[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“I’m a high school student and have found Linux to be extremely
useful in many areas where most people wouldn’t think of using it.
I use it for almost everything, from homework to gaming to
programming as well as teaching myself some networking. I could
never have learned everything I’ve learned using
legitimately-acquired MS software. I can’t afford close to $1K
(Canadian) for Win2000 server to learn some networking, and I can’t
afford to purchase stuff like Visual C++ to learn some programming.
Sure I could scrounge around for bootleg copies, but that’s not
exactly ‘kosher.'”
“At my home, we have a cable Internet connection, and 3 desktop
machines. I’ve set up a router with two Ethernet cards to share the
cable connection, and it’s been up for about 4 months straight.
It’s running a strong firewall ruleset, and allows for IRC, ICQ,
Quake3, RealAudio and QuickTime to be pulled through it, as well as
‘normal’ stuff like HTTP, FTP, telnet, etc. It’s also running
OpenSSH so I can login from my school to check my e-mail (yes, our
high school has about 10 Linux boxes, also running OpenSSH). The
router is also a small web server for our family’s personal pages,
and has a whatever.yi.org domain so we don’t have to worry about
the dynamic IP of the cable connection….”
“My point here is that Linux *is* ready for primetime. You
can do anything in Linux that you can do in Win32, and more. And
usually, you can do it for free. Distributions like Corel
Linux and Linux-Mandrake are also extremely easy to install and set
up, rivaling Win32 in that area as well.”