First of all before I go any further, yes I am a UNIX geek, I have a beard, I wear jeans/combats and a t-shirt to work and I stay late at night trying to figure out why I cannot get the latest cool toy to ./configure ; make ; make install. However the week before FoWA I spent my time playing with Windows 2008 (Beta 3) Core Edition….here I plan to explain why.

Now I do understand that Microsoft Windows is not free/Free but that does not mean it should be ignored. I believe it is going to take someone much smarter than my self to figure out a business model that will allow Microsoft to make Microsoft Windows free/Free without affecting their revenues with this change. On a side note however they do now let you install the OS for a few days before having to license the OS. For me this allows me to test powershell, WAIK and gain experience with other Microsoft products without having to license anything

The thing that attracted me to Core Edition was an appearance that Microsoft really have been listening to their users. With Core Edition they have removed everything that is not required to run the base operating system. Now this means everything, including the start bar, the clock and anything else that is not a cmd.exe window. Oh, sorry, notepad is there but that is about it This allows administrators to deploy Windows 2008 Server with just the applications they require. Eg if you want a Windows MySQL server you don’t have to have IIS, Media Player or Internet Explorer installed. This allows a very quick, minimal deployment that is easy to keep secure. Almost like someone at Microsoft went through a Linux install.

Now the only thing I can say to fault this version of Microsoft Windows is they do not include powershell. Now I understand why, to include powershell would require .NET, and I can understand why that is not part of Core edition, but it would be nice if it was easy to include…..oh wait it is!

As may be clear now this was an old article I had written but not really gotten around to publishing. I have quite a few of these because of the wonderful drafts feature in Wordpress, it is one of the features that made me decide on Wordpress in the first place for my new blog. I decided to publish it because while it has been a little while since I have played with it I would highly recommend having a look if you are a traditional UNIX geek who knows it is a good idea to keep an eye on the competition. Also I think I might be playing with the WAIK sometime soon, blog post coming soon.

Take care.