How Does Windows XP Professional Compare to UNIX and Linux?
| Windows XP's kernel, like Windows 2000's, has its roots in UNIX. UNIX is a very popular multitasking operating system developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s. It was designed by programmers for programmers. In fact, the language C was developed just to write UNIX. Even though UNIX has become a friendlier operating system with the addition of Windows-like interfaces such as MOTIF, it's still relatively user-unfriendly, requiring cryptic commands much like DOS. UNIXBecause it is written in C, UNIX can run on any computer that has a C compiler, making it quite portable. AT&T gave away the UNIX source code to universities and licensed it to several companies during its early years. AT&T no longer owns UNIX; the UNIX trademark is now owned by OpenGroup, though the source code is claimed to be owned by the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), though this is now in debate. Unfortunately, to avoid even the licensing fees to AT&T, UNIX lookalikes sprung up over the years. Without the proper license, these versions could not call themselves UNIX, only UNIX-like. And as these clones proliferated, cross-compatibility became an issue. More than a handful of versions (dialects) of UNIX have appeared, the primary contenders being AT&T's own, known as System V, and another developed at the University of California at Berkeley, known as BSD4.x, x being a number from 1 to 3. Other popular brands of UNIX these days are HP-UX from HP, AIX from IBM, Solaris from Sun, and SCO's version, UnixWare. In 1984, industry experts were brought together to create guidelines and standards for UNIX clones, in hopes of creating a more coherent market. The result was a single UNIX specification, which includes a requirement for POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface for UNIX) compliance. Accepted by the IEEE and ISO, POSIX is a standard that makes porting applications and other code between variants of UNIX as simple as recompiling the source code. NOTE Another popular version of UNIX that runs on the PC platform is called FreeBSD. Briefly, FreeBSD 4.x is a UNIX-like operating system based on U.C. Berkeley's 4.4BSD-lite release for the Intel 386 platform. It is also based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C. Berkeley's Net/2 to the Intel 386, known as 386BSD, though very little of the 386BSD code remains. You can find a fuller description of what FreeBSD is and how it can work for you at www.freebsd.com. UNIX has been the predominant operating system for workstations connected to servers, mostly because of its multiuser capabilities and its rock-solid performance. Windows NT and its successors, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, have been making inroads due to the extensive number of development tools and applications for the Windows platform. However, the low-cost UNIX variant called Linux is revitalizing UNIX across all platforms. LinuxLinux is a UNIX lookalike. Linux isn't a port of a preexisting operating system, but rather it was written from the ground up by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish-born computer scientist who wanted to develop a UNIX-like operating system for computer students to run on low-cost Intel computers. Torvalds wrote the kernel with the help of a handful of computer programmers. Like all variants of UNIX, Linux has many of the features of NT/Windows 2000/Windows XP, such as true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, intelligent memory management, and TCP/IP networking. Linux is an open system, and programmers worldwide are invited to participate in its building and refinement. Unlike other flavors of UNIX that were based on licensed source code, Linux is based on Minix, which mimics UNIX in a way that does not infringe on the UNIX license. That's why Linux distributions are practically free. NOTE Actually, the term Linux pertains only to the kernel. What people have come to refer to as Linux is actually a collection of separate pieces of code, the majority of which are GNU. It was not until Linux came together with GNU that the full power of the Linux OS (what GNU enthusiasts would called GNU Linux) crystallized. The several popularly distributed Linux versions are differentiated mostly by the selection of tools and utilities bundled with them. The most popular package at this point is Red Hat Linux. If you want to go it alone, you can acquire Linux for free, but buying some commercially bundled packages makes the job of installation and support easier because you get support. Technically, the distribution of the software must be free, in accordance with the GNU General Public License (GPL) agreement governing the distribution of Linux and the collected modules that accompany it. Linux is now running on a wide variety of systems, including Sun JavaStations, the IBM RS/6000, and the Alpha chip originally developed by DEC and later sold by Compaq, MIPS, SPARC, Open VMS, Digital UNIX, and other platforms. Windows Application Compatibility with LinuxIT professionals willing to get under the hood and poke around and learn Linux's ways are impressed with its solidity. Though Linux is not commonly used as a business productivity workstation, it is being embraced by some for back-end Web servers or transaction servers where reliability is a high priority. WINE, a DOS, Windows 3.1, and 32-bit Windows emulator, is a popular program used by a number of vendors to move their Windows programs to the Linux platform. For more information, see the WINE Web site at www.winehq.com. However, even the most recent versions of WINE are limited, especially in their multimedia support. To get full Linux and full Windows XP support on a single system, set up a dual-boot system. The only reliable way to run Windows programs on a Linux system is to dual-boot.
Mainstream applications for Linux have taken a long time to arrive. There used to be Corel's WordPerfect Office for Linux, but that was discontinued. There is Sun's StarOffice 5.2, a powerful office suites with many of the features of recent Microsoft Office releases. CorelDRAW for Linux was also discontinued. There are, of course, many downloadable freeware and shareware programs for Linux available online. Microsoft, of course, doesn't want to develop Linux versions of either its programming languages or applications such as Office, for obvious reasons. Obviously, as a capitalistic enterprise, Linux doesn't cut it for the entrepreneur, unless he or she is willing to look at the world through a radically new set of glasses. Giving away your software doesn't net you much. Then again, people are giving away PCs to sell the advertising, so go figure. The world of computing might be changing more than we know. But because applications developers for the Linux environment are supposed to distribute their source code along with the applications, this is a daunting shift of worldview for a behemoth such as Microsoft, which works overtime to protect its intellectual property. The upshot is that you're out of luck if you want to run Word, Excel, or Access, Internet Explorer, or any other Microsoft programs on a Linux box. Windows XP Versus LinuxTrying to compare Windows XP versus Linux is difficult for several reasons, including
Although Linux has made great strides in so-called "back end" uses such as Web servers, network servers, and embedded devices, Windows XP is a better choice for desktops for several reasons, including
We believe that the entire Linux/Windows controversy comes down to this: Microsoft offers lots and lots of powerful stuff (which you can use to build very sophisticated software) from the C++ compiler, to the component-nature of Excel and other apps, to the ASP scripting language, COM, and so on. These tools let you leverage everything Microsoft offers to make very powerful applications. As people used to say in the '60s and '70s, nobody ever lost his job buying IBM. Now it's safe to say nobody ever lost his job buying Microsoft. True, you're locked into Windows because the stuff you build on Windows systems can't be ported to UNIX variants, but that's the price you pay for the tools, the user base, and the support and training. Although increasing support options are available for Linux (see www.linuxcare.com), enterprise-level support for Linux is still not as widespread as for Windows. Linux might be a decent choice for the small-business owners or IS professionals who need to build low-cost servers for Web, email, or file sharing. This operating system is designed for those uses, and the popular Red Hat and Caldera Linux packages make installation relatively painless (not as easy as Windows XP Professional, though, mind you). If you're thinking of using Linux on your desktop PC, bewareyou might be biting off more than you can chew. The manuals that come with Linuxeven the commercial versionsare dense. It is not always headache-free. But if you have a good understanding of computer technology and insist on switching from Windows to something more stable and more flexible, Linux might be the choice for you. If nothing else, using Linux will be a learning experience. However, for the foreseeable future, Linux will be primarily a server and embedded-device operating system, rather than a desktop operating system. |
To learn more about dual-booting Linux, 
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