[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alex Martelli) writes: > Paul Rubin <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Really, I just want to buy a new > > computer, turn it on, and have everything there. That's generally > > impossible without running satanware from Redmond > > The princes of insufficient light from Cupertino will in fact be very > happy to sell you such computers,
I actually do sometimes advise nontechnical people to buy those things and run the installed software since GNU/Linux is really not there yet with a number of types of apps, and is more of a maintenance headache. But if I bought one myself, I'd feel oblige to reformat the hard drive to get rid of the darkware (= no source) just like I do with a PC. I've played with that notion at different times since the hardware is actually rather nice. > and _their_ definition of "everything" > includes a bit more than the Redmonders' (e.g., Python is there, perl is > there, gcc is there, so is Apache, a good development GUI-based IDE, Oh cool, you mean emacs/gud/gdb. > emacs, a solid firewall, a _usable_ Terminal/commandline program to run > bash or tcsh on, ...), Yes, shell mode in Emacs works fine, I haven't had much need to use anything else. Xterm also works. > though it's no doubt still missing many pieces > that you or I might want as parts of *our* "everything" (gvim rather > than just vim, I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be... I remember someone explaining "you can't spell vile without vi". > GUI/IDEs for Python, I remember there was a gud interface for Python but it didn't work pretty well. There's also IDLE which is pretty crude and flaky. I think I'll just wait for Pypy deployment before worrying about this situation too much. Is there something else I can download? > Python add-ons such as numarray, > gmpy, ctypes, ...) -- all of those you still have to download and > install, just as you would for the satanware. That's unfortunate, that stuff should be included with Python. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list