Ahhhh yes...the Linux OS that promises Windows compatibility.
When you get down and dirty they don't do much different with
Linux than I do right now. I run an all graphical interface just like windows, with point and click. Netscape mail, which is just like, well, netscape mail, Mozilla Browser -- and for office software I use a commercial product called Applixware that reads word perfect and microsoft word for windows and excel files. I have a spreadsheet and word processor and print just fine to any printer. All point and click. And I play sound on a sound card, etc.. Right now I have trouble with sound and video as realplayer refuses at present to provide a free download for Linux which they used to do. That company has upgradeitis. Yes, I have yahoo instant messaging which is not supposed to work on Slackware but I tweaked it and got it to run. A few library tweaks is all it took.
In the end Lindows will not really run, well-enough, microsoft software. They admit it. They use WINE, just like other Linuxes to run windows software and they are realistic and they don't recommend it. It is presently a work in progress. On the other hand their windows FILE compatibility is good, which is all you need. If you can word process, spreadsheet, adobe pdf and play sound files, and video, you are most of the way there in the computing world. I can import and export word and excel files to windows users from Applix.
The reason to use Linux as they say is COST. It costs less.
I will caveat you and tell you that Corel tried this too and almost made it. But they broke under the strain. They had word processing and the like but they were not MS compatible or did not try to be. The corel OS was quite a good Linux. And it had a free version of Word Perfect.
What I would like to do is get a bunch of programmers together and provide a platform that is easier to write to than X-Windows which is the graphical user interface of Linux. X-Windows if made easy to "port" to, would then automatically attract 80,000 application vendors to change their MSwindows programs to run under Linux. Right now it is too much of a headache to change the source code of a MSwindows program to run on Linux most of the time. A lot of code has to be changed and you have to know the internals of X-Windows and Linux to do it. This could be changed from a 9 month job to a 3 week job if X were rewritten. How do I know this? Because one company did it about ten years ago, but due to a change in strategy they decided to shelve the project. All that code is sitting there unused. It could be bought of rewritten. One of the programmers on the project I talked to said that it worked, and worked better than X-Windows. In addition it would run X-Windows programs better than X-Windows itself! To make a window in this new program code took four lines of writing. To do that in X-Windows takes 1200 lines.
What would such a project do? Well for one thing it would be come the GUI of choice for ALL the Unix and Linux computers in existence. If in addition, if it achieved crash-proofness, in that a GUI crash would not bring the underlying multi-tasking system down, it would be usable as a sysadmin's graphical network admin tool. Linux is FAR superior as a networking tool and server tool. It runs 40% of all the servers on the Internet and this number is growing.
If this new simplified Linux GUI were rolled out I would estimate the sales figures per year at 1 million units. There are at least 4 million computers running Linux or Unix today. After a while the greater speed, stability,security (no viruses!), networkability and lower cost of Linux would result in more and more sales as its ;lower cost, ease of use, power and usability as an office tool became apparent and crossovers in not just the poor student and education fields would start to increase.
At a certain point the cost of constant upgrades and high cost obsolete tools in the MS world has to hit home. I spent 12,000 dollars on MS software since 1986 and much of it just gathers dust. Some of it was obsolete unsupported and unusable 3 months after I bought it.
Can an average guy run Linux today with all the grpahical stuff and get 95% of what he wants done in browsing, word processing, graphics, sound etc.. I would say yes. Red Hat 8.0 might do it, with either Star Office or Applixware bought or installed, or perhaps Lindows.
I am partial to Slackware. It still installs easier than all the other Linuxes. And to get it I go out to the slakware site and load it down for free. Or pay 38 bucks at a university for 4 disks. Manual is about 60 bucks.
For a home windows guy I could see having an problem configuring X-Windows for your monitor. You have to know a few things. It is really easy and could be simplified for most people. But it is not as automatic as windows. In the end it may be just as easy as some of the windows problems I have had to solve to install hardware, but I am sure it will confuse a lot of people. You have to know what com port your mouse is on. What com port your modem is on. I would not run the same interrupt for com 1 and com 3. or com 2 and com 4. Questions are asked in Xconfig that I am sure you cannot answer if you are a neophyte. You have to know what make your monitor is and its stats for vertical refresh and horizontal synch rate. You have to know the make and model of your video and sound card.Plus I would not guarantee that Linux will run all motherboards that have built-in sound, video and network "cards". It will run some but not all. In addition it will not run all windmodems, peripherals such as "winprinters" requiring the Windows OS to run, or all USB devices in my experience. Neither will Windows BTW!
Now much more compatibility has been built into Linux versions lately and I have not followed the MSwindows wars here, it may be better or worse than it was a while back. I run mostly older equipment.
Trouble --->???
There is even the possibility of having to recompile the kernel if you do not find features in the precompiled kernels that you need. This happened to me when I tried to do an all SCSI system and connect to the net. The precompiled kernel in this release did not have PPP in if for that brand of SCSI controller the kernel was compiled with. I could not use a module for the SCSI card because I was booting in SCSI from the HD. So a kernel recompile was necessary. Don't understand at all? Well there can be complexities in Linux. Most IDE users will not run into this. But in selecting a kernel in slackware, it does not tell you right off that if you want to run the internet (who the hell doesn't?) the kernel to use is net.i not bare .i. Sheesh! RedHat 8.0 thankfully evades all that. P.S -- a kernel recompile takes 3 hours on my system and I had to do it 5 times. But at least I can do it. MS will not let you recompile squat.
For a full install of Red Hat 8.0 you need about 3.8 giges of disk space.
EC<:-} |
