On Fri, 24 Jan 2003 17:21, you wrote: > > Comment: > > I just had a friend the other night try to upgrade a Windows98 system > > to WindowsXP. The installer Wizard let him without any complaint. No > > warnings about compatibility issues or anything. He then installed a > > wireless card with drivers and that install trashed his system. When he > > went to recover using the supplied XP tools it further trashed his > > system so he could not even boot. He called tech support for the > > wireless card and was told it is an operating system error and once he > > got that fixed just download the newest drivers from the website. Some > > upgrade path, a little more "heavy lifting" type programming all around > > would have saved my friend a frustrating couple of days. > > I also wish that every OS would give me the same upgrade path debian gives > me.
I'm not sure where this is going, and I may regret this.... I've just this minute finished upgrading a Pentium from Woody to Unstable. Taken singly, it was easy enough I guess, but I'd hate to do ten of them. OTOH, RHL with which I'm much more familiar, is a piece of cake in comparison, especially with lots of them. Sure, there's a lot to like in Debian, but the installer sure isn't one of them. > > Quote from article: > > "I still believe Linux is an extension of the Unix paradigm. It's a > > command-line-focused approach that's not particularly designed to be > > user friendly. The Windows approach is very different. > > Read: windows is not scriptable. Not _quite_ true. Some years ago I write a script (standard dosish batch file) to pack some data up and send it off to an MVS system using the standard NT ftp client. However, I never found anything to compare with what I could do in OS/2 where I could easily customise its equivalent to the Windows registry. > > > I will say that > > the adoption of Linux is likely to be bounded by how many companies are > > happy with Unix. Will it have an ability to be persuasive to people that > > it's a more cost-effective version of Unix? Yes. For us the key > > challenge in 2003 will be speaking to Unix users about why they ought > > to use Windows on Intel rather than Linux on Intel." > > I always thought that it was easier to write a GUI to a scriptable system > than to make a GUI system scriptable... > > > Aparantly I was right. As best I can figure it, Bill hasn't tried. Either that, or the facility is an extra-charge item. Most people would regard OS/2 s a GUI-based system, though in truth you can run it without a GUI or even replace the GUI with another. I've done both. And, it's well scriptable. You can do almost anything in REXX (a standard, fully-documented component of the base OS) that you can do in Perl (and you can do almost anything in Perl you can do in REXX). -- Cheers John Summerfield Microsoft's most solid OS: http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/ Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb
