Hi Alvin,

A lot of user around the UT are using Red hat Linux. The persoanl edition can be purchased for around $40.00 from most computer stores like Office Depot, CompUSA, Office Max, Circuit City, etc. Once Red Hat Linux is installed, you can bring it into your window's network. On a single computer, you can select whether to boot window's or linux, but you need specai software to run both operating system at the same time on a single computer.

To me Linux works best when networked into a windows network. Once a Linux computer joins the network, I setup a samba file system, which allows the Linux computer to appear in network neighborhood, just like any other windows computer.

Linux makes a great file/web/databse server. For example, I have my web directory and cgi-bin directory that live on my Linux computer set up via samba. This allow me to fire up my favorite HTML editor (e.g. homeiste) on my windows desktop to create, edit, and delete web pages and perl scripts on the linux computer. After saving a web page, I can immediately refresh my windows browser to see the changes to the html/cgi-bin scripts on the linux computer. I have read that the latest version of the apache web server is asp compatible, but I'm not sure what if this means apache on windows, apache on Linux, or either. If this is correct, you could create HTML scrits with java, vba, perl, etc embedded in them, all from the comfort of your windows desktop using your windows web development GUI of choice.

Also, Visual Studio and Visual FoxPro can be used to create client/server apps using a Linux enterprise class database like MySQL and Postgres as the back-end server. You could build a Visual Basis client/server app as a font-end app to an enterprise class database server like MySQL or PostgreSQL that runs on your Linux Database Server. The VB app would need to run on a windows computer, because VB only runs on that single platform. If you built the application correctly, it would easily connect to any SQL 92/99 compliant backend Server like MSSQL, Informix, Sybase, DB2, etc. You could run MSSQL on a Windows computer while running MySQL and Postgres on the Linux box. They could all be running at the same time as long as they were listening to different port addresses. This would make it easy to test portability of your app.

LelandJ