Welcome to Jewels Web Graphics

Most of us probably use a Windows OS (XP, ME, 98 etc), on our home computers at least, but Unix Operating Systems are becoming much more common these days in corporate environments. This is because Unix is open source software, released under the GNU GPL. Therefore, businesses are freed from the obligation of paying quite large licence fees for the use of proprietary software such as operating systems and applications, owned by Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe, Apple and so on. Such a cost saving is naturally an attractive proposition for many companies, but it is only recently that it has caught on in a big way. Why? Well, whilst Unix systems were free to download, initially they were not easy to install and use, so this fact alone tended to put most people off using them. Microsoft products by contrast, although not a cheap option, were easy to install and use, and the licence fees entitled companies to tech support as well.

So what has changed now? Unix has been brought into the mainstream with companies like Novell packaging the considerably more user-friendly Suse Linux Professional Operating System for home users, (among many other systems aimed primarily at the business market), which includes a wide range of software packages that replace your windows application. These include OpenOffice.org…, (for all Office applications like Word, Excel, Access), The Gimp, (an open source image editor comparable to Photoshop), and several browsers, text editors, ftp clients, multi-media apps, and so on..).
Rather than me go into great detail about these things here, I am going to provide a list of links for you to read up on anything that interests you:

• Suse Linux Professional
• Linux Online
• Learning Linux
• Open Office
• The Gimp

Although Unix is open source software freely available to all, it still takes a bit of technical knowhow to download, compile and install the operating system and related software without paying a bean. You were waiting for the catch, weren’t you? However; companies like Novell have come up with an excellent middle road. They provide a dvd with everything you are likely to need pre-configured, which you just put into your dvd drive, follow the instructions and go. The dvd also comes with 3 months worth of tech support, at a total cost of around $99.95 (shipping may be extra, please check), if you are in the US, and £65 if you are in the UK, for Suse Linux Professional 9.3 (available from mid April 2005). Click the main link for Suse Linux Pro for details of prices and shipping worldwide. Compare this with the cost of Windows XP Professional with SP2 at around $270 at amazon.com… and £253 at amazon.co.uk (which is rather more expensive, but then we do pay more for software in the UK ), sadly…

I intend to purchase this myself next month, and will be installing it as a ‘dual boot’ OS along with my current copy of Windows XP Pro. This means that when I boot up my computer, at the start-up screen I will have a choice of whether to boot into Windows or Linux. The obvious advantages of this are: if I can’t get on with Linux, I can go back to Windows easily, and also, if there are occasions when I need to do something that Linux cant do, I can nip back into Windows, so to speak.

Elixir (my son) will be helping me with all this, and I am going to go through the Linux online course (listed above), to prepare myself for the changes. I will of course report back here on my adventures with Linux, so watch this space for further info in the coming months. I would naturally be very interested to hear from anyone who has already made the leap into the unknown. Wish me luck!

This entry was posted on Monday 21st March 2005 at 17:51 by Jewel and is filed under Techno. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.