Danny Bowman presented his science project, The Operating System
Comparision Project (OSCP) for us. The project's goal is to compare
several different operating systems, such as Mandrake Linux, Windows
XP Home, and FreeBSD, through benchmarking (scimark2c, nbench/bytecpu,
iozone, and several SPEC suites), surveys of users (ie, to gather
statistics on what operating systems are used for different things by
different age groups), interviews of users, computer owners, and
administrators (to gather information on what operating system is
prefered for each major task by each group of people, both inside and
outside the 'geek' or power user level), general usage (loading times,
responsiveness, looks, etc), and research (history, documentation,
available support, etc). Some security testing will also be done to
give a general overview of how secure each operating system is. All
tests will be run on a virgin install, with multiple configurations if
available (ie, different eye candy levels in Window XP,
Gnome/KDE/XFCE4/Fluxbox on *nix systems). The systems (10 in total)
are Dell PIII 450mhz systems with 128mb ram, 3gig HD, CD drive, floppy
drive, and onboard NIC (donated to us by Computers For Schools
Alberta). All computers are identical, to eliminate hardware
differences as an influence over the results.

The main network was donated to us by Maurice and Mark at HardData,
the testing networks (3 dual computer networks) were donated by Mr.
PC, and SPEC donated CPU2000, as well as allowed us to use
SPECViewPerf and several SPECapc suites. Mr. Dave Turner, Mr. Adair
and Mr.Stephen Lynch from Vernon Barford Junior High School helped
considerably. Thanks goes out to these people - the project would not
have even gotten off the ground with them.

And of course, thanks to Dr. Renee from the University of Alberta FGSR
Outreach Program who hooked me up with Adil Kodain, who has been an
extreme help in the project.

A full description of the project, including a status page, contact
info, etc can be found at www.grecko.ca although the webserver is not
always available.