Pine is superb. One interesting thing is the way experienced users swear by it, but complete beginners appreciate it too.
Recently a user who was very keen on their flashy web interface mail account (which they used on Windows) happened to walk by whilst I was using pine. Their reaction? "You can forward a message just by pressing F and typing their address? That's so easy !!" People like not having to wade through dialog boxes to perform each operation.
I haven't used Sketch so I don't know how it compares, but Tgif has saved me many times. I tried lots of commercial vector graphics packages and found that it took ages to draw diagrams with any of them. Tgif may not look as impressive, but its no-nonsense design makes it orders of magnitude quicker to use. I like the way it concentrates on the features you actually need and puts them readily at hand.
Hmmm, I'd rather it didn't use Motif myself. For one thing, Motif isn't free so you have to consume memory with statically linked libraries or use Lesstif instead.
What about Qt? Motif looks positively old fashioned next to Qt. I'd also love to see the extra level of key binding translation used by Motif be removed from nedit (osfPageUp etc).
Nedit is a great editor though, that would be my choice too.
Well... there's ease of use for newbies, perhaps a smaller memory footprint, a proper GUI, default key bindings which don't cause RSI, and extensibility without having to learn LISP.
The key thing I want from a text editor is the ability to edit text in a nice way, not embedded news readers or psychoanalysis software.
Emacs is very impressive, but I feel the design has been in need of modernisation since window systems made it unnecessary to do everything in one program.
People in general seem to mean whatever comes on the CD when they say OS, but this is obviously getting inaccurate.
At some point I noticed Sun called Solaris an "Operating Environment", and I've started using this convenient term to mean everything including utilities, window system etc. That way "OS" can just refer to the kernel.
Then we have "distributions" which include applications as well as the OE, although of course when everything's free the distinction is a little fuzzy.
Right. I do think that the upgrade process described by Dr. Crane is amazingly cool, and quite possibly the way things will be done in the future whenever a non-technical user has to sysadmin their own box. Upgrading Slackware by comparison requires careful planning to say the least!
The problems which I experienced with a large Debian installation were because apt-get wasn't used to switch cleanly from one stable version to another. We had Slink but people needed newer versions of certain bits of software, so the sysadmins grabbed them from the unstable tree with apt-get (it was a rule that one had to use package management if a package existed).
However the new software was linked with different libraries and had lots of dependencies, so all kinds of other things got fetched as well. Now we can't say "we've got version X" because we don't really know what we've got!
By comparison, when this problem occurs with Slackware (which it does, since they've been slow with stable releases in the past also), I grab only the new program a user has asked for, compile it from source and stick it in/usr/local or/opt - keeping it clearly separate from the distribution, which remains the same as on my CD. Folks who need the new program can pick up the new path, others aren't affected. When I upgrade the whole distribution to a newer Slackware I go through/usr/local and see what can be retired since it now comes with the distribution itself. It's a bit more work for the sysadmin but I find it a very safe, reliable method.
Also to clarify what I said about apt-get "breaking" things, I didn't really mean due to any fault or inconsistency in Debian itself, even the "unstable" version. The difficulties arise simply because bits of software people didn't expect to be upgraded changed to newer versions, with slightly incompatible config file formats. The stuff which broke were the users' startup scripts - it felt like a lot of effort just to avoid software rot, never mind getting on with actual work.
Essentially apt-get is great technology but seems to encourage rather dangerous things, at least to a real stability-devotee such as myself!
It seems to me the Debian folks do a lot of great development work, but aren't so good at actually distributing the software in a convenient, timely form.
apt-get is cool for developers but not good for business environments, where you just can't have things changing under your feet and goodness knows what breaking all the time.
Also although I do have T1 net access I much prefer to have a physical CD with the distribution I'm using on it. That way I know where I stand and won't be screwed if I need to do an install or grab some source when there's no net access available for some reason.
Anyway, good luck with Slackware. The new version is really splendid - an up to date kernel, glibc 2.1, KDE 1.2, October GNOME and so on. Best of all it has nice standard ASCII configuration files and rock solid stability - great if you know what you're doing and don't want the distribution to screw things up in an attempt to be overly clever.
At first sight it's surprising that a tiny development team can roll out stable releases faster than the huge army of Debian developers... but then I think about the problems maintaining conceptual integrity in committees and realise it's not surprising at all...
For a newbie I would recommend RH/Mandrake/Caldera instead, because the installers do a better job of holding the user's hand. The smart money's on Slackware though!
> Figure out what application was running when your system hung, tell your support provider, and get them to fix it.
If the system goes down, it's because of a problem with the OS (poorly behaved applications shouldn't be able to crash a robust operating system, unless running as root).
So whilst it's interesting to find out which application exposed the bug, you still need enough clout to make your closed source OS vendor do something about it...
Slashdot Mirror
Recently a user who was very keen on their flashy web interface mail account (which they used on Windows) happened to walk by whilst I was using pine. Their reaction? "You can forward a message just by pressing F and typing their address? That's so easy !!" People like not having to wade through dialog boxes to perform each operation.
-- David.
-- Lightstorm.
-- Lightstorm.
What about Qt? Motif looks positively old fashioned next to Qt. I'd also love to see the extra level of key binding translation used by Motif be removed from nedit (osfPageUp etc).
Nedit is a great editor though, that would be my choice too.
-- Lightstorm.
Well... there's ease of use for newbies, perhaps a smaller memory footprint, a proper GUI, default key bindings which don't cause RSI, and extensibility without having to learn LISP.
The key thing I want from a text editor is the ability to edit text in a nice way, not embedded news readers or psychoanalysis software.
Emacs is very impressive, but I feel the design has been in need of modernisation since window systems made it unnecessary to do everything in one program.
-- Lightstorm.
Fair enough, but I'm still surprised Hemos forgot to mention you can't view it under linux, given the known Slashdot demographic...
At some point I noticed Sun called Solaris an "Operating Environment", and I've started using this convenient term to mean everything including utilities, window system etc. That way "OS" can just refer to the kernel.
Then we have "distributions" which include applications as well as the OE, although of course when everything's free the distinction is a little fuzzy.
The problems which I experienced with a large Debian installation were because apt-get wasn't used to switch cleanly from one stable version to another. We had Slink but people needed newer versions of certain bits of software, so the sysadmins grabbed them from the unstable tree with apt-get (it was a rule that one had to use package management if a package existed).
However the new software was linked with different libraries and had lots of dependencies, so all kinds of other things got fetched as well. Now we can't say "we've got version X" because we don't really know what we've got!
By comparison, when this problem occurs with Slackware (which it does, since they've been slow with stable releases in the past also), I grab only the new program a user has asked for, compile it from source and stick it in /usr/local or /opt - keeping it clearly separate from the distribution, which remains the same as on my CD. Folks who need the new program can pick up the new path, others aren't affected. When I upgrade the whole distribution to a newer Slackware I go through /usr/local and see what can be retired since it now comes with the distribution itself. It's a bit more work for the sysadmin but I find it a very safe, reliable method.
Also to clarify what I said about apt-get "breaking" things, I didn't really mean due to any fault or inconsistency in Debian itself, even the "unstable" version. The difficulties arise simply because bits of software people didn't expect to be upgraded changed to newer versions, with slightly incompatible config file formats. The stuff which broke were the users' startup scripts - it felt like a lot of effort just to avoid software rot, never mind getting on with actual work.
Essentially apt-get is great technology but seems to encourage rather dangerous things, at least to a real stability-devotee such as myself!
apt-get is cool for developers but not good for business environments, where you just can't have things changing under your feet and goodness knows what breaking all the time.
Also although I do have T1 net access I much prefer to have a physical CD with the distribution I'm using on it. That way I know where I stand and won't be screwed if I need to do an install or grab some source when there's no net access available for some reason.
Anyway, good luck with Slackware. The new version is really splendid - an up to date kernel, glibc 2.1, KDE 1.2, October GNOME and so on. Best of all it has nice standard ASCII configuration files and rock solid stability - great if you know what you're doing and don't want the distribution to screw things up in an attempt to be overly clever.
At first sight it's surprising that a tiny development team can roll out stable releases faster than the huge army of Debian developers... but then I think about the problems maintaining conceptual integrity in committees and realise it's not surprising at all...
For a newbie I would recommend RH/Mandrake/Caldera instead, because the installers do a better job of holding the user's hand. The smart money's on Slackware though!
If the system goes down, it's because of a problem with the OS (poorly behaved applications shouldn't be able to crash a robust operating system, unless running as root).
So whilst it's interesting to find out which application exposed the bug, you still need enough clout to make your closed source OS vendor do something about it...