"Steven C. Darnold" wrote: > > Day Brown wrote: > > > > Linux is much more powerful than dos. He seems to me to be > > wondering what that power can do for him, and so far I've > > not seen much that either of us cares about. > > I've come to the conclusion that Day likes arguing simply for > the sake of arguing. Here, for example, he says about Linux > "I've not seen much that either of us cares about." > > However, when you read the header of his message, you see this: > ------------------------------------------------------- > X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.14 i686) > ------------------------------------------------------- > So, Day has used Linux to dial his ISP, read his mail, and > compose a message. Are these not things he cares about? > > And a second point: if Linux is so "arcane", how can Day > (the eternal newbie and Linux hater) manage to get it working > well enough to dial his ISP and send a message. > > And a third point: wouldn't Day's pro-DOS messages be more > credible if they were actually sent from DOS? Caveat Lector. what you believe is up to you. We went into this before, but I dont expect everyone to read everything. In this case we have two different threads.
If there were a dos browser that could handle the mickysloth webpages and do online ordering, I'd run it. Arachne dont do USENET either. Neither does OPERA. And whatever I feel about dos, it is clear to me that Linux is what more folks will be running; and if I can setup linux on a system I sell and service, so much the better for the client. I havta be familiar with Linux. Agreed that if you have normal hardware, Linux can be installed. But the difficulty, depending on the distro and the hardware, can be considerable. Redhat 5.2, the first I saw, was appallingly lacking in handling errors. considering the vastly more powerful os, the documentation is remarkably puny. Looking up a doc file on a 486 in dos was duck soup; by the time the 486 could find the same info or man segment on the drive in Linux, you could make duch soup. There are problems with the apps that have nothing to do with the operating system and vice versus. Linux apps could be made as small and fast with the documentation in a directory with the app, but Netscape dont do it that way. With dos, there's a lotta hardware around now it wont run; you dont waste time trying. There's a lotta linux offerings that say that they can run some of the win modems, printers, or scanners, and you can spend enormous amounts of time tweaking that you wouldnt do in dos, and sometimes, it works, sometimes not. I downloaded DESQUVIEW and QEMM; fooled around with them a little, but saw that it would take more to get it running. Apparently there are, however, dos users who succeed at this, and out of that they get an os with a flat address space and multitasking. What does Linux offer that this dont? Netscape. There is no intrinsic reason that the dos app could not be developed. And actually, over time, I can see where that might happen. the dos/qemm/dqv os is no longer under development, which means that if you write an app that runs on it, it will still work next year. you dont need to upgrade it to keep up with the changes in the os. But there is a synergy between the os, the programmer, and the public. it is why windoz, as crummy as it is, works. criticizing linux or dos usually comes down to one or more of these other factors that have very little to do with the fundamentals of the os. I find it fairly easy to install a distro off the cd. I'd never try to download one, and the few times I downloaded a linux app I got into trouble. No dos app I ever tried was so complex to try to install. I didnt need to worry about which distro of dos I had. If the newbie can get by on whatever comes on the distro cd, then linux is simple. if not, then net. I bought seven different linux distros before I found one that would run my scsi card. That was after weeks diddling around downloading drivers for various distros. Dos ran that same scsi card right from the BIOS. no drivers, no screwing around. The speed was notiably faster, but since dos apps are so small and already fast, it had very little effect on my desktop. But when I found a SUSE that would run it, the linux boot time was cut nearly in half, and Netscape comes up nearly as fast as Arachne on a 486. But Netscape is the only thing I use Linux for. I routinely mount the dos ide to get files to upload, and routinely use LDIR from dos to copy downloads from the ext2 scsi. and use each to backup my personal files from the other. AN OS cannot trash a drive it dont see. I have always used dos batch to create mnemonics to launch apps. I was informed that you can do this with linux, and looked into ncurses. again, the power of that is vastly beyond anything you can do in dos batch... and so is the complexity. Ncurses is not for a newbie, but simple dos batch is reasonably useful. But the vast majority of users would just stick with the GUI buttons, and be perfectly happy with 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
