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Can Linux Pick Up Users Abandoning Win98?
Mark writes, "When Microsoft announced the end of support for Windows 98 and Millennium Edition on June 30th, there was a lot of talk of these users migrating over to Linux desktops. In the weeks since this announcement, there is a very noticeable increase of activity on community boards and blogs from newbies asking questions about switching over to Linux, and how would they support their new systems." According to OneStat.com, Windows 98 and Windows ME account for about 4% of the total PCs in the world.
I recently pulled out my Windows 98 Celeron 300A with 128MB PC100 RAM, and 5400rpm 6GB drive, booted it up, and cracked open Netscape 4. You know what I found? Not much.
This machine has been sitting in a box for about 5 years, and as far as the time signatures are concerned, that rebuild was only about 7 months in. Office 2000 ran fine. Everything worked great -- I couldn't notice any difference with performance from my current Athlon machine when it comes to simple word processing and Web browsing. If I was ignorant to hotfixes and security, I'd be using this machine without any problems for many more years to come.
A simple reinstall of the OS -- as long as the disk is still healthy -- can stretch out the lifespan of any old machine, as long as you stick with the software of time, which isn't that much different than what Aunt June uses today.
body massage!
Is there a reason not to use the "official" Linux client from Citrix? My company is definitely beholden to MS, but they recently set up an Internet-accessible Citrix gateway to most of our internal apps. I went to the Citrix website and got the Linux client. Works for everything we use it for, anyway... Now I don't have to dig out my work laptop for every little thing when I'm at home!
Granted, I had to go install it myself - it would certainly make things much nicer to have a client ready to go in the distro's package manager.