Drawing in Linux

Well, I am open minded. So tell mw what I do not know.

For the enterprise, I considered Linux (which I used extensively for the last 13 years since 1995), and FreeBSD. The choice was fairly obvious. FreeBSD is rock solid stable, but there is less support and I was not as well versed.

Looking for a proper distro, I rejected both debian as well as Fedora. Ubuntu server gives me everything that I look for and is every easy to maintain. We have several dozens of servers and I manage all of them by means of scripts. I made a practice to never log on to them individually one by one to do anything. Everything is done via scripted commands.

This way, the incremental "cost of ownership", as far as personnel and administrative costs go, is zero. If they add 500 more servers, administering them will not be any more work.

We also found them to be highly reliable, as in, none ever crashed or misbehaved beyond out own mistakes.

So, this is a decent platform.

I understand. I think that what it means for Linux people is that we should make it better, instead of frothing at the mouth.

i

Iggy

What filing system do you chose to use. I've been using XFS for about 5 or 6 years now and find it really stable. I am currently using Mandriva 2006, does Ubuntu do XFS. I know Redhat didn't but haven't looked recently to see what they now support.

For enterprise class OSes try ones such as: AIX, OpenVMS, Solaris, HPUX, etc., all OSes with mission critical level support, something that both Windoze and Linux lack.

Where I work we have many 10s of thousands of servers (no joke), and among those we have like a dozen Linux systems that were an experiment in their viability in the enterprise space. That experiment was some years ago and there has been no expansion in the Linux space, even though the company is very big on cutting costs.

Perhaps one of these days it will win one on my shootouts.

I heard a lot of that "mission critical" talk. I do not think that it is worth the exorbitant amount of money, given that Linux already gives us the reliability. We have enough scripts written for quick failover.

Depending on what you do exactly, which you obviously do not have to state here, you could save a "very large" amount of money. Google can do it.

If 30+ servers have not crashed in 6 months, that tells me that their reliability is decent. I reboot them every week, automatically of course, just in case.

If you want to try Ubuntu, I can help you set it up.

igor

Mission critical service includes such things as on site spare parts inventory, guaranteed on-site response and system repair times, etc. All critical systems already have multiple levels of redundancy to ensure rapid service recovery in the event of a system loss or even a site loss. Mission critical service isn't to ensure uninterupted service, proper systems design ensures that, mission critical service ensures a minimum exposure to reduced redundancy.

We work to "five nines" i.e. 99.999% availability standards, so not crashing in six months isn't enough to meet that standard. My systems regularly run years without a crash, and do not require weekly reboots either. The reboots during routine maintenance every few months are plenty. The bulk of failures are transparent such as a failure of a disk that is mirrored and automatically replaced with a hot spare so the replacement of the failed disk is at our leisure.

I'd need to find an application for it.

The last big shootout I did was with Linux/EMC vs. Windoze/Mach3 and Mach3 won. That was before EMC2 was out, so perhaps EMC2 would have done better in the shootout. In either case, I settled on Mach3 and it continues to do everything I need and given my HSM needs, one control PC can control multiple machines.

My home web/mail/storage server is also running Windoze, and given it's

4.5 years of continuous service without a crash and without being compromised, it seems to be meeting the requirements just fine as well. I am considering replacing the old Dell desktop it runs on with a little Shuttle mini PC as I expect it would pay for itself in power savings in about a year, as well as being a higher performance system.

We have spare parts on site too, and computers available to take over, I do not see what is the big deal about "parts". We have several people who are proficient with screwdrivers and can replace said parts when necessary.

Google runs its service using very crappy computers that are the polar opposite of "mission critical". It does just fine due to software based failover.

This was my objective as well, to be relatively reliable, without paying too much money to "enterprise vendors".

Yep.

You must be paying a lot of money for this.

There is two approaches to having reliability, one with expensive hardware, and the other with failovers. The latter is cheaper, and is good enough for us.

The last big trouble we had, was from a failed circuit breaker. (one lug loosened and heated)

Different enterprises have different standards for reliability, different costs associated with failures and different regulatory requirements (or no regulatory requirements).

Yep. I hear the power bill alone for just one DC is around $250k/mo and there are a lot more than one.

Redundant power supplies in systems and storage, redundant PDUs, redundant static transfer switches, redundant UPSes, redundant generators. Redundant network connections, redundant storage connections, redundant mirrored and hot spares disks, physically separate fallback sites, etc.

On my personal stuff at home I have several UPSes, a couple generators, a couple spare cable modems, routers, network switches, dialup for additional backup, etc.

I use ext3 only, it never let me down. I have no experience with XFS.

[ ... ]

[ ... ]

And one of the reasons for the difficulty in automation (scripting and the like) is what the users normally consider one of tis strengths -- the ability to easily embed spaces in file names (from a GUI level -- though not so from a command-line level). This tends to break scripting and command-line operation on Windows, just as it does on unix systems. (This is ignoring for the moment the difference in scripting capability in the absence of the embedded-spaces filenames.)

Agreed.

While the open source software, if you want (and are willing to invest the time learning to program in C and/or C++) you can add features to existing programs. I did this to add the ability to calculate times in hours, minutes and seconds to a spreadsheet calculator called "sc". I needed this capability when juggling performance cut lengths to arrange them to fit equally on the two sides of a 60-minute cassette tape. All I did was to add a modulo operator so I could deal with the

60 minutes/hour and 60 seconds/minute calculations.

Or -- if you are a bit more patient, you can suggest the feature (with reasons why you think that it will benefit other users) to the maintainers of the package, and if there is enough interest, *they* may add the feature between times of dealing quickly with reported bugs or security holes.

Agreed. Don't dive in depending on it all to work and you to understand it immediately. Give yourself something which you can use to continue things which you *need* to work, and as you learn to do things easily on the linux side, move that task over to the linux machine. When you find that you are doing everything on linux you can retire the windows machine and install linux on it to benefit from the faster machine.

Be warned, however, that so far the vendors of things like income tax software only support Windows and Mac (OS-X these days), so if you depend on such programs, at least keep dual-boot capability.

Also -- some later acquisition may force you to a need for either Windows or Mac's OS-X. An example is the TomTom GPS navigators. While it should be perfectly possible to download the updated software and install it from unix, they *insist* that it be downloaded and installed by their own programs, which are only available for Windows and Macs. (I don't know whether other GPS vendors are similar, since I only need one GPS. :-)

Great!

Enjoy, DoN.

Thanks, everybody. I've decided that the new laptop will be Windows, primarily because of applications that aren't available in Linux. Also, I'll probably have to pick a Windows CAD package, although I'm going to try the ones available in Linux first.

Pete Keillor

I would not recommend that anyone gets a Linux laptop as a first Linux computer. But if someone gives you a free computer, for a desktop, you can try Linux on it.

Oh, I've got a Ubuntu box running, playing with EMC2. I've also set up an old cheap laptop for my middle son who finally started college. It does everything he needs, including wireless, etc. I even found a decent project management package. He's majoring in construction management. What I haven't found is a CAD package I liked, hence the question. For a laptop, which I'd also use while travelling, I'd want to be able to use the DeLorme mapping products as well. Google Earth is fine when I have internet access, but that's not always the case.

Pete Keillor

FWIW, I use TurboCAD for my CAD work on Windoze. I'm certainly no CAD wiz, since I do only occasional CAD work, but TurboCAD has handled everything I've needed to do and seems to have plenty of power / features I still haven't tapped. One time when I ran into a problem, I got good responses quickly on the TurboCAD user forum, so there is support available beyond pay options.

This is only one difficulty. Another one is that Windows likes to lock files, for example you cannot delete a file that is being accessed by another program. It is a major pain to deal with and an issue with which Unix is dealing correctly.

yep, and they do not try to "capture" you with incompatible formats and behaviors.

i

I've been dabbling with 2D Qcad

and Flightgear's flight simulator. Just so's you know...

Also beat my bank in a mortgage dispute using Gnumeric. :-)

I did some computer work for a took making shop a few years back where the software they used for the drawings for the prototypes they made was QCAD. It seemed to meet their needs fine.

I am pleasantly surprised that QCad is a part of Ubuntu. I installed it from repositories and it seems to work.

Saying QCad is "part of Ubuntu" is about as accurate as saying it's part of Windows.

Ribbonsoft puts it this way: "QCAD works on Windows, Mac OS X and many Linux and Unix Systems. The source code of the QCAD community edition is released under the GPL (Open Source)."

No, he's right. It is part of Ubuntu, Debian and probably a slew of others, but it's not part of Windows.

A lot of people don't comprehend what "repository" means, since it is an alien concept in the world of MS-Windows. Basically, "repository" in this sense means that it comes with the operating system, instead of being a third-party add-on (ie, QCad is on the OS installation disks).

Anyway, this place *might* help with actually learning how to use CAD: