more reasonable. If you plan to deploy hundreds of thousands of nodes, they make a very good deal, so it scales commercially.