Re: Fw: [Hampshire] Killer Apps for Linux

> Windows I find easy to use. Yes you have to know where to find the
> drivers but this is not difficult.

That's just a familiarity argument; I could just as easily have said
"Linux I find easy to use. Yes you have to know where to find the drivers
but this is not difficult". Your argument is that you know where to get
the Windows drivers but you don't know where to get the Linux drivers,
ergo Windows is inherently easier to use than Linux. But that is spurious
in extremis; if you don't know where to get the drivers, you'll find it
difficult - whatever the OS.

> Even if drivers are not loaded it sort of
> works for the things I often do.

And Windows usually fails for the sort of things I do.

Here's an example - I have a Mustek 1200UB scanner.

Windows 98 tells me that the cable is broken.
Windows 2000 tells me that the cable is broken.
Windows XP tells me that the cable is broken.
Linux runs up sane and scans things for me.

> For someone who does not run servers and just uses a desktop machine and
> likes a graphical desktop because I find many of the command lines in
> Linux
> not yet understandable because of my DOS background Linux is not user
> friendly while to me the Windows system is.

I have no idea what you're talking about there.

I also have a DOS background. I now do things with shell commands that I
used to do with DOS commands before Microsoft broke piping. The slashes go
the other way, but it's really not a huge change between the two
environments.

Compare that to the paradigm change between a point-and-click GUI and a
command line; I really don't understand how you can say that your CLI
problems are *because of* a DOS background.

> I lost an extended partition last week there was no way that I could have
> retrieved the lost data in Linux

That might be true - but it does *not* imply that there was no way someone
with a little familiarity with Linux could have salvaged the drive -
indeed, Linux is my first point of call for data recovery. Here's an
example - I recently had to salvage a load of data off a Mac G4. I found a
couple of programmes for Windows that *claimed* they could mount a HFS+
filesystem - but there was no way of finding out without paying real
money. Linux merely required me to load the hfsplus module...

> but I was able to find written windows
> software that could do it.

You could have found Linux software as well. That you didn't is entirely
due to your approach to the problem. I don't know what your drive problem
was, but I'd wager that most if not all of the softare you actually needed
was already on your machine.

> Knoppix was the quicker solution.

Knoppix is usually the complete solution.

> In another case I had some data on one disk which needed copying to
> another.
> I connected the drives to the machine up and thought I try to do the
> copying
> in Linux as it was a dual boot system. The connected drive was
> unmountable
> in Linux without putting in various commands which I would have had to
> look
> up (if I knew where to look).

Familiarity argument again. Just because you didn't look for info, it
doesn't mean that the job is difficult. Linux has support for an enormous
range of filesystems. The same cannot be said for Windows - Netware file
system, anyone?

> I switched the machine off and did the job
> using BartPe xp on a CD.

I'll bet that took longer to boot than it would have taken you to fire up
a web browser and point it at Google...

> I tried putting Ubunto on a laptop with 128MB of memory it failed. I know
> there are GURU's are would be able to do this with no problem. Putting
> Windows 98 on this machine was no problem.

That'll be apples and apples, then. A modern installation of Linux that
declares a minimum requirement more than you've given it, against an
antique that has been EOLed by its manufacturer, and can no longer be
updated...

I have a laptop. It's a P233 with 32MB of RAM and a 4GB drive (it won't
recognise anything bigger than that - I tried). I run Whitebox Linux on it
- a rebuild of RedHat Enterprise.

Now how do you imagine Vista will get on if I try to install it on that
machine?

> Each system Windows and Linux have their strengths and weaknesses where
> different users are concerned.

That's true. And those strengths and weaknesses are much more apparent
when the comparisons are objective.

> At the moment I am looking forward to watching films using mplayer on SUSE
> 10.2. But I have to do the reading on how to first.

And I have a choice of mplayer, xine, or vlc, depending on which I happen
to prefer at the time.

> In windows I installed
> BSplayer and the various codecs with no problem. In less than 5 minutes.

I have a number of videos that were unwatchable in Windows until I
installed vlc. Being Free Software, you can do that porting thang. But
you'd have to do just as much reading whether you installed it on Windows
or Linux.

Vic.