tienshiao.org

Work. Well.. today was my first day of work. It’s been awhile, but I’m happy to be a cog in the great economic machine. What do I do? Hrmm. I’m not sure exactly. I think the job posting (thanks craigslist) was titled something like UNIX systems programmer. My impression was that I’d be doing a bunch of PHP programming, but looks like I’ll be doing a bit of non-PHP programming as well. It’s all good. I’m just happy to be getting paid for stuff now. Granted the pay isn’t as good, the benefits aren’t as good, the commute isn’t as good, the furniture isn’t as good, the hardware isn’t as good, but at least the company is profitable (so I’ve been told). The company is also quite a bit smaller than Openwave, and the dynamics of the small size will make for an interesting learning experiece. It’ll be fun.

RedHat. As part of my work duties today, I went about setting up my desktop machine. I was given the option of running either Windows or Linux. I optted for Linux for a couple of reasons.

1. Does everything I need, and cheaper. Might as well contribute to the bottom line.


2. I’m going to have a laptop later, and I’m going to run Windows on that. It’ll be good to have multiple platforms.


3. I’ll be doing a lot of work with MySQL, Apache, and PHP. I only have experience with those under Linux, and figured since they were Unix applications first they would run and be more manageable under Unix.

So I went about setting it up. I ended up with RedHat 9.0 running Gnome with BlueCurve. All in all, I’m very pleased with it. I run Gentoo with Gnome at home, and it lacks a bit of cohesiveness, and it is a little rough around the edges. The UI is still not quite as quick/immediate as Windows, but it’s better than my Gentoo system (It probably runs X at a higher priority, Gentoo does not). Installation was pretty painless, and nicely polished. Graphical touches are more complete and cohesive. Anti-aliasing of fonts worked without any drama. Hardware was all picked up without any problems. I dare say, RedHat (and probably) others are pretty damn close to having competitive desktop ready solution.

The only thing that annoys me is keeping it updated. With RedHat you can join the RedHat Network (RHN) but I think there is a limit on the number of computers, etc. Keeping my Gentoo system up to date is easy, and costs nothing. Keeping my Windows machine up to date is easy, and costs nothing. I understand that RedHat needs to make money some way. And as long as there are cheaper alternatives elsewhere, I’ll look elsewhere. Gentoo will remain on my personal servers, but I may consider RedHat on a desktop in the future.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2003 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.