Only minutes before 6 AM, EST, Sunday, January 4, 1998, Mark Louis Oyco Santos realizes that he is an idiot.
He would like to proclaim this to the world. So please, tell everybody that, Mark is an idiot, because it's the truth. If they ask why, then tell them, because it's the truth. Don't ask me, because by the time I get a response from this I would have forgotten the cause of this epiphany. Well, just to remind you, Mark, it had to do with a place called Valpo and someone named S.L.L. - but both unrelated.
Also in more recent news, Mark's interest in Windows and Windows software has declined due to the knowledge of a [far] superior operating system. Be warned that all the links may be gone any day now, as well as some of the tips and humor, and in the place of it, a totally Linux oriented site! My mirror at Tripod, however, will remain unchanged, though it is seriously outdated and thus retains a more uniform look ;-).
Whose to blame?
Look for:
In other words, this is going to be a modern operating system oriented site, with a focus on Linux and Windows NT, and secondarily on BeOS, *BSD, and OpenDOS, and why not, a little on Windows 3.1x since I have bit of experience with it, half the world still uses it, and it uses far fewer resources than Windows 95. Of course, I will link to some apps and maybe review some, because an Operating System is worthless without apps (and games ;-) right?
Linux, the best platform to beta test on. With KDE beta 2 I had dozens of crashes a day, but none of which brought Linux down. With Windows 95, I constantly work in fear of crashing because the ratio of application crashes to system crashes is about 3:1. Windows NT should be named Windows TE - Windows Too Expensive [as a server platform as opposed to Linux].
In order of worst to best IMHO:DOS, MacOS, Windows 3.x, OpenDOS, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows Nice Try, Solaris, *BSD, Linux, BeOS - Rhapsody would probably be somewhere between Windows NT and Solaris but at present it's vaporware [as far as I'm concerned]. Note that I'm only mentioning the more popular operating systems. The KDE changes everything as far as which operating system(s) has the best GUI [with the least amount of effort from the user, that is], so I'm taking that into account as well as performance on low and high-end hardware, from i286's with 1 MB RAM to Alpha-based servers.
It was less than two weeks after successfully installing Linux for the first time that I made Linux my primary operating system, meaning I can and do everything I need to do with Linux. That includes both work and play. Needless to say, I have been learning at a fairly astonishing rate, at least to me and IMHO (those endless hours reading a day is probably to blame). However, Linux is very easy to get into with the release of Red Hat Linux 5.0 and the development of the KDE. At this point I am a fairly capable systems administrator, knowing all the basics of configuring and maintaining a Linux system. Key word here is 'basics,' of course. Yes, with RH 5.0, I ran into a few problems and actually had to edit text files (grin).
Actually, practically none of the new features actually worked on my computer (the probes and all the cool stuff like that, and even a couple of the graphical configuration tools), and with the new glibc library I had to recompile a few programs from source that weren't part of the Red Hat installation, oooooh ;-). Those half dozen books I got around Christmas time helped quite a bit, though. The next two challenges will be setting up a PPP daemon so I can dial in to my computer and getting StarOffice to work well with Red Hat 5.0 without having the source code (mission impossible?). Oh, and of course, recompiling the latest beta of KDE, but I already know how to do that. I know, it's easy, but I'm relatively new to Unix, and I am constantly astonished about how long it takes to do a compile. I guess I have to count my blessings and be thankful that I'm not compiling under Windows ;-).
Presently, I have a triple boot configuration with Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, and Red Hat Linux 5.0. But sometime in the next sixty or so days, Windows 95 will be off that list, permanently. This I am happy to say, as my Windows 95 installation crashes almost daily or every three hours of work, and thus is not an appropriate OS for getting work done. I will also be acquiring [the very promising] BeOS for Intel, and I anticipate that it will require a primary partition, the primary partition Windows 95 currently is on. Additionally, as a result of my attending college again, I have restricted my Internet access to getting e-mail. I will no longer need Windows 95 to run America Online for Windows 95 as the 16-bit AOL running under Windows NT 4.0 will suffice for this purpose though or because it is less reliable. I will, however, soon get a PPP provider. That is, I will get one as soon as I find one in my area. Then, perhaps I will not have to have Windows at all. But the most likely case is that I will still have Windows NT to do a few things I still can't do in Linux, as some of my software as well as my printer works optimally only under Windows.
I'm also seriously thinking about installing FreeBSD. From the documentation that I've read, I shouldn't have any problems adding FreeBSD to the slew of operating systems that I already have on my computer, except maybe that I probably have to build a custom kernel, but that's not really a problem. And, hey, if it's good enough for Yahoo and Walnut Creek CD-ROM, then it's good enough for me ;-). If that doesn't do, then I'll just get Solaris x86. It comes with WABI and the CDE, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it doesn't come with 16 more MB's of RAM ;-).
Friends don't let friends use Windows 95.
Windows NT = Windows Nice Try.
I didn't think there were any OS2 users left. I thought they all switched over to Linux.
The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.
Debian is for the poor, and Caldera is for the rich. Slackware is for the insane.
Personally I don't have anything against these distributions - I just found this amusing - other distributions worth mentioning are Suse (#1 in Europe), the up and coming TurboLinux, and Unifix Linux - the POSIX certified Linux [for only $80]).
Copyright © 1997 Mark Santos. All rights reserved.