Text 2691, 78 rader
Skriven 2005-06-05 14:33:16 av Charles Scaglione (1:123/789.0)
     Kommentar till en text av Maurice Kinal (1:340/401.1)
Ärende: Linux, OS/2 Maximus and
===============================
On Sat, 04 Jun 2005 11:59:22 -0700, Maurice Kinal -> Charles Scaglione
wrote:

Hi Maurice:

 CS>> about if I were a Thinkpad owner is where will the support come
 MK>   from?

 MK> Beats me.  Did IBM give all that great of support for those things?
 MK> Personally I don't count on getting any great support from anyone.
 MK> Everytime I ask a manufacturer about their products I get the standard
 MK> MSish type answer(s) which is totally meaningless to me.  Either that or
 MK> some useless PDF that says nothing of any consequence in the grand
 MK> scheme of things other then more annoyance with that whole lousy
 MK> stinkin' format.

Most support has been moved off shore anyway.  I recently called about a
problem I was having with my Toshiba notebook and was connected to
somewhere in India.  The person I spoke with was polite, fairly
knowledgeable, and conversed in somewhat understandable English.  I wound
up resolving the problem myself after a no joy on that call. <g>

 CS>> Unfortunately
 CS>> there are still some applications that I'm forced to use from CS>
 MK>   Windows.

 MK> Such as?  I ask people this question all the time and the answer is
 MK> usually office type stuff which they seldom use, if at all.  I think
 MK> they just think they need that stuff because others tell them they do,
 MK> others usually meaning Bill G.

Mainly PowerPoint.  There are equivalent applications such as in Open
Office but more difficult to use and do not always convert properly. Since
my wife and I do a lot of ministry work we use church software quite a
bit.  For that we are almost completely limited to Windows versions. There
are Mac OS/X packages that do the same thing but so far I haven't found
anything for Linux.

 CS>> I've pretty much decided that I will not be making any upgrade CS>
 MK>   purchases
 CS>> for what I currently have.  If I can successfully move everything
 MK>   to CS> Linux, I'll only keep what's necessary (Windows) in order to
 MK>   maintain CS> compatibility with people I work with.

 MK> There are filters for formatting whatever over to whatever format the
 MK> Windows people seem to think they need.  I don't believe this is REALLY
 MK> an issue at all but people seem to think it is even when it isn't.

That's true.  It's unfortunate that MS applications have become the
"standard" in modern offices and for the most part in US government.

 MK> The best bet for migration is to have a seperate box to play with Linux
 MK> on.  Once you get the basics down, such as initialization, scripting and
 MK> networking, then the rest falls nicely into place rather quickly after
 MK> that.  Simply installing a user-friendly graphical Linux thingy will get
 MK> you nowhere fast but if that is what people want then I don't have a
 MK> problem with it.  I'll stick to the path I started on with Linux as it
 MK> has paid off BIG time in my favour.

Right now I have one desktop with several large hard drives which I use to
dual boot both Linux and Windows.  I keep both operating systems separate
on their own hard drive and use a small boot manager called Bootit Next
Generation.  I prefer that over Grub or the Windows XP boot loader.

A graphical face (GUI) is what makes the new Linux distros so popular. And
the fact that some of them can be run from a live CD rather than be
installed to the hard drive.  Some friends of mine who in the past were
reluctant to try Linux are more than willing to give Knoppix or something
like MEPIS a go.  Many folks like myself who have a background in UNIX
would never think about running it on a personal desktop, but with the
advent of the Linux GUI (X windows) our view has changed.

Have fun and regards.

chscag@gmail.com

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