“In the first two parts of this series we focused a great deal
on the hardware. Rightly so since you need good hardware properly
configured for any solid workstation solution. Once you have all
that figured out you must make some decisions regarding what
software to install. It really does seem like a waste of good CPU
cycles to just install a vanilla desktop Linux distribution. This
final installment will look at several potential choices for the
base operating system and in detail at what we finally settled
on.“Before you start burning install DVDs it’s probably a good idea
to come up with a list of things you want your operating system to
do. In our case the biggest single requirement was the ability to
do virtualization, or running multiple operating systems on the
same hardware at the same time. This doesn’t really narrow things
down very well. In fact, it opens up a number of options to
consider from both the open source world and free (as in VMware’s
ESXi and Citrix’s XenServer) for personal use.”