Most of the time, Tamal Vista is a part-time activity for the Defremery family, and the press is as much a labor of love as an economic engine. A few years ago I pointed the Defremerys to iCat, one of the first online malls. But when iCat recently announced the elimination of its free services, Wayne Defremery asked me what would be involved in moving their merchant services literally in-house. Although most SD Times readers are probably nodding along, it is worth reflecting on how radical it is to suggest to a small business that a new, unfamiliar, non-Microsoft operating system has more advantages than disadvantages. But everyone wants to sell on the Web.
Cottage industry is a killer app.
I mused on this as we cruised the aisles of the local CompUSA looking at packaged Linux distributions. There must have been a dozen to choose from, all mistakenly packaged to appeal to geeks. Finally, we bought a copy of Red Hat 7 and began the install. As I was waxing about the bulletproof reliability of Linux, the install failed to recognize the chosen machine's CD recorder drive and suddenly we had a box that had no operating system and no apparent route to recovery. After booting into a lower run level, reviewing the network settings several times and rebooting several times, Wayne Defremery realized the network cable wasn't connected, and sure enough that seemed to be the cause.