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Linux

Like someone who works his or her way up from the mail room to run the company, Linux is following a trajectory that began in the workshops of bitheads and looks to be on a straight path to the enterprise. Witness the evolution of Network Computing's coverage of Linux over the past two years:

May 31, 1999: In "Is It Time for Linux?" Greg Shipley called Linux "the Swiss Army knife of networking" but added that it "still lacks some high-end features, such as a robust 64-bit file system and advanced clustering technology".

June 26, 2000: We took "The Linux Challenge" as our Chicago partner Neohapsis Labs converted its production systems -- everything from file and print servers to firewalls to backup systems and VPNs -- to Linux. We found that Linux suffered from "lack of a journalized file system, lack of strong SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support, immature vendor-support models, lack of third-party application providers and lack of overall polish."

Flash forward. Enterprises have thrown millions of dollars down the black hole of Microsoft software insecurity, mopping up after armies of worms and viruses. Enterprise applications are being ported to Linux at a steady clip. Spiffy new GUIs are easing management. The 2.4 kernel adds four new architectures, including IA64 (Itanium); support for 64 GB of RAM, 16 NICs and 10 IDE controllers; and a robust resource-management subsystem. Distribution vendors and third-party service providers are offering 24x7 enterprise-class support. Top-notch administrative and security toolsets are available. We could go on, but you get the picture.

For our review, we decided to break new ground: We loaded up five Linux distributions that are clearly enterprise ready, put on our end-user hat and tested the offerings on the workstation as well as on the server. In the final analysis, Linux is still not at the point at which it should be installed on your average corporate end user's desktop, mainly because there's no robust Linux-based office suite -- not yet, anyway (though there is a lot of buzz over Sun Microsystems StarOffice 6).

Each package has its strong points, but SuSE Linux 7.2 charmed us on all fronts and took home our very first Editor's Choice award for Linux on the workstation.

In addition, we offer a primer on window managers and desktop environments, and explain the finer points of four journaling file systems. We also assess security tools and security-enhanced distributions.

We can't say for sure what 2002 will hold for Linux, but we know two things: Its path to the enterprise won't be boring, and we'll be here to keep answering the question, "Are we there yet?"