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Re: [LUG] quiet and reliable

 

On Friday 04 March 2005 9:46 pm, Richard Brown wrote:
Hi

Take a look at the latest offering from Apple. Very quiet and very
small. http://www.apple.com/uk/macmini/ and comes with the best OS in
the world!!! Oops I don't think I should have said that!

Simon will have something to say about that. There are GNU/Linux mini PC 
solutions, some from single companies and some from community groups like 
UserLinux
http://www.userlinux.com/about/faq

Steve's request was for a server - depending on what he needs, MacOSX is not 
necessarily a good choice for a server that needs to work with GNU/Linux 
boxes. If things are kept simple, it should be OK but there are big 
differences in how OSX deals with some services and configuration is quite 
different in some areas too.

If you want a simple mail, print, file server it can probably do the job. 
Personally, I'd need it to do some compilation work and OSX really suffers 
here. The vast majority of GNU/Linux packages will not compile directly on 
OSX - this is why we have projects like Fink, because making the adjustments 
to allow compilation is a tedious and skilled task.

This flows into other services where even the packages that are available may 
be two or more releases behind Debian testing (to allow for all the work by 
Fink) - meaning a loss of certain functionality compared to a genuine Debian 
box. Again, this is most important for development where you need to write 
against the latest software - it means OSX is a useful *test* platform 
(because you always test against released software before releasing your own) 
but hinders general development.

OK, it's not as bad as Windows, but it's not as good as it could be either.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.dcglug.org.uk/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/
http://www.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/
http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3

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