Return of the *nix based systems

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If you have been following my posts lately, you'll remember that my main computer system in the studio/office at home died. Motherboard failure. I was left scrambling for a replacement out of the stock of old computers in storage at the house. I really only had 3 to choose from. I grabbed an older Sony VAO and slapped Linux on it. Which of great! I love any *nix operating system. BUT, we don't have cable at the house so we rely on internet services for entertainment. I was using Playon to feed the XBox 360 as a media extender. Payon won't run under Wine because you can't get Media Player 11 to run separately from a Windows installation. Before you say, "Just get Netflix through the XBox directly." We watch more than just Netflix from the internet. with Youtube, Crackle, Hulu, and other independent streaming services, being limited by using just the XBox or an Apple TV just sounded too limiting. Now I do have a copy of Vista Ultimate. That's how things were for about a month.
However even after tweaking Vista to make it faster and more reliable, there were two problems. 1. The computer it was on (the Sony) just wasn't powerful enough to act as a video streaming server. The XBox would often lose connection when streaming. 2. When recording audio, Vista would create dropouts. Keep in mind this problem did NOT exist when the same machine was running Linux. It recorded audio just fine. Plus with Vista there were sound card driver issues. This just wouldn't work! 

Chapter 2: Return of the *nix based systems.
Meanwhile at work we've been having serious problems with Windows machines being exploited through backdoors and then scanning other machines on the network. The result has been other machines having Windows Explorer crashes and the inability to connect to mapped network drives. My IT Staff has been losing sleep fighting this breach. Most of my teams days have been spent re-imaging machines that have been compromised. Productivity in departments impacted by these compromises have suffered in there productivity. Windows has produced a bad taste in my mouth lately. Meanwhile I switched back to a Mac at work. I've been an Apple user since OS8 and have always felt better organized and more productive on an Apple computer. When I bought my iMac it came with both OS9 and Mac OSX 10.1  and immediately fell in love with the BSD based OSX. UNIX to the rescue. I've been a Microsoft Research supporter for years now. I have built applications for Microsoft Surface and think that the XBox 360 and Kinect are the best! But when it comes to operating systems Unix based systems like Free BSD, OSX, and their cousin Linux are my top choices.

So back home I have recently resurrected an Apple G4 Tower that a friend have me. It had no RAM, or Hard drive. I found RAM and a hard drive and proceeded to get it up and running. First let me say that finances are such that I can't just run out and buy a new computer. The only other machine in the house needs to be a Windows machine for learning software that my kids use, that doesn't play nice on Linux under Wine. I set the Apple G4 up in the office at home. Ran updates and BAM! I'm working. Plugged my external sound card I use for recording and it instantly shows up in the sound card choices. Plug in my USB M-Audio keyboard and it immediately is available for use in my software. A brief Google search gets me the latest Flash update for Safari. Now I'm streaming vids. Bottom line? An Apple computer that is HALF the CPU power of the Sony VAO is running circles around the Sony running Vista. I'm very happy right now. Plus being a PPC system, I can dig into cool audio tools that I haven't used in a while from back in the day. 
Where's the Sony running Vista? Well it's in the living room as a media PC. Again when I can get Netflix streaming on a Linux operating system it will quickly get re-imaged. 
Is this a Windows vs Apple thing? Not really. It's more of a *nix based system vs an NT based system. It about how drivers and software connect with the kernel. You can see how much an operating system can impact hardware performance as illustrated by the example above. As much as I like OSX, I'm already planning my next adventure; compiling the Linux kernel for my Apple G4. 

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