Welcome to my 'news' page. I've prepared quite a lot of material for this update - too much actually to the point that I think I have enough material for an entirely new web site! Two things I won't get into [too much] are a comparison of major free Unix-like operating systems and emulation. Instead I will just talk about a few of the major things that I've been reading about [and doing] and a little about the two previous topics.
SCO UnixWare 7 was released since my last update. I don't plan on trying it. It incorporates [significant] SCO code into UnixWare, which is a really bad thing. Nevertheless, it's looking to be the de facto standard on x86 [commercial] Unix. It's funny really, because I've never read anything but bad things about SCO's Unix (e.g. worst Unix implementation ever).
This is pretty cool. It's at version 0.5 already, and it's the first public release. All this means is more applications for Linux [to me, at least]. Of course the importance of this project to Unix users will depend partly on Rhapsody's success.
I've purchased WABI which has made my transition to Linux complete. I have an integrated graphical desktop in CDE, and I can run SmartSuite 4.0 under WABI. And I have Netscape, KDE apps (who says you can't run KDE apps under CDE?), LyX, XSpread, asWedit, NEdit, Amaya, LessTif, xpdf, etc. I also bought a printer supported by WABI (I gave my other printer to my sister with the computer I recently bought her). Is there anything else? Yes! Games!
Next to WinDOS, Linux is probably the most popular gaming platform on the PC. There are quite a number of native games available for it, especially network-based games including Ultima Online and Quake II, though admittedly nowhere near as many games as are available for the WinDOS platform.
But there are other ways to play games under Linux, however. It's called emulation. There's Bochs, which allows you to run Windows 95 under Linux, DOSEmu, which can run Warcraft among many other games, and Wine, which can now run Tomb Raider, to add to the number of games available for Linux enthusiasts. And there's the legal-grey-area emulation of console (and legacy computers) games under Linux.
Additionally, the number of Linux users has been growing exponentially. Consequently there are more and more commercial applications and games being announced and made available for Linux everyday. Don't count it out.
Well, I've gotten into games again [as a result of not having any more problems with finding apps to run under Linux]. Unfortunately Linux still isn't the ideal gaming platform simply because there aren't as many games for it as, let's say, DOS, and emulation of DOS or Windows under Linux just to play games doesn't seem like an ideal situation. And though I have Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 and DirectX 5.0 (yes, that's 5.0 - I will post the binaries on my site on request), that isn't ideal either because of the high overhead of NT and general incompatibility of NT with DOS apps. So what did I end up doing? It's simple, really, and I avoided having to repartition my hard drive just to install DOS.
On top of one of my speakers are three DOS boot disks (look forward to a comparison of DOS variants soon). I have a FAT partition. I put all my games on the FAT partition, then I put one of my bootdisks in my floppy drive and boot to DOS, and there you go - no incompatibility problems! It's like DOS without having DOS! Works great! Whatever games don't run under NT I can run under DOS - and NO Windows 95!
During this time, I must brag, I also learned how to configure and use DOS (it's much simpler than Unix) - cool.
These are just entertaining (IMO) things I've seen on the web.
Changing an operating system means changing everything from under you. So changing the operating system is like trying to go in and transplant a person's brain. It's much easier to switch a word processor. It may be painful, but it's not that painful. You may have withdrawal symptoms. Once you have the operating system niche, you're really home free.
Maybe. And maybe this is why open source software tends to be so good: the only people who can 'afford' to create open source products are the top of the pyramid that do it because they enjoy it, not because they have to. No wonder free software is technically usually in a league of its own.
Having an idiot proof system is also convenient when yours truly temporarily, and inexplicably, becomes the functional equivalent of an idiot :-). Happens to the best of us. Better not as root.
...therefore a bootable CD-ROM with a Linux kernel built to detect and use the existing Windows swapfile. *Nobody*, and I mean *nobody* would object to having to hit the reset button to play a game. This is something that the Windows 'community' are very well used to doing on a very regular basis.
Remember, kids, if it runs Emacs, it's a computer. Otherwise, it's a peripheral.
I don't know about you guys out there, but I find legitimate ownership of M$ [products] more morally objectionable than pirating their products. I fortunately successfully abandoned all M$ products on my machine a couple years ago. These opinions are my own as I don't want M$ to try and recall Slashdot.
Sun has begun to aggressivly price a developer's suite, which is even cheaper if you buy it along with a workstation. With this move Sun is trying to keep their market share, by not only keeping the hardware, but developing products that will keep people around-cheap.
Running Scared Chris DiBona Fri Mar 6 13:36:10 1998 EST chris@svlug.org http://www.slvug.org
Linux has begun to aggressively price a developer's suite, which is even cheaper if you download it directly from the internet. With this move, Linux is crushing Sun by giving away C, C++, Java, Pascal, Fortran, Objective C, Perl, Python, Eiffel, Basic, COBOL, TCL, TK, SCHEME, LISP and others. The Linux community, upon hearing of the threat from Sun was quoted as saying 'Bwah! A ha ha ha ha ha haw! We'll even support it for free!'
The continual adoption of Windows NT will lead to world domination but not by Microsoft - more on this later. I've decided to make a move to OpenBSD [once 2.3 is available on CD] for several reasons that I won't mention here (well maybe I will - two of the reasons are: dev. model, cool name). Linux will stay, of course, along with NT :(. Yeah, and the Netscape source code was released if you don't already know about the greatest event in free software history. Oh, and I was readmitted to Valparaiso U. The next two or three weeks will determine whether or not I will return there. And, believe it or not, I got a job (which also means I'm also probably getting a girlfriend soon ;-) - scary - I won't have any time for my hobbies again until, hmm, I retire? I think I've found the language I want to start programming in - Pascal - about time, eh?
Copyright © 1997 Mark Santos. All rights reserved.