http://www.frugalbrothers.com Before you spend money to downgrade Vista Business Edition to XP Pro, you may want to consider installing Linux on the new machine. You can also keep older machines purring with Linux as well. Distributed by Tubemogul.


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Video Transcription

Hi, I am Bruce Naylor your FrugalTech and thank you for joining us for this episode of the Frugal Technology Show. We are going to talk a little bit about Linux today. There are a lot of changes in the way that XP is now being licensed and what is coming on new machines and if you are not aware of what is happening is that Microsoft is allowing you to downgrade to XP on new machines but you got to purchase this to license to do it with. It is kind of expensive way to do it. What if your IT dollars or just kind of short, is there alternative and I got to tell you Linux can be a valuable and viable alternative to this on new machines. Now, the first thing you should understand is that Linux comes in different distributions. Become in the industrial so short but it is basically a different dialect of Linux out there. But some of the most popular distributions and certainly I think the most popular right now it might could guess some debate on and off is the distribution called the Ubuntu. And Ubuntu is from a company called Canonical. It is absolutely free, there is no license fee. That is likes 300 bucks if you are looking at a Vista business license right now. That is $300.00 with Ubuntu the desktop edition, it is absolutely free. There is not licensing fee. That is really, really cool that you can do that. And I view Ubuntu for a long time. We use the server version over here when my engineers are using it as a desktop replacement for XP. And, he is running a little bit older hardware and it is doing great. He is giving really great performance out of it. Our Ubuntu server runs day in and day out without complaining. We really do not have to do anything to it and we did not pay a dime for that server operating system. Now, Windows Server 2008 starts out at around a thousand dollars for the basic operating system. So we save the thousand bucks right upfront on the server. Now, it is really depends on what you this server for and the type of line the business application you run. But we are going to talk a little bit about Linux and some of the things that you can do. The Distro or distribution of Linux is important. But also, the desktop manager, that is the user interface of Linux. There are basically two, KDE is one and I am not sure if this is pronounced G-nome or Gnome but it is Gnome, two different desk and I think with Ubuntu it out of the gate installs the Gnome desktop. This is just the Windows do but you can change, you can have it one if you do not like it. You can install the other. Now, Linux is licensed and what is called the General Public License so there are commercial versions that you can buy but there is many, many free ones and Ubuntu happens to be one of the free ones. And when you install Linux on a machine, they really do a nice job today of detecting your hardware, setting themselves up and join the network very, very nicely, very, very easily and it has really cool how well they work. And they also come with a lot of productivity applications right into the operating system. And you can basically download, for example an ISO image of Linux, save Ubuntu, burn it to a DVD or CD and install it on the machine and off you go. And one of the things that it comes with is the product called OpenOffice. And we are going to talk about that a little bit more depth here in the minute but OpenOffice is a replacement for Microsoft Office. The Linux version of Office, absolutely free to use. And I think it is pretty much feature functionally equivalent of the Microsoft Office Professional edition which is around what $500.00 or more. It comes with that, it is comes with web browser Firefox, it comes with it. But it also will install Apache which is a personal webs or a web server application. Main installed My SQL which is a database systems that gives to install in a Linux installation. There is virtualization software now that comes with it, so you could actually run, you could actually if you want to install another OS in the virtual machine, you can run VMware server as well on this, for example on Ubuntu system