Folks, I've just come back from the Netherlands and I think many of you would be interested in the following (mercifully brief) observations I made while there. Europeans on this list would correct me, but these are impressions from an outsider.
RS6000's are the name of the game. IBM have a big footprint. I was mildly surprised to see small flat boxes in the corner of just about any travel agent, small insurance office, even landscape gardening centers. I expected to see clusters of the usual wintel workstations and was mildly surprised to see the prevalence of single, AIX4 workstations, not clusters., just a single box doing it's job. The impression I got was NT? what's that? Big Bill is not a player there. (just an impression folks) Secondly, there is a push to migrate these boxen to AIX5L, read the letter L. It means Linux. Most (not all) of the IBM engineers I spoke to had a preference of converting there AIX4 supplied personal machines over to a Linux OS, there and then, for home use. It is common enough (like all engineering toads) to recieve the dregs from their customers. As upgrades were taking place to bigger better faster cpu's (based on the Motorola / IBM / Apple power PC), the older $7,000 boxes were given away, they were immediately 'upgraded' to Linux. There is a burgeoning, highly trained, skilled techno-hacker underpinning Linux in Europe. Thirdly, what Linux OS? Well here's more surprises for me. Not in the outcome, but the prevalance. Walk into just about *any* newsagent or bookstore, and they all have a computer section. Books, Software, Games, and, Operating Systems. In quantities stocked on shelves, Suse was 3:2 against Windows XP. Rehdat ran a poorish third. Only one bookstore stocked Caldera, there were no other distros I noticed (unless the Europeans use cunning packaging, or are French) Averaged prices were as follows in Dutch Guilders. (3 guilders= 1 dollar) Windows XP Professional *600 Windows XP Personal- Upgrade *300 SuSE 7.3 Professional *180 SuSE 7.3 Professional Upgrade *120 SuSE 7.3 Personal *120 Redhat 7.2 *120 Some things to note, these weren't 'specials', these were walk in public mom and dad prices at the corner bookstore across Holland, not just Amsterdam. Average stocking on shelves was 3 x XP 5 x Suse 1 x Redhat It would be trite to say Windoze wasn't in the running. The massive games stockpile underpin it. But, the exposure to Linux was in your face and self evident. -- http://linux.nf -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
