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Re: [LUG] dress Linux

 

On 07/11/12 22:12, Rob Beard wrote:
>
> It's actually RedHat Enterprise Linux.  They ported their in house
> system from Windows to Linux (looking at the article it runs on Java):
>
> http://www.opensourcehandbook.com/?d=overview/who/&s=who_biz-12
>
> There was an article in Linux Format a couple of years ago, I think
> they started the migration back in 2007 or something.  They do still
> have some Windows though, at least in the Torquay store (one of the
> bits of kit they use ran on Vista!).
>
> Rob
>

Thanks for that Rob - I did think it was pretty unlikely that they were
still using a RedHat 9 system in 2012, that article puts it in
perspective. I have a soft spot for that exact distro, it marked the
period where I stopped floundering around and found my feet in the Linux
world: I had bought the first (and only) Linux distro I ever personally
paid for, RedHat 6.2, a couple of years beforehand for £30 in a swanky
Tottenham Court Road shop and ruined my poor friends university degree*
by repeatedly attempting to install it on the £2000 (!!) Pentium 233MHz
he had been given from a government dyslexia grant. He wanted to use the
win95 install it had shipped to him with, but alas, I had better ideas
and after endless pain - Linux was harsh back in those days, google
didn't exist and I quite frankly had no clue what I was doing - I
somehow made it work. RedHat 9, a couple of years later, was the first
OS that ever made proper, 'real' sense to me. Then came the
RedHat/Fedora schism and I fell in with the apt-get hippies from Debian
and never looked back. Good times :]

Cheers

* Despite my horrid interference with the only computer I had access to
at the time, my friend nonetheless did somehow pass his degree and is
now a successful actor in London. Despite putting up reluctantly with my
obsessive geekiness for so many years, to this day he still runs Linux
(by choice) at home on all of his computers, and even recently used a
linux live USB drive (backtrack) with no help from me to reclaim the
data files from his girlfriend's MacBook when a borked 10.7 > 10.8
upgrade went bad.

** RedHat 9 is positively modern compared to some of my odder (and by
far the most fun) ongoing support jobs I have: amongst the seriously
weird and old shit I very occasionally have to deal with are a SGI Iris
4D/60 (believe it or not, reconditioned and positively prehistoric SGI
machines are really common in India as re-purposed industrial control
machines, hooked up via serial buses to 1970 eras automated looms in
sweatshops: you're probably wearing something right now that was made by
a 7 year old girl and a 25+ year old SGI system), a VAX 4000 (I have
begged and begged for this customer to just give me the damn machine,
I'd pay him in blood or his weight in Alpha 21064 silicon replacements
or even both) and slightly more modern, a Sun Ultra 1 that is still
controlling about half a million quids worth of industrial CNC
machinery. I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was young, and I think
that tendency somehow bled into my sysadmin skills: you'll have to prise
the i7 workstations and Opteron/Xeon/Itanium servers from my cold dead
hands but I really, *really* miss the old, slow, crappy, incompatible
systems despite the fact that I'm actually too young to remember them
being released in the first place. I really envy the old-schoolers like
Gordon who got to grow up with this cool, cool stuff!

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