Can Linux beat XP in homes yet or NOT?

[Tim]

Tim:
>> Secondly, please tell me how you manage to get XP running in half an
>> hour.  It takes far longer than half an hour on all the PCs I've seen to
>> prep the drive and install the software.  Never mind what comes after
>> the first boot of the barebones system.

Knute Johnson:
> Lot's of practice reloading it :-).  I've had to load it many times 
> for work and you get pretty good at it after a while.

LOL!  I actually meant the hardware speed, though, not the user speed.
Even just hitting enter and letting it do its defaults without me making
any decisions, takes it longer than that.

I'd make jokes, too, about how often one has to install one versus the
other, but then I'm one of the few that only ever installed my Windows
about three times.  I just didn't keep on breaking it like many do.  ;-)

> As for Linux, I can't get F7 to run on my mail server and it's clone. 
> It just won't boot.  I'm SOL.  I'm going to have to buy a new 
> computer for my mail server or go back to a Windows system like 
> Mercury.

I've been lucky that I haven't really had a great deal of trouble
loading Linux on my machines, except for a couple of quite old boxes.  I
managed it in the end, though.

You might consider CentOS.  I'd suggest something, like it, with a
longer lifespan than Fedora for a server.  Re-installing servers is a
bigger pain than desktop boxes.

> If I had unlimited time I think I might try playing with BSD.  It 
> should run on my old mail server computers.

I had a brief play with BSD to see what it was like.  It was a bit too
different for me to do much with it, I'd need more spare time, and more
interest to bother.

I'm a little hesitent at mixing systems between server and client.  I
want things like NFS to work smoothly between them all.  Running
disparate versions of NFS isn't always easy.  I left my server running
on FC4 as all other boxes (FC 4, 5, 6 & 7) can talk with it.
Conversely, I've had a few firewall headaches trying to use NFS between
boxes using later versions.

I need to change my server, but I'm not looking forward to the
mailserver changeover.  There's some thirty-thousand e-mails in my
account that I don't want to stuff up.

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ rm -rfd /*^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Huname -ipr
2.6.21-1.3228.fc7 i686 i386

Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5.  Today, it's FC7.

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