The Old Tin Shed

As you have probably gathered from my previous posts I have been doing a lot of investigating into the current Linux distributions and building 3 servers based around them. The server editions of Centos 6, have been stable and secure the way I expected them to.  To be honest now that we have the servers installed at the proprietary software running, I feel one hell of a lot less stressed about being hacked and viruses.  I have also been looking at a desktop distribution of Linux that I could replace my windows desktop with.  Therefore removing yet another entry point for hackers and or spy ware etc.  I mentioned BSD and it ran great as did quite a few others.  But I learnt some things you need to take into consideration before diving in. Do you have another machine for windows or can you dual boot for the programs that don't have a Linux version Are you prepared to try new programs What desktop do you want to run, as there are several out there. Try ...

Wow, is all I can say.  The software is finally installed and working, some 11 emails to tech support and struggling to get my head around why things were not working.  If linux has one fault when it comes to these things its that it is very complicated.  Each step in the process showed up because something had not been thought about in the previous step, so we were lurching from one error to another. Most of this can be countered however with a more comprehensive how to for the install of the vendor software.  Things like make sure you have all the updates installed, make sure you set your static IP in advance of any install, make sure you disable SElinux and the correct way to do that.  I have learnt about iptables and how to work those and firewall exceptions that are actually separate.  All in all have accumulated a large amount of data on how linux workings are different to windows. As per the last post if you have no desire to ever go to...

Now I dont know if i should be complaining about linux or the proprietary software I am trying to install on it. Have been through every major distro, but is seems the later the version of the software the more unlikely it is to install with no issues.   For example I can install the software on version 5.6 of CentOS no worries but try to use version 6 and it crashes out with the mysql install.  The proprietary software installs its own version of all the needed MYSQL, and has major issues with the way that works on the newer distro's.  I can only assume that, that is the reason for my issues. Lots of people ask if Linux is a real alternative to windows.  The answer is both yes and no. Windows out of the box is ready to install apps and runs full multimedia devices no issues at all.  Its primary issues are based around the fact that it is realitvely insecure and you need lots of extra software to make it do what you want it to.  For exanple to ...