On Thu, 21 Mar 2002 17:16:48 +1000, "john rigby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Even Civilme (the resident expert on the Newbie list) THOUGHT he was putting > me in my place by telling me that in some Govt Dept they had some typistes > *actually* using Linux and olde Star Office. BUT then went on and said they > were *using* WorpdPerfect! (Sigh) A separate and quite expensive product > (but very good) except that nobody I know outside of Civilme has ever got it > to go on and work!
Wordperfect was one of the first things I got going myself after I started using GNU/Linux. I had next to no GNU/Linux experience at the time, but I found the installation to be a breeze. It is a free (as in beer) download. > 1. There is nothing like even FrontPage98 in the Linux world that I could > get to install/see working. One of them trashed one of my semi-successful > installs completely. > ( I also used the one IBM bought out, in its Doze form and it was full of > holes.) FrontPage98 is a joke. It is malware like this that is destroying the open Internet. > 2. If you are a serious business user, you NEED to be moving toward voice > recognition as you know. No, I don't know. Why would a business need voice recognition? I once tried using Viavoice for a whole year -- my productivity decreased despite my best efforts at speaking clearly (something which I've been told I'm good at) and training the software. These packages often advertise 90%-95% accuracy. This sounds great, until you realise that this means that every 10-20 words will be incorrectly interpreted. John Dvorak recently wrote an interesting article on the topic: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-826862.html. > 3. I don't think the available products that I used, when I did sometimes > get Manrake to *partially* work, are anywhere near commercial acceptability. > ( Star Office, KDE etc. incredibly poor presentation and often almost > non-existent help structures). What is your definition of "incredibly poor presentation"? Open source developers usually prefer to focus on code quality rather than polish. MS products are riddled with bugs and holes; you just don't notice them as much because the source is closed and they deliberately obscure things with bangs-and-whistles. StarOffice and KDE (to use your examples) are very usable and stable. They _do_ have extensive help structures, so either you didn't install them or you just didn't look properly. > 5. The 8.2 Mandrake had terrific writeups in the press - but in the light of > the failures being experienced by the geek contingent on this list already, > it is a loooooong way off being real-world ready. It is actually trashing > many previously hard-won working installations! Nothing is perfect. Go to a Windows list and I'll guarantee you that you'll see many users with problems. On this list, most problems are quite minor, and many messages are simple enquiries. > 6. It appears to me to be still the most fabulous Server System in the world > and great fun for the hobbyist/masochist, but I am still highly motivated by > the continual failures of the MS OS and their draconian plans for the > future, so will keep coming back in hopes. You seem awfully pessimistic for one who is "in hopes". > I believe you really need a Geek to get you online. Back in 2000, I decided to give Win2K a test drive. The CD refused to boot into the installer, even though I had installed numerous GNU/Linux distros this way. After pouring through the docs on the CD, I managed to make some discs from which to start the installation. IIRC, there were _five_ of them. Next, I started the installation with the discs. After an inordinate amount of time waiting for it to load (not because of the discs), I was thrown into a boring-looking text-based installer. It refused to accept my PartitionMagic-made NTFS partition, and proceeded to reformat it. After that, the installation began. A long time and several gigabytes (!) later, the installation was complete. I rebooted, but the system refused to boot into Win2K! I tried the whole installation process two more times before giving up. Then the geekiness kicked in. I remembered that LILO used to have a problem with booting from a partition that was past the 1024th cylinder on a drive. I deduced that Win2K might have the same problem (probably deliberately, to prevent users from dual-booting with a non-MS OS). I repartitioned my drive, making an NTFS partition at the beginning. After reinstalling Win2k, it booted to the GUI. Had I not been a geek, I would not hae known this relatively obscure tidbit of information. Getting online was the interesting bit. I have a Netcomm external modem (which are very common in Australia), which has a _real_ Rockwell (now Connexant) chipset. I tried a variety of different generic and vendor-issued drivers, and I tried just about every Dial-up-networking setting. After a week of trying and then giving up, my modem magically started to work. I still don't know why this happened. In Caldera OpenLinux, Red Hat and Mandrake, all I had to do to connect to the Internet was run KPPP (the KDE 1 version) and enter a few settings. Simple. > I believe that someone of (business) maturity will take over in Mandrake, or > one of the many others and do the bleedin' obvious ( to any experienced > businessman) and get out a productivity-designed package for the 90 million > non-Geeks who WANT an alternative and the 300 million who don't even know - > ( the ones who keep buying Apples!) Please tell me why you hate Macs so much. Enlighten me. Like with GNU/Linux, you obviously don't even know what Macs are about, and what's worse is that you don't even want to know. How can you criticise something you don't understand? -- Sridhar Dhanapalan "I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others." -- Linus Torvalds
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