[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
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! -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq