Question on protocol

If it was on my TRS-80, it would have had to come on cassette tape. :)

16k of RAM! But that was 15k more than my SYM-1.

miker

Crossover Office is a commercial product which is based on WINE, which is free software. I'm using WINE to run one Windows-only program that I need for some classes I'm taking. It beats the hell out of using the wife's XP laptop.

I've been running linux as my desktop OS for 8 or 9 years now. It took some real commitment back then, but now the more polished distributions like Ubuntu (what I use) are a piece of cake. The desktop is just as easy to learn and use as Windows, and underneath there is an operating system with real power, security and stability.

I spent the BIG BUCKS, I had the floppy drive!

I am typically not very lucky with wine. It depends on your application, I guess.

I would not agree, having tried Centos, and now settled on Debian. If you are happy with the MicroSoftbrain compatible stuff and whatever the installation provides prepackaged, you have no problem. But if you need just a little bit more, it suddenly becomes unbelievably difficult and extremely time consuming. Even for someone who has been using Unix for 20 years.

Some things that proved to be extremely difficult, requiring days of google searches and experimenting:

1) Turning on the warning bell 2) Getting truecrypt to work 3) Figuring out what you cannot do in getting the latest version of software. (And confirming your notion that what you need most is solid backups.) 4) Preventing my laptop from locking up (still does it on occasion.) 5) Sound. Don't even ask. 6) Getting your .profile, that according to Unix standards should run automatically at system start-up, to actually *run*. 7) Getting your drives to mount, and then mounted with consistent names. 8) Learning that USB sticks are buffered: if you take them out without unmounting, there goes the stuff you thought was on them. Windows warns you that the buffer was lost, Linux does not. 9) Getting some basic protection for your dial-up passwords. They are stored in plain text for even the most incompetent thief of your portable to find. 10) Getting a dial-up connection that actually works. 11) Trying to get a clue about firewall protection.

Actually, if you want a reasonably recent version of the driver that accesses your old Windows disks, you are stuck with what is called the "testing" version of Debian (still staying clear of the cutting-edge "unstable" version,) and you lose *all* help. Even if you are sophisticated enough to navigate this completely ridiculous Unix file system consisting of a million poorly named files randomly distributed over 100,000 randomly named folders, you will find the help source files are still unreadable. The operating system comes with games, but it is hard to get excited if there is no help to tell you what the objective is.

If you want to modify your menus, well, don't want it. In MicroSoftbrain Windows, you just drag icons from one place to the other. In the new Linux versions, you use xdg, which means you write XML-like "programs". You will typically need to deal with "three* such programs, as well as create a *png* icon, just to get your program on the menu. The documentation for the three programs is on the web; the parts I printed out because they have the important info are about 30 pages already. *Just to customize a menu*. (There is an "alacarte" program that does some of it using menus, but not very well and it is very limited.)

Actually, if you have a laptop, the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) will freeze it if unused within 15 minutes. The tools provided to the a bit more sophisticated users to diagnose the problem are incomplete, so they do not allow you to solve it. Personally, I managed to enable "shutdown" and "restart" to work without the computer crashing (which is bad because of the possibility of losing pending disk operations.) Screen blank-out freezes I manage by having my screensaver come on after 5 minutes, beating the

15 minutes that the screen-blank comes on and freezes the computer. I saw on the web that people a lot more hardware savvy than me are not doing much better.

I should say that the actual *applications* tend to be relatively problem-free. They tend to be actually better in many respects than the corresponding Windows versions. It is just the operating system that is such a mess. The result of hobbyist playing around with no need to sell their results.

Still, I have no plans to return to MicroSoftbrain Windows. Nothing is as bad as that.

Leon

See what I mean Chris? Do you really *want* to know all of this? ;-)

Pat

I have this completely un-scientific notion that anything we can think of, we're likely to bring about. I don't have time to watch sci-fi anymore (or anything else for that matter it seems!) but thinking back on the stuff I used to watch, pretty much the only things we haven't managed to sort out yet is beaming ourselves from one place to another, and flying at the speed of light. Nearly everything else we've managed to invent - communicators as Mike says, androids (though they're not yet as fully featured as they will be), being able to see each other across space etc. It seems that once we put our minds to something we manage to find a way of doing it. If we're not doing something it's more likely to be because we haven't thought of it.

As I say, a completely unscientific notion which will, no doubt, now be shot down by the rocket scientists amongst us :-)

Eric

OK, have done!

ERic