Last week I needed to get DB2 working in my lab for my research.

I first installed it in a Ubuntu 9.10 box. The installer didn't work as expected so there were a lot of manual installations. It works but the weird thing is that it is painfully slow. A database creation script took almost five minutes. And there are no error or complaints. I think there are something wrong with interaction between DB2 and the file system.

So I decided to try on the Windows 2008 server. It works fine. I actually found that Windows server is very stable compared to the Linux counter part. Everything work out of the box. I even install an SVN server and it just worked! I started to have second though about the UNIX/Windows balance. The main problem with Windows server before was viruses. Virus protection for Windows server costs a fortune. But the new version have better security and build in antivirus. You can also install Windows 2008 without the interface. This remove a lot of problem associate with viruses. Another strong point of Windows is RDC. I spent hours trying to set up a stable configuration of VNC on the Solaris and Ubuntu box. With the RDC, everything works. You can adjust the resolution on the fly or remotely mount your drive. Sound even works remotely. For academic use, I think Windows is winning the battle. It is free for most school. A subcription for Solaris 10 or RedHat is around $300 a year.

Solaris 10 was pretty good as well. I am surprise  how stable it is. The GNOME re-branded Java desktop is a new breeze. Their configuration repository is very interesting. Instead of changing configuration files, you can just change the setting in the repo. This make administration task easy. I didn't install DB2 because I found out that most of the software are very old. You have to buy the subscription to update the stock software. They release the update for free after a year or so.

So for now, I am sticking to Windows server.