10 Jan
2005
10 Jan
'05
6:07 a.m.
Rumor has it that Dan Williams may have mentioned these words:
On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 13:28:55 -0800 (PST), Tom Jennings
<tomj(a)wps.com> wrote:
As I have to, at both work and home. Work: Peachtree. Other than that, I
SSH into all of my linux servers. ;-) Home: MPEG transcoding software from
my TiVo to SVCD. Linux just doesn't have the (inexpensive) software yet.
Good stuff is $$$$$, free stuff isn't worth dealing with.
On Sat, 8 Jan 2005 gordonjcp(a)gjcp.net wrote:
> I'm *amazed* how many people on this list still struggle on with Windows.
> I would have thought most people with the geeky proclivities that would
> lead them into playing with old computers would all be running one of the
> many free OSes.
As the other's have sometimes you have to run windows. Openoffice can't deal with
some excel files and last time I looked any powerpoint documents.
OO 1.1.x has opened every excel file I threw at it so far; but that's not
saying much; I don't deal with very high-end spreadsheets. And now that I
have my serial cable & floppy emulation software set up for my Tandy 200, I
want to see how well it opens SYLK files from MultiPlan... hehehe -- It's
interesting how it opens more MicroSoft formats than M$... ;-)
It's *supposed* to work well with powerpoint, but I never use them, so I
can't say how well it does it.
OpenOffice 1.9.(mumble) is out in beta form - it's supposed to be even
closer yet, and has a GUI database as well. I don't know if it supports
Access databases... haven't installed it yet. (Tonite at home.)
That's without even speaking about games.
That's why most people still run Winders.
Win2K, all security patches, no firewall, running Mozilla Firefox & Eudora
(but sometimes use Mutt directly on the servers) -- scan for spyware every
2-3 *weeks* (only come up positive every 3rd scan or so) and have no
problems at all. Granted, I wouldn't recommand a "non-geek" do this. ;-)
=-=-=-=
Everyone's talking 'distro' (this 'Ubuntu' sounds interesting --
methinks I
need to check it out) -- if you want to use a distro that *runs* from CD,
try Knoppix. It boots, you try it out, make sure all the stuff works, then
pull the CD & reboot -- no changes to the system.
[[ and I certainly don't want to 'war' about it either - they all have
their strengths and weaknesses! ]]
For my laptop, I went the "Other Way." www.linuxfromscratch.org -- I
compiled *everything* for my Crusoe processor, and lemme tell ya, it's
*fast*. From boot, including FVWM 2.5.(mumble), Apache, Coldfusion 4.5 (I
need to support it), PostgreSQL, and total memory used is under 80Meg.
Granted, it took me a month of spare time to get the way I like it... but
damn, do I like it. ;-) If you want to speed things up and have multiple
Linux boxen available, check out distcc -- distributed compiling across
several boxen; it works well, too.
The wife runs linux -- despite the fact she's the "Anti-Geek" (I installed
a basic RedHat 9 - she couldn't install Winders either if she tried...), my
next door neighbor just installed it & was surprised how easy it was - He'd
heard the horror stories, but thought it was just as easy as installing
windows. ;-)
It's getting there...
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch(a)30below.com |