Misc. Ramblings

But first, this message. I've been following the America's Cup (or follow the link here) races via the web since no one seems to be televising anything on TV about it yet. Even more frustrating is that the Hawaii team Abracadabra2000 is not doing well. They are 8th out of 11 at the end of the first round with a record of 4 wins and 6 loses. The Italian team, Prada Challenge, is a perfect 10 and 0. If things don't change soon, it may be a New Zealand vs. Italy cup race! Unfortunately, the only thing that would be proven by such a race is that them who has the money, wins...

And now, this. You may have noticed the new email address link at the top of the page. It took me two days to get it going (an eternity in Internet time) so feel free to start sending those cards and letters in. Replies, albeit not necessarily prompt, are guaranteed. Your mileage may vary. Objects are larger than the appear. The door is ajar. The dog ate my diskette. And now my first official email (Brian was actually the first but that doesn't count *grin*). This in from John Doucette. He writes in reply from my question about installing Win98SE onto a clean drive if you don't have the retail version to install from. He writes:

Hi Dan

Got the link to your page from Brian. I have only read the current week so far but looks good to me.

I also saw Sports Night this week and thought it was one of the best written episodes of any show I have seen in a very long time.

I am as I write this working on an install of Win98 Upgrade. You can use the Win3.1 disks as an upgrade product. As I recall Win95 only wanted to see Disk 1 of Win 3.1 but Win98 just asked me for disks 1,2,4, and 5. Too bad Win98 isn't like Dos upgrades which if you use the /g switch acts like full version of Dos.

John Doucette

Thanks John for the information and the kind words. I think that Sports Night may be one of the better, if not the best written series this season. It seems to me that Frasier lost its edge last year and has not regained it yet. And Ally can go off into the deep end sometimes while exploring her psychological problems.

As to the install, what I ended up doing was using a copy of the commercial version of the original Win98 (is there a term now for this version - First Edition?) first, then used the upgrade to get to Win98SE. And as DrKeyboard has said, MS is getting ridiculous in the length of the product keys now-a-days. They are long and prone to miskeying (is that a word?).

And now my children, gather round while I begin the scary tale of how I installed Linux and learned to love the bomb. But to those who are wise, RUN! Run for you lives!

Not being one to scare easily, I figured I would see what all of the hubbub was about and bought a copy of Caldera's Linux 2.2 on the advice of several reviews which said that it was the easiest distribution to install. And I guess that (the install) could be true if the hardware you have matches what is on the very small compatibility list. Unfortunately, if you have a video card less than 5 years old the GUI-based install won't work. Which is still OK, its just not as easy.

On the other hand, if you were planning on using Linux as a desktop operating system as a replacement for Windows, think again. Because you need to get KDE up and running so that you can use the StarOffice office suite or WordPerfect. Either of which you would need to have to actually do some work on. So, the first problem is hardware compatibility.

The second problem is that if you can't get the GUI running, everything else becomes long and sleepless nights learning how to change configuration files. Many of which are hidden from you so you won't change them. And in the case of one of the communications programs (which actually runs under KDE), a file needs to be there, but it has to be empty...

If you do get the GUI running, which I did eventually after playing email tag with Caldera support for a couple of weeks (they no longer talk to me because their "free" support structure literally includes a ceiling on questions) then you get to see all of the bugs in programs designed to run under Linux. Bugs? you say. Yes bugs. These programs that run under Linux are FULL of bugs. While the Linux kernel may be rock solid, almost everything else looks like it was written by a six year old.

Over and above the bugs is the fact the even when the software runs, its not as easy nor as powerful as what runs under Windows. Say what you will about MS Office, but I can't find anything better. And MS Office stands way above StarOffice 5.1.

So the moral of the story my children is that you can fool some of the people all of time, and all of the people some of the time, but Linux, as a replacement for Windows, has no clothes.

Have a Happy and Safe Halloween! See you Monday.