Suggested OS settings, OS Questions, Why not UNIX instead of Windows?

[tekdiveraz]

Has anyone seen any suggestions on how best to maintain a clean ONYX installation? Perhaps a whitepaper with some do's and dont's. I am aware of the no antivirus and security suites, etc. However I have yet to see a recommendation as far as the ideals for an install. My environment is a 4 way Mac Pro with 8 Gigs of apple ram. Onyx runs on a 500 gig SATA drive seperate from the OSX partition. Machine has minimal other software loaded onto it. It sits on a Cisco firewalled network, and work is filter through macs and then transferred to it when ready to print. I run Productionhouse 7.1 with HP 5500's (4). Color measurement device is the onyx suggested eye-one uvcut device. I have been using ONYX for several years now, first version I purchased was Postershop 6.5, which I did not like much. For me, 7.0 was a vast improvement as far as how profiling works. I have done the profiiling online training with Johanna Franke twice, and then came up to onyx in December to do the Profiling training onsite.
Overall works very well, however windows xp has an uncanny ability to eventually mess up its own registry and generally foul up its own nest with time. Quite frankly I wish that ONYX would port it to some flavor of unix, preferrably Apple OS X, however a controlled unix build of some sorts would be just fine too. Perhaps someone, could have some information they would be willing to share with us on this. There are several rips out there that run on OS X, HP markets one with their machines, the Colorbyte one I believe. However from what I know so far I have not seen any that are so feature complete and are so mindfully designed, as far as how their workflow functions. In my humble opinion, a move to a unix os, with vista looming over us, could be a great thing for the users of onyx. The design of productionhouse is like a finely skilled rider, on a old nag of a horse, that stumbles and falls, gets sick easily and costs a heck of a lot to keep running. Something to think about...

[Scott]

Don't have a ton of time to post at the moment, so first, it's nice to meet you, and next...I believe they are working for supporting on different OS other than windows. I'll find out details.

[bellevuefineart]

This issue has come up before. I would welcome it if the RIP supported Linux, or BSD, or both. Vista is a pig and causes a lot of problems for Onyx in the form of stupid windows messages. I really don't care to put Onyx on an expensive MAC. Linux is a good option for a dedicated print server with hot folders.

[MarcoRoos]

(10-23-2009 12:36 PM)bellevuefineart Wrote:  This issue has come up before. I would welcome it if the RIP supported Linux, or BSD, or both. Vista is a pig and causes a lot of problems for Onyx in the form of stupid windows messages. I really don't care to put Onyx on an expensive MAC. Linux is a good option for a dedicated print server with hot folders.

I think everything you say is true, however: porting an application from Windows to Linux is not very easy. First of all there is a legacy of old code which is still being used by a lot of ONYX modules. This is very common with all software packages (why would you change something that works? ;-)). Besides that Linux is not always Linux and only a few people know how to support, install and run it. For home use and some experiments it is great and the bright guys among us might be able to use it and build a fail safe production system on it. But think about this: printer manufacturers often create driver kits for RIP vendors to be used, they only make them for Windows and/or Mac. Same story with measurement devices, Firewire cards, SCSI cards etc.

Caldera is using Linux but they are very experienced in both development and the support of it. Changing from a legacy Windows code base, redeveloping all drivers, converting users and re-training resellers and employees might not worth the advantages it will bring. Better spend more time on improving the current products than to make this huge change for a relatively small group of users that want to use it. ONYX has to support more than 300 printer drivers and they have to be functional in both versions! The amount of work, possible issues and change is beyond imagination.

Besides that: you might ask yourself the question how long the RIP as we know it today 'will be amongst us'. PrepEdge shows a direction where RIP and LFP Job preparation gets separated. The only thing you need is a Windows PC somewhere in the network with a Queue and a printer driver. I expect to see more of this strategy in the future. But that is my personal opinion.... ;-)

Ciao
Marco