We were finally ready for prime time. I would like to point out here that if we had chosen an operating system that did not release the source code, this would have been the tragic end of our story. Last December we attended the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, having just taken delivery of 5 additional laptops. Linux was a hit, and everyone wanted one. The second week of January saw us shipping four laptops into the field.
Preliminary reports are encouraging.
The laptops work and are making life easier for our users. The people using these machines are not Linux experts, but the machines are easy enough to use that people would rather utilize these than any currently available DOS alternative. We did not originally expect Linux to be the way to go for us. Obviously porting to a Sparc laptop would have required much less work, but they are prohibitively expensive. We also looked into Solaris for PC's, but the minimal volume of hardware that Solaris supports turned us away.