One of the beauties of Linux from a business point of view is that it doesn’t require the “latest and greatest” hardware to run properly. This means you can increase the return on investments (ROI) for legacy hardware. As I’ll show in this article, as in the case with virtualization, the “latest and greatest” software is not required either.

Consider the following example. Back in 2005 I purchased (as did many other businesses) a P4 3.4 GHz laptop with 1 GB RAM and 120 GB hard disc drive (HDD) under Windows XP Pro SP2 (throughout the article I will refer to it as Windows XP for brevity’s sake). Now it looks like a message from the stone age, but back then it was a decent PC. The virtualization software that I used was VMWare Workstation 5 (aka VMWare 5). Virtual machines (VM) with various Linux/Unix distributions were placed on external 200 GB HDD, making it convenient to use various operating systems with Windows XP.

This was the software/hardware platform that I used for writing my article “Running Fedora Core 5 Under Windows XP - Tips and Tricks.” You may want to read it (http://linux.sys-con.com/read/219966.htm) before proceeding further. The article will be referred to as my previous article.

The “Best of Both Worlds” Concept
At the time of writing Windows XP was most likely to be supported by a majority of external devices (HDD, camcorders, digital voice recorders, printers, faxes, etc.), manufacturers, and Internet service providers.

In most cases it’s enough to simply plug a device or to subscribe to a service to start using it right away. So it’s reasonable to use Windows XP as a gateway to the outside world. On the other hand, Linux has a great community of enthusiastic supporters and major software vendors (such as Intel and IBM) that produce software that may be convenient to use for your business (an example will be given later).