Bob George wrote: > Unfortunately, I can't get to the softcon archives at the moment, but my > recollection is more of Day saying nothing like Norton Commander existed for > Linux, at which point a couple of folks pointed out MC. Day then came back > bemoaning the fact that a few keystrokes were different in MC than NC. He > has since moved on to other DOS-based tools which have lower probabilities > of having direct Linux counterparts, ensuring that Linux will forever be the > less capable OS. I never used Norton commander. I have used Norton Disk doctor. I have also run accross 'Northern Commander', and when I found it on the file list, I checked it for install along with the rest of the distro. But it dont do anything. > > Henceforth, all open source development on networked, multiuser or GUI > desktop applications should stop, and all of the effort redirected to > porting all DOS tools to Linux and BSD in order to get over this critical > hurdle to the future acceptance of these alternative operating systems. > Without this, we are doomed. Well as a matter of fact, this issue was alluded to day on geek tv. Guy commented on the problem I have run into, which is that the variety of Linux distros out there has resulted in a lotta stuff that _theoretically_ runs on Linux, but just not the distro you happen to have running.
He implied that the open source was not something they could compete on, but that they could have proprietary install and other tools to differentiate themselves. Thus we see Corel/debian has the 'open Source' distro, and the deluxe edition which has WINE, PhotoPaint, & their win 98 version of WORPERFECT 8 running if installed from the scripts they have on their CD. But no newbie is gonna be able to install any of these on another distro. It's kinda like having win 31, win 98, win NT, win ME, win 2000, win xp apps on different cd roms, which will only work on the version of win that they were released for. In both cases, users are lead to believe that if they have a Linux app or a windoz app, it will run on the particular distribution which they have. Sometimes, but not always. > > > [...] > > > Although, if so, I dont understand why the distros dont > > > tell the users to use them. > > > > Why would a distro tell users what to use? A distro is just > > a collection of stuff that somebody thought was useful. Yep. And what did the distro install scripters think was useful? Well, first, as above, what would be most profitable, and lock users into proprietary apps that they sell. And lock users out of any which were open source competition. > The abundance of choices in Linux is obviously a detriment. It may be better > if a user has to pay for every utility that addresses shortcomings of the > core operating system (or themselves), no matter how trivial. How much did > Xtree or Norton Commander cost when they came out, $20 or so? Charge another > $20-60 for a decent editor. What the hell, a few bucks for the core OS and > every update that comes out. And all those startup scripts are just way too > confusing. Let users learn to create them on their own. There, I think Linux > has a chance. If it doesn't cost several hundred dollars for the software, > people will just hoard it all and get confused. Well, yeah, I remember file cabinets full of 5" floppies. some of it traded at local user groups, some d/l from the local BBSes. But take the dos file managers for instance. there is a kind of percolation to the top of the best ones that were most intuitive for newbies, but yet had the wider array of functions geeks liked. The DC, DF, DW series have differences, but they are way ahead of lots of other junk that is still out there. PCTOOLS tried to offer it all, but I for one, found a lotta stuff just got in the way of what I needed to do most often. The user base for Linux is changing from the network guru to the personal pc, and in doing so runs into new sets of priorities. I spoze someone will both figure out how to copy the functionality of the time tested (by personal pc users) dos file managers listed, and an install script that will recognize most of the distros, and be- self extracting. I dunno how many times I've clicked on some item I downloaded with an archive tool, which then tells me it can not figure out how to handle it. Or- maybe there oughtta be a Linux tool like dos RAR, which does recognize all of the dos compression formats, and unlike PKZIP, has a scrollbar menu built in to clearly indicate where the ZIP is, and where it will put the extracted files. Or- izzat out there too? I can imagine that it might be, but can see where the distro outfits would fail to include it. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
