Linux Gaining Strength In Downturn 293
gubm writes "A February survey of IT managers by IDC indicated that hard times are accelerating the adoption of Linux. The open source operating system will emerge from the recession in a stronger data center position than before, concluded an IDC white paper."
Re:The best things in life... (Score:3, Informative)
If Linux does see more widespread adoption, more software developers will support it with proprietary software that is only on Windows/Mac/both now. Sure, we'll lose some of the advantages of FOSS, but Linux will be more usable. More adoption, whatever the reason, will spur more development for both proprietary systems and FOSS; at this point, I don't think anybody will argue against innovation or jobs.
Re:The best things in life... (Score:2, Informative)
Well oracle does run in linux too and is quite on par with MSSQL...
Obviously evetyone has his own preferences.
Re:The best things in life... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The best things in life... (Score:5, Informative)
Say goodbye to the MS business plan. That's what we're really talking about, the slow death of Windows in the data center.
Nonsense. Even Ballmer agrees that Linux has always been the undisputed leader in the data center. The downturn will only increase the dominance of Linux.
"Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux," he said. "How are we doing? Forty is less than 60, so I don't like it. ... We have some work to do."
from here:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/151568/ballmer_still_searching_for_an_answer_to_google.html [pcworld.com]
Re:The best things in life... (Score:3, Informative)
PostgreSQL can handle Petabytes without any problems. And it is much faster than MS-SQL and much simpler to set up and administer, besides.
Re:The best things in life... (Score:3, Informative)
I guess I'm one of those guys who you would assume "just knows," but really I often don't. I've been using Linux for seven years, doing it for a living for three, and I'd still put myself in the wide pool labeled "intermediate." But FWIW, here's the "secrets" I know. Prepare to not have your mind blown.
It's more about problem-solving skills than rote knowledge. If you ignore everything else I say, remember this one, it's the key to the whole thing.
There are books, and some of them are good (I really recommend this one [tldp.org] and this one [tldp.org]) but for the most part, the internet is "the book." Learn to use it. To start with, a good search pattern is [four or five word synopsis of problem OR pasted error message] [name of distribution]. Sometimes you'll get a bunch of old crap in the search results in which case you may want to put the version number of the distro at the end. 95% of the time that's your book.
Fuck all this "spare machine play-around box" nonsense. You want to learn? Fucking learn. Use it every day. When you can't figure out how to do something you want to do, go figure it out. Don't take no for an answer. Figure it out.
Related to that last, as a rookie I know that often I would run into a situation where I (rightly or wrongly) thought "omg, I screwed everything up, I should just reinstall and start over!" Resist this temptation as much as you can. Do it the hard way.
Set up a simple home file server using that spare box. Once you've accomplished this, come up with other stuff to do with it.
Figure out how to use your printer from the command line. That'll keep you busy.
Really, the unifying theme here is that it's more about learning the problem-solving methods. Set arbitrary tasks for yourself for no good reason and figure them out. Pick something you already know how to do with a GUI and figure out how to do it in the shell. Read read read. Those two books I linked above are excellent.
And don't let it scare you. If you don't let yourself get pysched out, it's pretty easy stuff.
Have fun, and godspeed.