On Tuesday 06 November 2001 22:47, Dave Barton wrote:
Hi Jerry,
I see that you are a software developer, Dave, working with the
Kodak SDK. You got me :-0 Excellent, you must REALLY be on the ball to cross-reference me like that.
Elementry google, my dear Watson!
With such a technical background, how is it that you are having so
much trouble? Yes, I have been coding since before IBM turned the micro-computer into a PC. My trouble is that I was looking for an alternative OS
Uh, oh.... you are dating yourself! :) I'll bet you've got some gray hair! I went to the Barnes School of Business in 1959 to learn how to operate the IBM 402 Tabulators. They weighed 4,000 lbs and that's how the term 'big iron' got started. I never could get a job because even though I was 18 I looked 14. Now I'm 60 and I look 70. :( But, I ended up in college majoring in Science, which led to Fortran in grad school, which eventually led to learning more than a dozen languages and my own consulting business. The, after teaching/consulting for about 35 years I retired to part-time consulting. One of my clients was the state, and they gave me an offer I couldn't refuse.
which didn't require the user to have a degree in computer science to make the smallest change in the system. Not that windoze is easy, but it doesn't constantly require the user to enter mystical, cryptic strings through a command line to get the simplest things done.
What things do you have reference to? (You are probably aware of "man" and "info", and the 'How-to"s.)
I have spent years getting my head around the obscurities of several programming languages, but I don't want an OS that I have to use as if I were writing code all the time. IMHO Linux is (and will be for the foreseeable future) work in progress for the mainstream user and I hope to still be around when that work is complete.
mmmm.... I run KDE 99.99% of the time. The only command line utilities that I'll pop an xterm for are: startx - I don't like the loop that xdm and kdm put you in. whereis - to locate a file locate - to list files whose names containing certain characters Two or three years ago I used the command-line a lot. You had to. But now KDE has made Linux MUCH MUCH easier to use, especially for the novices.
SInce SuSE 7.3 Pro is only $70 I am curious how you could spend "hundreds" of dollars getting it to work?
I spent AU$177 to get the Suse distro and several hundred more AU$ on VMware, plus buying additional licences for the Linux versions of other software I use.
Oh, VMware. I've heard good and bad about it. I use WINE when possible, but the only need I have had for it lately was to run the new QuickTime app from codeweavers. Runs slick. But, software licenses for 3rd party apps don't really count, because you have to pay for those for WinXX too. On the good side, Linux offers a TON of high-quality apps that are free. In the graphics areas, besides GIMP, are Blender, which is also free.
Did you buy a bunch of hardware?
No
(And if you did, how is that different from having to upgrade hardware to run each new upgrade of WinXX?)
The point you are making was exactly my motivation in trying to switch to Linux.
My motivation was crashes. I purchased a new PC on Dec 29th, 1996. It was a Sony VAIO with Win95 and Sony's MEDI-KIT. Between that day and May 7th I had to do a complete re-format, re-install of Win95 FIVE times! I was so disgusted that I started looking for another OS. My idea was to switch to OS/2, which I had tried when I was running Win 3.11 FWG, but abandon because Bill Gates kept tweeking Win3.11 with 'updates', the sole purpose of which were to disable OS/2. It worked. Running Win3.11 apps under OS/2 became impossible, but I was too stupid to realize where Gates was leading me, and decide to get the Sony with the NEW Win95. While browsing the bookstore to read about the Latest release of OS/2 I noticed a book titled "Learn Linux in 24 Hours", by Bill Bush. It had a CD of RH 5.0 in the back and cost only $24, so I took it home and installed it dual boot with a fresh install of my Win95. I ran fwm95 as the desktop and learned Linux in about 30 hours ;-P.. During my time on the Linux side I noticed that the Sony was very stable and reliable, the very opposite of what Microsoft support was telling me. The Sony only crashed when it was running Win95. My first purchase was a WordPerfect 8.0 CD for $40, and the OSS sound driver for $15. Then I purchased Applix. WP and OSS were great. Applix was.... not so great. When Corel WP 2000 came out I tried it, but found it too slow and unstable for my Sony hardware, and too instable also. It was built on top of WINE and when I did an strace to see what it was doing, the phantom crash trapping convinced me to get a refund. Then SO 5.1 and 5.2 came out. SO 5.2 is great. So is SO 6. I found that Visual Age for Java on Linux ran identically to VAJ 3.0 for Windows at work, but faster and no crashing. Anyway, I decided to wean myself off of WIn95. MoneyDance and MuPAD were the last two apps that I needed to make the break. On Jan 1st, 1999 I deleted Win95 from my HD and have been WinXX free every since. I did run my CD of StreetAtlas 5.0 once to see if it would run under WINE. It did, but it was a lot easier to fire a mapping program on the Internet.
Were you trying to 'dual boot' and put both Linux and Windows partitions on your HD?
No, I installed Linux on a totally separate box.
In my experience SuSE 7.3 was a total joy to install. My clean install was by far the most hands-free I've ever experienced with either Linux or Windows.
I am in total agreement with you there. The problems start after installation when anything needs to be configured. Linux may possibly be the greatest networking OS in the universe, but it is an absolute bitch to set up it's networking configuration.
Setting up my network was when I had a senior moment.... the switch from IPv4 to and IPv4-IPv6 mix, where the traditional network classes have been abandon in favor of the 128 bit IP address mode came unexpectedly. It didn't appear that the loopback was being set, so I was setting it. Yast2 was following my directions for setting up the routing table, but was always making the loopback the gateway. I sent up a help message to suse-e-linux and someone mentioned using a "-a" parameter with 'ifconfig" (one of those commandline thingies:) and it showed that even when I removed all the NIC intializations and emptied the routing table, then put in the NIC command manually, the loopback config was done automatically! Once I realized that I used YaST2 to make the NIC IP of my wife's Sony (my old machine) as the Gateway in that dropdown listbox, and nothing else in the routing table... and bingo! Everything worked. My past experience was making it too hard because I WASN'T reading the docs on things I thought I new quite well.
BTW, Boot your floppy and run "fdisk /mbr" to restore the Master Boot Record on the HD.
Thanks, I had a total memory blackout on that one.
What 'cryptic keyboard incantations' were you trying to make, and
why? To answer that question would take forever and I think this list is probably getting bored with this thread by now. Suffice it to say that, while I would love to go with Linux, I don't have the time to learn all the intricacies necessary to make it work for me. Neither do I think that this list would have the patience to answer all my questions.
I'll bet the list wouldn't get bored, that is what it is here for! It has enough patience to put up with a 60 year old fossil like me.
Didn't you use YaST2? If not, why not? Yes, but while YaST2 is a big improvement, it cannot do everything.
True. Well, I'll make a bet that Gate's need to churn the Windows user base for more income to keep his kingdom afloat by constant upgrades that cost more and require more powerful hardware, combined with he paranoia about 'pirates' and his tendency to ignore basic freedoms, like speech and association, will eventually drive you back to Linux. If that doesn't then Gates desire that you pay him $1,500 up front and then "per-use" to use his software development tools to write apps that your clients will have to pay $10,000 up front and then per-use to use, while their data is being held hostage on passport servers that Gates can't protect for any length of time, certainly will drive you back. See ya then! :) Jerry
Many thanks for your response.
Regards Dave
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