IT manager's crash course: Operating systems

No one can tell you what operating systems are best for your organization or yourself better than you can. Here are some tips for selecting the right OS for the right job.

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First, what will your target computer be used for? If it's a desktop computer, it needs a desktop operating system like Linspire, Fedora Core, Windows XP, or Mac OS X, among others. These are just examples -- there are dozens of viable desktop operating systems. The positive characteristics of a good desktop operating system should always involve the word easy. Easy to install, easy to set up, easy to maintain, easy to add software, and easy to use. Negative aspects should be "hard," as in hard to damage, hard to extract personal information from, and hard to remotely infiltrate. The goal of a desktop OS is, somewhat obviously, desktop computing: accessing email and the World Wide Web; listening to music and watching movies; transferring and cataloguing digital media from peripheral devices; creating and printing documents and photos; and playing games. Business desktops usually have a reduced set of requirements depending on the kind of work each employee does.

Laptop or notebook computers tend to be less powerful than desktop systems, but otherwise perform similar functions. In addition to looking the qualifications that apply to desktop systems, you probably want a notebook computer's operating system to have power-saving functions, the ability to suspend the computer to disk, and the versatility to connect to an array of removable devices. There are a few GNU/Linux distributions that specialize in desktop notebook use, such as SUSE Linux Professional, Linspire, and Mandriva Linux.

Some operating systems are designed specifically to be used on workstations, which are high-end desktop machines. A workstation is typically used for producing graphics, movies, books, documents, programs, or analysis of large volumes of data. A workstation OS should be easy to lock down, come with few or no services enabled by default, and if there are dozens of machines to maintain, it should be able to be remotely installed and administrated. Some examples of workstation operating systems are Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation, Solaris, IRIX, and SUSE Linux Professional.

Server operating systems, on a basic level, need to provide secure, restricted access to important resources (data stored on the server, or services it provides). The machines that connect to a server generally need to retrieve data and use certain services. So really, all a server operating system has to do is provide services and offer regulated access to data. The trick is to do it securely and reliably, and the best way to do that is to allow no extraneous programs or services to run while the server is in production.

There are many operating systems made specifically for servers. Many of them are specialized to certain computer hardware. Most of them are highly technical and require a lot of technical knowledge to use efficiently. FreeBSD and OpenBSD are good examples of such operating systems, as are the SCO Group's OpenServer and UnixWare products. Some good examples of graphically administered server OSes are Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server, Windows Server System, Mandriva Corporate Server, and Mac OS X Server.

You can certainly use one operating system for all of your platforms, if it's supported on all of your hardware. Solaris is often deployed as both a workstation and a server (and there are people at Sun Microsystems who use it as a laptop and desktop operating system as well), and there are many GNU/Linux distributions that can be made to do practically anything in the wide spectrum of computer use. Some, like Red Hat, have an array of differently tuned operating systems for each specific use.

Know your hardware

If your OS of choice will not support your hardware, you'll need to rethink one or the other. Production equipment is generally best bought with an operating system preinstalled from the manufacturer because commercial support, paper documentation, and guaranteed hardware compatibility are almost always included. Dell can sell you a Windows workstation; Sun can sell you a Solaris server; Apple can sell you an OS X desktop; IBM can sell you a whole bunch of specialized hardware. There are many vendors to choose from.

Small or home businesses, on the other hand, can custom-build their own hardware out of aftermarket parts and install and configure their operating systems themselves. Technical IT professionals should have no trouble doing this, and independent consultants sometimes choose this route in an effort to provide low-cost, high-quality, custom-made hardware solutions. If you don't have a large IT department or any employees with the requisite technical competency, it's probably better to go with a commercial vendor -- or at least a reputable independent consultant.

If you already have an existing production hardware infrastructure that you have inherited or otherwise would like to preserve, you will probably need a versatile operating system that can handle a variety of hardware configurations. GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows are good at that. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD can work on a slightly less diverse array of systems. Solaris and SCO UnixWare are quite limited in their hardware support, and AIX, IRIX, and Mac OS X run on only a very small number of systems.

Understand your support options

No matter which operating system you run, there will be times when you have a problem with it that you can't solve yourself. That's what technical support is for. Paid support, however, is often overrated. If you're properly trained and have access to the necessary documentation, you probably don't need to pay thousands of dollars per year to talk to a support engineer on the phone when you could research and fix a problem yourself in the same amount of time. Support is a significant source of income for software companies, especially those that make and distribute operating systems. Remember that when they're trying to sell you a huge support package.

How technical are you? If you aren't comfortable using the command line interface, the BSDs are not for you. If you demand a completely graphical environment, you're going to have to look for an operating system that can provide that. Windows, OS X, and many GNU/Linux distributions offer complete control over the system (or the network) via graphical administration tools.

The same logic extends to software running on your server hardware. Can you adequately manage your Web, email, and FTP servers from the command line? If not, consider either finding server programs that are graphically managed, or control panel programs that can control command-line-based server software.

Nearly every commercial operating system vendor claims to have the most advanced operating system on the market. Technical advantages and impressive new features don't always add up to more productivity. Solaris, for instance, has technologies like DTrace that require a great deal of time to learn to use effectively. Don't out-tech yourself when selecting an operating system that you have to depend on.

Play with it

One of the most important things you can do while trying out operating systems is to install them on a spare machine and play with them; figure out how to make them do what you want them to do. This will give you an idea of how easily the operating system is configured, how stable it is when you change its configuration, and the array of software available for it. Don't trust a salesman's demo -- put your own system under heavy load, give it strange and unusual work to perform, and try to mess up the configuration. Try to make it do something that it isn't supposed to.

In the end, you can make almost anything work, but making a practical and economical choice is a different story.

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