3. COMPARISON Free Cost Money Kernel (heart) of an OS. Only With a Linux Distribution make a completely usable OS A Family of OS (eg. AIX, BSDI, Solaris, SunOS). Vendors provide complete OS Open Source, fully customizable, can change kernel and create ‘new’ OS. Mostly come with A-Z programs, editors, compilers, etc. Most Software are Open Source, compatibility issues can be rectified by compiling for the relevant platform. Software should be compatible with the kind of UNIX installed. Available for almost HW architectures, OS can’t be specifically optimized for a given HW platform. Coded for a single of a few HW architectures, OS can be specifically optimized to suit the given HW platform. User friendly for general computing Less user friendly.

4. COMPARISON Powerful hardware config. not needed Powerful hardware config. needed Yet to provide genuine real-time scheduling Some OS provide it Less testing before release; New version less reliable Vendors carryout testing before release; New versions are almost always reliable Doesn’t have the luxury of borrowing tools from proprietary Unix vendors Vendors provide some GNU tools pre-installed or as optional components (emacs, perl) Few software applications available; vendors delay provision until Linux adopted by many. Many Non-free and closed source applications available (CAD, financial & graphics design software) Non formal technical support; no single point of contact support Vendors provide technical support; Single point of contact supported

5. Linux OS Server Base Distro Availability Free/Comm. Others http://www2.mandriva.com/downloads/?p=linux-free Free Maintenance provided (pay) https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/ Commercial ($349 - $18,000) http://www.debian.org/CD/ Free Desktop/server http://www.novell.com/products/server/howtobuy.html Commercial ($349 –$4,050)