On Sun February 22 2004 3:48 pm, deedee wrote: > On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 08:15:11, Ray Hogaboom wrote: > > Thanks again for all of your help I have downloaded Rute. > > We are driving to the bay area today (5 hr round trip) I will > > copy it to our laptop so that I can start reading it. > > Good. Once you get terminology and an understanding of how Linux > works under your belt, I think you will find a lot of stuff much > easier to deal with. > > Which bay area is that? Tokyo Bay, San Francisco Bay. I live and > work in the SF bay area on the peninsula.
San Francisco Bay Have in-law that live in Pacifica. > > If your computing life has been primarily with ms win and ms dos, > then you should know it is a completely different way of doing > things. > > Linux is transparent. Everything is out in the open where you can > see it and deal with it directly. You can control the whole works > as root user. Real control. > > MS win is set up to keep the user ignorant of how the system > works in order to control what the user will do with it. A lot of > stuff is done in a very indirect fashion. > > One example is the way MS tried to fix win9x so that users didn't > know that it was dos-based by obscuring which files actually > contained the autoexec.bat and config.sys that it was using and > moving all the dos files to a different directory. > > At the time, MS was trying to get everyone to believe that dos > was dead. Ultimately, people figured out what was going on and > that indeed win9x was dos-based. But, if you can remember that > far back, MS repeatedly claimed that the 32-bit win9x was not. Yes I know that windows is DOS based. When I started using computers MS-DOS ver 3.1 it was just staring to get popular most where running on IBM DOS. Even then I did not use most of the DOS commands. Mostly I would start a programs like Lotus 123 and do my work. I worked for Spectrolab a subsidiary of Hues Aircraft in the building maintenance dept. I used Lotus 123 macros to track and make monthly reports for the 1000+ a year maintenance work orders. It was not long till I found Norton Commander then I did not have to use DOS commands to cd to directories or any other file manager duties. In fact Norton Commander could do more in 1985 or 1987 than MToolsFM 1.9-3 running in Linux will do now. Then Norton Utilities was released no more DOS commands for disk handling duties or DOS edit. Because now I could make bat files using a graphical interface. That was about the same time I got my 1st mouse and DesignCAD 3D. I was kinda blown away when I could not find a Linux based program that will do what I was doing almost 20 years ago. Ok maybe that is not completely fair, the CAD programs I looked at mostly would not cost me any money. They will display a lot more colors and do photo realistic 3D rendering. Or they are designed more for drawing electronics. But then these are things I don't need. Then some time after DOS ver 5.0 I started using Windows 3.0 after that I would go some times a year and never enter a DOS command. Now with XP the only DOS I might use is if I am installing a hard drive. I have boot disk that gives me a graphical interface to handle most of this. > > > I did seen a project on SourceForge.net for a promising > > Auction Management program. They have not released any files to > > download yet. I am not a programmer but may be I will spend > > some time helping them any way that I can. > > You don't have to be a programmer. Linux moves forward because > people have a particular interest that isn't being met exactly > the way they need it to be, and they do something about that. > > In addition to working with developers to get things that I > needed done, I've also worked with software manufacturers to get > them to port ms win software to the Linux platform. Sometimes > with success, sometimes without. They won't know there's interest > unless someone tells them. > > > Thanks > > You're quite welcome. Good luck with your migration to Linux. > > deedee I do plan on working with developers and software manufacturers again. -- Ray Hogaboom
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