Hi,
I too run Linux on several systems
at home and office. I've been involved in
part of it's development. It's a very
powerful and hardware friendly OS
and it's about the most economical
unix/OS for the money. Time to invest
not withstanding.
Unfortunately, unix is still not ready for
the 'masses'. It doesn't wrap the
user in a helpful gui or protect
them from 'rming' or 'mving'
themselves into oblivion.
X. I think it's about the best example
of platform independent windowing system.
I'm not a fan of the 'darkside',
I don't think it's really ready
for the 'masses' either.
But marketing has it's advantages
and MS has taken advantage of it
quite nicely. Many home users have
200Mhz PentiumPRO configurations with
32mb of memory and gazillion gigabyte
harddrives. Why?!?! because the OS needs
it. Why?!?!?! because the OS manufacturer
built it into it's product. Why?!?! ask
the razorblade manufacturers, they've been
doing that for years. Build it and they will
buy.
I'd have to put my plug in for the WIntel
port. It's ashame we can't keep a small,
lean, mean, contesting machine, free of the
overhead of a balloned gui based OS. Ascii
text is fine for the contesting we do. Nice
big 80x24 character displays staring at us during
the wee hours of the morning.
NO! Don't get me wrong,
I work on a tactical system, with a gui and lots of
windows and a mouse/trackball, and it is life and death
based and it did cost millions of dollars to develop.
But, it was built buy several teams of engineers and
it was developed over several years. Here with
CT you have a development team of one? two? and I'm
sure the developer has a life other than catering
to the whims of HAM contesters. I'm sure he doesn't
depend on the less-than-$100.US per legal copy of
CT sold. He'd be pretty well off if he got
paid for every bootleg copy of CT out there.
CT is more than sufficient for contesting. It
might need a few STR(SoftwareTroubleReport)'s
cleaned up. Now those of us using 386 & 486 with
DOS have to look for a suitable W95/NT platform
to run WIntel software on and go through the
gyrations of RF silencing it.
We know what opinions are like and these
have been mine. Sorry, I've had way too
much sugar and caffeine and no one came
buy with my tapioca and medication.
73 DE KR6NA
(the operator formally known as KE6WEO)
Lawrence G. Dobranski & Carol Cantlon wrote:
>
> Ken
>
> I know that you have started down the road towards a WinIntel port, but is
> it to late to switch to Linux???? using X-Windows....
>
> Win98 will be released in June, with NT 5.0 following by 4th quarter 98 and
> the changes at the driver level are significant....and you'll need a Pentium
> 100 with 32M of RAM as a minimum.
>
> Linux is almost free, runs well even on 386 machines, runs well in 8 M of
> RAM; can support multiple serial interfaces; device drivers are a lot
> easier; the source code for the operating system is available and your work
> would never be made obsolete by a new operating system revision....
>
> I wonder what others reaction to this would be....
>
> What ever the response good luck....
>
> 73
> Lawrence, VA3LGD
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: Ken Wolff <kwolff@ultranet.com>
> To: ct-user@contesting.com <ct-user@contesting.com>
To: <ct-user@contesting.com>
> Date: March 18, 1998 18:43
> Subject: [ct-user] Schedule Update
>
> >I have the device driver tools in place to write real device drivers for
> >both NT and 95. Having spoken with several Windows driver developers, I am
> >confident I can do a real port to WIN95/NT. The plan is to start with CW
> >sending (including sending from the paddle) to the LPT port. Next comes a
> >DVP driver, followed by Sound Blaster support. After that, I will rebuild
> >the user interface as a true the Windows GUI.
> >
> >My expected timetable is:
> >
> >CW sending 5/98
> >DVP 6/98
> >SoundBlaster 7/98
> >Real GUI 9/98
> >Full release 1/99
> >
> >Thanks for sticking with me.
> >
> >
> >Ken K1EA <k1ea@contesting.com>
> >
> >--
> >Submissions: ct-user@contesting.com
> >Administrative requests: ct-user-REQUEST@contesting.com
> >WWW: http://www.contesting.com/ct/
> >Questions: owner-ct-user@contesting.com
> >
>
> --
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> Administrative requests: ct-user-REQUEST@contesting.com
> WWW: http://www.contesting.com/ct/
> Questions: owner-ct-user@contesting.com
--
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(A Hughe Jorgen Company)
1106 2nd St./Suite 316/Encinitas, CA./92024
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