Mark et al When you say you have a spare box lying around waiting for a catasrophe to happen, is it literally tucked away in storage somewhere, or is it pre-connected to the farm but just powered down?
The reason I ask is whether you physically alternate the backup box or just power up / power down one box sequentially in the farm at predefined timespans? E -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Mark Harrison Sent: 07 September 2007 21:23 To: British Ubuntu Talk Subject: Re: [ubuntu-uk] Going back to the Dell deal... Michael Holloway wrote: > 2. How many Linux users would buy a one? I'm not sure i can answer this, but i imagine not too many. Most linux users like to customise their machines, and put all the latest and greatest (or cheapest and oldest) compenents into it. 10 years ago, that would have been me. In fact, about 10 years ago I _did_ build my Own PC (a Pentium-90 in fact.) Now, I want a machine that works, with an operating system that works. Don't get me wrong - I work in IT, I'm into the latest toys as much as the next geek, but desktop O/Ss aren't an exciting playground for me compared to Ajax apps :-) As I said, I want a machine that works, with an operating system that works. Hmm... let me think? Should I go with (out of date) XP? Should I go with (utterly, cripplingly slow) Vista? or... can we think of another O/S that might run a lot faster on modern laptop hardware AND be more reliable? I'd be INCREDIBLY tempted to go with a pre-installed, manufacturer-supported, Linux-laptop next time round. Mainstream buyers have a different mind-set, and the "Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed" is hitting a lot more of those buttons than "download this distribution" ever did. The worst case is that Dell do the work (or get Canonical to) to come up with a standard image for their Ubuntu laptops, and that image sits on a server farm in Ireland not being installed from much. Net cost to Dell, a small amount of disk space. Net benefit to Dell, marginal increase in customer choice. Marginal benefit to Ubuntu - huge - endorsement from Dell that our chosen distro is supported by the biggest and the best. (Yes, I know, HP / IBM / RedHat, but heh... Dell has the biggest mindshare for desktops / laptops, I suspect.) And, for people like me, who are already on pure Ubuntu-servers at work (4 in the operational farm, 2 development servers, and a spare box sitting around to swap in in the event of catasrophic hardware failure), this has a marginal benefit to ME even if I never buy a Dell Linux Laptop - it helps convince my board (who to be fair, I've trained to trust my technical judgement) that I am backing the right horse with Ubuntu..... Regards, Mark -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
