Shawn's Blog

a hair-band lovin', techni-junkie's banter about… whatever.

Linux vs. Windows

Posted on | January 25, 2007 | No Comments

It’s not very often I get a really good laugh out of a comic strip, but this one is just awesome.  I can relate to the strip whole heartedly, as I am trying to become a full fledge Linux convert, and try to convert others as well.  Unfortunately, I had to back tread this month, and admit that Windows is not as bad as I make it out to be.

2 years ago, our company decided to try to get into the web hosting business, which hasn’t really panned out.  We bought a powerhouse of a server, and hired someone who knew the Linux OS to get us started.  We have the server set up to handle DNS, WWW, FTP & Email accounts, primarily.  It works, and it works pretty well.

We have had clients in the past ask us to design web applications built around databases.  No problem, we have Php & MySQL set up (well, the problem being that we’re not really sure on PHP just yet, but we could learn fairly easily).  Well, here’s the problem… the clients want to put their existing Microsoft Access databases online, and have the web applications built using their current databases, not MySQL.  Well, there’s the problem.  It’s not easy to get Linux to read an Access database.  It can be done, but to be honest, I was not comfortable having someones website running under Linux using an Access database.  If it was a headache to get working, how stable would their site be?

So, after enough inquiries about putting Access databases online, we purchased “Windows Server 2003″ and added another server to the mix.  I had the server up and running in half a day.  WWW, FTP & E-Mail.  The Linux server actually took a few weeks to get the bugs ironed out (to be fair, I could do it much quicker now that I know what to do, but still not that fast).  Setting up WWW is much faster on the Windows server & the Email server is a lot slicker as well.  Linux does not handle large volumes of email easily, and gets bogged down quickly.  Unfortunately, I found that out last week. I’m sure there is a way to make the Linux mail server more efficient, but it would take a lot of trial and error on the config files.  I had the Windows config set up in under 5 minutes.  Sheesh.

So there you have it, I admit Windows is not as evil as I make it out to be sometimes.  That being said, I am still not a Windows lover. Go Linux.

Oh yeah,  I’ve found a new RSS reader that I really like: GreatNews. It works great on a USB Key, so I am able to plug my key into any computer and pull in news at any time.  I don’t have to worry about going through headlines I’ve already read.  Great program, and it’s free to boot.

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Category: Computers
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