In the movie, the intrepid crew abandon their mother ship and crash onto the surface of Mars in something looking like a bathysphere. To survive the hard landing the bathysphere has an inflated geodesic buffer.
If you are wanting to get up and going quickly, I would recommend using Mandrake 8.0.
I'm an NT user at work, Mandrake is quite close to Windows in terms of ease of use. Also if you have some Win32 apps you need to run, the latest wine will run quite nicely on Mandrake.
In the past I've used Yggdrasil, Slackware, RedHat and Mandrake. Mandrake is the best I've found so far in terms of ease of use.
Good Points
It will get you up and going very quickly.
If you upgrade your hardware it will upgrade the drivers (this is very cool).
Bad points for Mandrake are:-
Shipped version of GNU Privacy Guard version may be slightly unsafe in this distribution.
gcc 2.96 version is broken (Mandrake uses the same broken version of gcc that RedHat uses, see comments below on setting up a learning partition)
If you don't tell the installer you want to develop code, it will just install runtime libraries and it's a matter of searching through the software manager for the development libraries you want and installing them.
Debian perhaps ??
If you want to do development, learn a lot about configuration/system administration and discover the power of a free software project, get hold of Debian. The standard potato distribution is not easy to use, but there are some enhanced easier to install Debian distributions. At home I have a 'learning' partition with Debian on it and then Mandrake where I get things done.
Knuth's trilogy of computing blockbusters
Hardcover Slipcase edition (October 1998)
Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201485419 ; Dimensions (in inches): 5.03 x 10.06 x 6.97
Bertrand Meyer : Object Oriented Software Engineering
1296 pages 2nd Bk&Cd edition (March 21, 2000)
Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN: 0136291554 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.93 x 9.28 x 7.03
Frederick Brooks : Mythical Man Month
336 pages 2nd edition (July 1995)
Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201835959 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.75 x 9.07 x 6.11
... These are just some ideas. I think some of the 'Dummies' books are quite good if you want to get people starting off on particular subjects (eg Delphi, C++, HTML, XML, XHTML).
Cheers
Parsley Sage
Your points are good ones. Here's why I think we should bother with things like Wine.
1. Windows is free with PCs ?
Windows is not free with your PC. It is built into the price of your PC. At present this cost is small. PCs will get cheaper and then the relative system cost will rise.
2. Absolutely. Windows works and is heavily used.
All the more reason to be able to run apps from this system on other systems.
3. At the moment games are faster on PCs running Windows, but if we look at Moore's law, in 5 years, it might be possible to run Quake inside an emulator written in Java ! (well... maybe not).
4. Windows does run things better than Wine at the moment, but it will improve with time.
5. I've been able to run some games quite nicely without any trace of Windows on my Linux box. Again this will improve with time.
I think Wine is VERY useful.
Cheers
Parsley
VMWare is supported on commercial platforms. It has been ported to Win9x/NT. Plex'86 can't do that yet (it may some day soon, who knows).To my mind the most important thing in any company is not the product but the people.
VMWare no doubt have a pretty cluey team. They'll probably be able to use their collective knowledge to come up with some new clever emulator or other piece of software magic.
The real threat to VMWare would more likely come from someone taking Plex86, porting it Win9x and BSD and selling it as a bundled up package.
It's important to remember the cost/value of wrapping something in plastic and selling it. Think of Red Hat.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a similar idea ?
If you are wanting to get up and going quickly, I would recommend using Mandrake 8.0.
I'm an NT user at work, Mandrake is quite close to Windows in terms of ease of use. Also if you have some Win32 apps you need to run, the latest wine will run quite nicely on Mandrake.
In the past I've used Yggdrasil, Slackware, RedHat and Mandrake. Mandrake is the best I've found so far in terms of ease of use.
Good Points
Bad points for Mandrake are :-
- Shipped version of GNU Privacy Guard version may be slightly unsafe in this distribution.
- gcc 2.96 version is broken (Mandrake uses the same broken version of gcc that RedHat uses, see comments below on setting up a learning partition)
- If you don't tell the installer you want to develop code, it will just install runtime libraries and it's a matter of searching through the software manager for the development libraries you want and installing them.
Debian perhaps ?? If you want to do development, learn a lot about configuration/system administration and discover the power of a free software project, get hold of Debian. The standard potato distribution is not easy to use, but there are some enhanced easier to install Debian distributions. At home I have a 'learning' partition with Debian on it and then Mandrake where I get things done.Knuth's trilogy of computing blockbusters Hardcover Slipcase edition (October 1998) Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201485419 ; Dimensions (in inches): 5.03 x 10.06 x 6.97
Bertrand Meyer : Object Oriented Software Engineering 1296 pages 2nd Bk&Cd edition (March 21, 2000) Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN: 0136291554 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.93 x 9.28 x 7.03
Frederick Brooks : Mythical Man Month 336 pages 2nd edition (July 1995) Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201835959 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.75 x 9.07 x 6.11
Your points are good ones. Here's why I think we should bother with things like Wine. 1. Windows is free with PCs ? Windows is not free with your PC. It is built into the price of your PC. At present this cost is small. PCs will get cheaper and then the relative system cost will rise. 2. Absolutely. Windows works and is heavily used. All the more reason to be able to run apps from this system on other systems. 3. At the moment games are faster on PCs running Windows, but if we look at Moore's law, in 5 years, it might be possible to run Quake inside an emulator written in Java ! (well... maybe not). 4. Windows does run things better than Wine at the moment, but it will improve with time. 5. I've been able to run some games quite nicely without any trace of Windows on my Linux box. Again this will improve with time. I think Wine is VERY useful. Cheers Parsley
VMWare no doubt have a pretty cluey team. They'll probably be able to use their collective knowledge to come up with some new clever emulator or other piece of software magic.
The real threat to VMWare would more likely come from someone taking Plex86, porting it Win9x and BSD and selling it as a bundled up package.
It's important to remember the cost/value of wrapping something in plastic and selling it. Think of Red Hat.