> I'm curious to know how Linux compares to Warp in terms
 > of multi-tasking performance

This is going to be a highly unpopular viewpoint, but in general the Linux
system will be superior. But (I add quickly before the yelling starts :-))
it also depends on what you want to do with it. OS/2 does some things
better, and Linux (or some other *nix or look-alike) does other things
better. For pure networking, performance-wise you could never rate an OS/2
box ahead of the same hardware running Linux or FreeBSD (the latter is
better again). For running nice n' friendly apps of a familiar nature, word
processing, office work, and generally for doing the kind of things that
*personal* computers are good at doing, then OS/2 is a more likely choice.

 > is there a GUI shell for Linux (& is it any good).

Linux has XFree86, which is a subset of X11R6 (often called "X"
or "X-windows"). Yes, it is brilliant, but it takes more work to
set up and run than your typical OS/2 desktop. It is also more confusing
and difficult to the newbie - if someone sets it up for you and finds a
decent window manager like fvwm2 and installs all the neat tk addons, then
you can pretty much duplicate and/or excell most of the capabilities of
WPS. If you're not familiar with it and don't have time to learn it, then
I'd seriously suggest sticking with OS/2. The down-side of all that power
is that (1) the learning curve is steep, and (2) you have to do all of the
setup yourself (there is no "canned" setup that everyone is going
to be happy with).


 > I'm thinking about putting together a DX/2-66 with 16MB &
 > 200-400MB of hard disk to play around with Linux ...
 > would this be an adequate platform

It would be adequate, but not exceptional. If you plan to run X, I'd highly
recommend an accelerated video card of some sort. For text mode, 16mb is
plenty unless you're going to be developing apps in modular 3 or fortran. X
will run fine under that, but give yourself plenty of swap.

--- MaltEd/2 1.0.b6