Hi all , For the past decade , i have noticed that most people prefer Red Hat /Fedora as the best way to get their feet wet with Linux. The biggest strength of Windows is it's developer community and the developer tools built by Microsoft over a period of time. ( There are plenty of system tools and horizontal apps in Linux and their ports are used on Windows too ) Mono Project , seems to be a promising project to woo Windows developers. The advantage of Mono is it works on Windows , Linux and MAC OS X too. Encourage people to embrace Mono , you can see people trickling to Linux . Another project , which i recently tested was Harbour. Harbour is a tool which can compile CA Clipper 5.x (A popular MSDOS based tools used to write small business application code ) code to C/C++ ( We can then use the Platform's Native compiler to generate executable ) . Using this , i ported an accounting package which was written in 1994 (12,000 lines of Clipper code ) to run on Windows (32 bit ) , Linux ( 32/64 ) and MAC OS X (64 bit ). Harbour has got the potential to make Linux platform rich by importing old Clipper/Xbase application. (80% of DOS applications ! ) DOSBox is a MSDOS emulator which can run old MSDOS applications and it has got potential to make Linux popular. Now a days , most college students use DosBox to run Turbo C/C++. if you do have a old DOS app (without source ) , we can use DosBox to run the stuff on Linux. Wine ( reason for a flame war some time back ) is a capable platform to run Windows Applications. Recently , i used Wine to recompile close to 50,000 lines of Windows code written in C/C++ to Linux platform ( It was a GUI application ) I am putting forward a new formula called "BEAT" Microsoft the strategy is as follows a ) if you have got a DOS application without source , run it using DosBox under Linux b) if you have got a DOS application with source (80% of DOS applications were written using XBase ) , we can use Harbour to port it to Linux c) if you have got a Windows binary , Most Windows binaries ( 32 bit one ) run on Wine d) if you have got a Windows program with source written in C/C++ , Recompile it using Wine f) if you have got a C# application , use Mono project to bring it to GNU Linux g) GCC for Java ( GCJ ) can compile most java desktop applications to GNU Linux ELF executable using the above strategy , 80% of the applications to run on GNU Linux and we can give Microsoft run for their money. Is there any Visual Basic equivalent in GNU Linux ? ( if it is there , it can be the final nail on the coffin ) regards Praseed Pai http://praseedp.blogspot.com
--- On Fri, 8/27/10, Siju George <[email protected]> wrote: From: Siju George <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [ILUG-Cochin.org] Distributions To: "This List discusses GNU/Linux & GNU, GPL Software" <[email protected]> Date: Friday, August 27, 2010, 9:25 PM For Windows Freaks Trying to Migrate http://www.pcbsd.org/ is great. You can double click setup and install programs if you want to. --Siju On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 10:56 PM, Codename062 George <[email protected]> wrote: PCLinuxOS Good distribution for Windows migrants! This is a really great alternative to anyone looking for an alternative to Mandriva, considering the fact it is basically based on Mandriva code. This being said, PCLinuxOS has long since been the standing Ubuntu alternative with its use of the KDE desktop, Mandriva-derived control panel and other features that include using its own unique approach to hardware detection. Despite needing to be updated, which is happening soon, the now dated PCLinuxOS 2007 remains a strong distribution for Windows migrants. http://www.pclinuxos.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCLinuxOS _______________________________________________ Indian Libre User Group Cochin Mailing List http://www.ilug-cochin.org/mailing-list/ http://mail.ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org #[email protected] -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ Indian Libre User Group Cochin Mailing List http://www.ilug-cochin.org/mailing-list/ http://mail.ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org #[email protected]
_______________________________________________ Indian Libre User Group Cochin Mailing List http://www.ilug-cochin.org/mailing-list/ http://mail.ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org #[email protected]
