If you are a technology entrepreneur building a large e-commerce site, you may decide to purchase a high-end Unix box to meet the volume and volume requirements. treatment of your bean counters. we have planned for you. You would run Sun Microsystem's Solaris software to power your web server and e-commerce applications. You might also choose to save a little risk capital and run Linus Torvalds' free operating system (and the free server applications that come with it) on a computer. Basic Intel PC cluster. The Linux operating system is well-suited for small to medium-sized operations and is increasingly used in large companies that would previously have considered Unix as the only option. It has established itself in Internet and e-commerce businesses, making the decision to use Unix or Linux not as simple as it seems. A few years ago, the decision to implement Unix or Linux was obvious. Linux was an interesting academic project, but most people didn't consider it an option for a serious commercial enterprise. How can it be so good if it's free? Isn't this just a toy for hackers and students? But the maxim “you get what you pay for” doesn't really apply in the open source world. With major software companies porting their applications to Linux, the operating system has become a viable option for web services and office applications. as a growing force in e-commerce (see Penguins Go Wild.) Linux or Unix? So when do you use Linux and when do you use Unix? There are indeed certain circumstances in which Unix is ​​the obvious choice, and Linux simply won't do the job. "If you're talking about very large, massively symmetric multiprocessing systems, systems with more than eight processors, you need a full-fledged Unix," says Jeremy Allison, Samba team leader at Fremont-based VA Linux Systems , in California. The current Linux kernel 2.2 doesn't scale beyond four processors in a multiprocessing environment, but Allison says the 2.4 kernel will scale much better, up to at least 16 processors. Kernel 2.4, currently in beta, is expected to be finally released in the first quarter of 2001. Allison adds that a proprietary Unix system is probably better suited to a massive, packaged data center. “But there aren't many applications that actually require something that large,” he says. Additionally, many applications that require mega-processing power can get that power through clustering, something Unix and Linux do very well..