I am supporting a website, The Fanac Fan History Project, using eCS 1.2R and an old HP desktop that is very slow and has little memory.. I am thinking about switching to Linux for that support mainly because Linux is the only PC based OS that I know about that supports Extended Attributes. I would appreciate some guidance in this project. eCS is an updated version of IBM's OS/2 but I am not optimistic that it's support is capable of keeping up with the new hardware and I am sure that, when it comes time to pass this effort on to the next person, no one would want to take over using it, it is too far out of the mainstream...

I need to know which release of Linux is the most stable and actually supports EAs.

I will need to dual-boot Linux along with a currently installed Windows XP, preferably with Linux installed on the 2nd hard drive, is this even possible? Eventually I would like to offload the entire thing, without the Windows of course, to a laptop in order to ease the transition to the next person but for now I'll stick to my desktop.

Another requirement is a graphics program the can be controlled by a script. I am currently using a old OS/2 program, Jview, that can be controlled by a Rexx script to do pretty much anything that can done using it manually. Any utility that can return the dimensions of a photo or scan and then resize and save the results, possibly in a different format, under the control of a script would do the job.

About me: I am a retired IBM programmer who was asked by some friends to start fanac.org in 1997. Our website has grown over the years to over 24,200 pages and 11,600 photos. Fanac also supports Fancyclopedia III and, although someone else runs Fancy 3, I provide the indices for their over 9,400 pages.

Thanks for your help.

The oldest Linux distributions still in use and popular are Slackware and Debian, either of which could serve your purpose. CentOS is another which is designed primarily to run as a server and is a free version of Red Hat. The most stable is not really quantifiable and you will probably get a lot of opinions on that. Most Linux distributions can be configured to do pretty much anything you want, some of them are designed more for ease of use and are heavy on gui so would not be good on an old machine.

Dual booting on separate drives is pretty simple and you should be able to get a number of sites explaining it in detail using google or some other search engine. You can probably find a number of posts here at LQ by using the Search function in the upper right.

For converting and resizing images, you should be able to use Imagemagick.

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Thanks. I have done my homework and have been forced to come to the conclusion that Linux is just not a viable choice. I use a lot of Rexx and am heavily dependent on Extended Attributes and the ability to find files based on their real attributes, Rexx for Linux supports neither of these even though Linux does support EAs.

OS/2 - mmmmm, (very) old memories swirling ...

Jack, you might find you are chucking the baby out with the bathwater.
I (occasionally) use Rexx in my day-to-day job (z/OS), but avoid it where I can - send files down to zLinux and process it there. I find the toolset much more accommodating.

Simple bash scripting would likely do most of that file finding based on EAs - not to mention more robust tools like awk or perl. And yes, I'm sure adding learning new "language(s)" to the mix, isn't likely to palatable. Might be worth keeping in mind though.

I played with rexx on BeOS a while back. HaikuOS ought to be useable.

I'd at least consider FreeBSD or some form of BSD.