Travis Harper, IT Consultant, writes
I work in the Fox Lake Cree Nation Future Development Office

We have an office based in Winnipeg Manitoba, Gillam Manitoba, and Bird Reserve Manitoba. The offices consist of a wide range of Development Consultants, that work on a wide variety of development projects in the Traditional Territory of the Fox Lake Cree. These projects include building Schools, Hydro Development Projects, Training the First Nations People to participate, help build, and take ownership in the projects.

All together we total 50-55 employees, and consultants. Those of us that had PC's used Windows and MS Office. The rest of us had Macs with MS Office. Why did we change to Linux? The PC's were riddled with viruses. Administering a Windows network was a real pain (could not keep kazaa off the network). System crashes and licensing costs were getting outrageous for a small non profit group like ours. And there were PC - Mac compatibility issues.

I made the choice to install Mandrake Linux on all the PC's and Yellow Dog Linux on the Macs. No more viruses (knock on wood). Administration is a breeze with ssh. Systems have been up for months with no problems. OpenOffice replaces MS Office with ease, and we can still exchange files with our other partners without worrying if they are using Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Personally I use a Mac. Mac OS X was right at home on our Linux Network thanks to its UNIX under pinnings, however out of curiosity I installed Yellow Dog ... and I'm not going back. Yellow Dog on my Tibook 500 is amazingly fast and responsive. After installing Mandrake on the PC's, I thought that linux was bulky and slow. Boy! did Yellow Dog prove me wrong. Every new employee or consultant that joins our group, now gets a Macintosh with Yellow Dog on it. I just love showing the P3 and P4 users how my 500mhz Tibook runs circles around them with Yellow Dog.

I could go on and on about this ... don't even get me started on Mac-On-Linux. Is that a cool piece of software or what? Not an emulator, but runs Mac OS and OS X from within Linux. I was skeptical because back in the days when we a mainly Windows Network I had Virtual PC installed so I could run Windows on my mac. Man was that every slow and painful. MOL runs OS X in a Window on Yellow Dog, with virtually no slow down.

My advice, If you belong to a small business, or a corporate office. Get a Mac, then get Yellow Dog.

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