Your right, firefox uses it's own cross platform image libraries... This is why firefox can display PNG images properly, while IE cannot. If they both used the same library functions, firefox couldn't display PNG properly either. If it encounters a file type it doesn't understand, it will offer to use an external program to view it, or save it, but it prompts you.
OpenOffice/Staroffice is no more buggy than msoffice... Having used both suites quite extensively i can quite honestly say both have more than their fair share of bugs. Wordperfect was always a vastly superior suite. On the other hand, i would feel ripped off having paid $400 for msoffice, yet $80 for staroffice doesn't seem quite so bad and $0 for openoffice means i can just delete it again and have lost nothing. Considering msoffice/openoffice are on a similar level right now in terms of bugs, but openoffice offers more features usefull to me (open fileformat which i can tweak in a text editor if i want to, regular expressions in find & replace, can use python as a macro language instead of forcing me to learn a new language that's useless for anything else, can be loaded and run from a usb stick on any computer i happen to be using and won't leave detritus in the registry, and runs the same on almost any os i might have access to)
Pagemaker i've never used, and Keynote i've barely glanced at. Latex is very powerfull but has quite a learning curve to go along with it.
Personally, i wouldn`t touch msoffice with a barge pole, openoffice is almost as bad, and i`d always use latex given the choice.
She'd probably have no issues installing anything either if you gave her something like Kentoo (kde graphical frontend for portage) and it's certainly very convenient being able to select packages from a large pre-supplied list instead of hunting around.
I have a similar situation, family members with gentoo boxes and i admin them... They can install apps themselves, but usually ask first. They have been asked not to remove anything that they haven't installed themselves.
MSI only really works for mass installation of packages...
It doesn't always remove things correctly. You don't have a usefull package list you can select apps from (debian dselect, suse yast for instance) Most apps are not available in MSI form.
Using the DVD/CD filesystems would also not work with windows... Windows will only bind such filesystems to devices it sees as being CD/DVD devices. Unix systems on the other hand, see all drives as block devices and will happily bind any filesystem to them.
But they won't... Microsoft knows they can screw people and get away with it, so that's exactly what they'l do. And their customers, wether they're big or small, will simply roll over and take it.
And also the fault of windows for not providing a proper package management system like virtually every other OS does. The OS should monitor what files are installed, and be able to remove them easily.
Ok, as unlikely as that sounds... I will try with a different disk, i have plenty of spare ones sitting around here. I do believe it is a maxtor disk too.
I might also try booting from a SCSI disk, since this machine has an unused SCSI controller.
The install/uninstall program of a given linux distro will often include a description as to what a particular app does, and based on this you can decide if you want to install/remove it or not... Also you can safely install it, play with it, and then remove it again cleanly without leaving detritus laying about the disk as you would on windows.
But apt-get downloads trusted checksummed packages from your os distributor, kinda like windows update.. If you trust the OS vendor enough to install it in the first place, then you can trust their packages too.
No versions of windows correctly support many modern video cards without manually downloading and installing drivers. The latest ATI and Nvidia cards are unsupported by windows and yet are picked up automatically by modern Linux distributions.
An average end user may be able to work his way through the install, but what happens when windows boots up in generic VESA mode and redraws the screen laughably slowly. Will the user realise they need to install proper drivers, or will they just assume the machine is slow?
As for monitor type, modern distributions auto detect the monitor, and already have video drivers included so the end user doesn't need to manually install them.
Video drivers aren't the only thing windows lacks by default.... If you have SATA then you need to press F5 at the right time early in the install, and load drivers from a floppy disk before windows will even install! This is totally unintuitive, and incredibly stupid that a modern sata based system would need to load drivers from floppy! Many modern systems don't even include floppy drives.
Also my Athlon64 system came with an onboard realtek gigabit ethernet adapter, 32-bit XP didn't support this by default so it installed the system without networking. I had to goto hardware manager, find the network card, click update drivers, and then type in the path where the drivers were located on a CD. Far from intuitive... Linux on the other hand, auto detected this network card.
99% of windows users never installed the OS, they merely recieved a box preinstalled and used it... Or they used recovery CD's, which are tailored to a particular configuration.
You could preinstall any OS, even gentoo and users would get along fine.
That's why the OS should come with _NONE_ of these apps when shipped by microsoft... Then OEM's such as Dell or HP can include whatever apps they want to...
Linus doesn't ship any browser with the kernel, it's the distro that packages everything together.
Well you can kill windowserver and run X11 under OSX, then you could run any unix windowmanager you like... Tho you'l lose the ability to run OSX specific graphical apps, as the OSX window system is very different to X11.
I have a dual boot Athlon64 system, running XP x64 edition and Gentoo Linux... The windows system will spontaneously reboot when playing games such as grand theft auto san andreas, and a few others (mostly those with heavy 3d graphics taking place) The linux install would happily play Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake3 and a few other games all day long...
Out of curiosity i installed UT2004 on windows aswell, and it would spontaneously reboot the system after a few minutes of gameplay, no aparrent reason and none of the system components appear to be overheating at all. Changing resolution, refresh rate, or changing anti aliasing settings etc, has no effect either.
I have the latest nvidia drivers on both systems, the windows drivers are WHQL certified.. Windows isn't using any other third party drivers, everything else is using the microsoft-supplied drivers from the installation CD.
Well this is a comparison performed by a for-profit commercial company... Do you really think they would publish the results if they were unfavourable towards the products of the company doing the comparison?
I'm sure they have done similar comparisons with NetBSD and whatever else, but the only comparisons that come out in their favour (or atleast don't show their products in a negative light) are the ones against fully features eyecandy-friendly modern linux distributions with all the bells and whistles.
Corporations who are large enough to pay for support, aren't likely to be using such old hardware in the first place... It's places like third world countries, and poor school districts that are likely to want to reuse such old machines, and they won't be able to afford commercial support. They rely on volunteers, and those volunteers are more likely to get support from the damn small linux website, or an irc channel etc.
But you'l still have to pay for the old version of windows/office.. People in poor countries want to minimise their costs, that's the primary reason they use such old hardware... A few dollars not spent on software can buy them more ram, or a faster cpu.
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Your right, firefox uses it's own cross platform image libraries...
This is why firefox can display PNG images properly, while IE cannot. If they both used the same library functions, firefox couldn't display PNG properly either.
If it encounters a file type it doesn't understand, it will offer to use an external program to view it, or save it, but it prompts you.
As are the drivers for ext2fs... So you have the same problem either way, microsoft arrogantly refusing to support anything they don't control.
OpenOffice/Staroffice is no more buggy than msoffice... Having used both suites quite extensively i can quite honestly say both have more than their fair share of bugs. Wordperfect was always a vastly superior suite.
On the other hand, i would feel ripped off having paid $400 for msoffice, yet $80 for staroffice doesn't seem quite so bad and $0 for openoffice means i can just delete it again and have lost nothing.
Considering msoffice/openoffice are on a similar level right now in terms of bugs, but openoffice offers more features usefull to me (open fileformat which i can tweak in a text editor if i want to, regular expressions in find & replace, can use python as a macro language instead of forcing me to learn a new language that's useless for anything else, can be loaded and run from a usb stick on any computer i happen to be using and won't leave detritus in the registry, and runs the same on almost any os i might have access to)
Pagemaker i've never used, and Keynote i've barely glanced at. Latex is very powerfull but has quite a learning curve to go along with it.
Personally, i wouldn`t touch msoffice with a barge pole, openoffice is almost as bad, and i`d always use latex given the choice.
We tended to call codeweavers when we needed support with running apps on their implementation of wine...
We had payed for support, and recieved it when we asked.
She'd probably have no issues installing anything either if you gave her something like Kentoo (kde graphical frontend for portage) and it's certainly very convenient being able to select packages from a large pre-supplied list instead of hunting around.
I have a similar situation, family members with gentoo boxes and i admin them...
They can install apps themselves, but usually ask first. They have been asked not to remove anything that they haven't installed themselves.
MSI only really works for mass installation of packages...
It doesn't always remove things correctly.
You don't have a usefull package list you can select apps from (debian dselect, suse yast for instance)
Most apps are not available in MSI form.
I don't think windows supports usbnet by default, does it?
Using the DVD/CD filesystems would also not work with windows...
Windows will only bind such filesystems to devices it sees as being CD/DVD devices.
Unix systems on the other hand, see all drives as block devices and will happily bind any filesystem to them.
But they won't...
Microsoft knows they can screw people and get away with it, so that's exactly what they'l do. And their customers, wether they're big or small, will simply roll over and take it.
Windows can't do that, microsoft are simply too arrogant to support any filesystems other than their own.
The Amiga used to do exactly as you describe however.
And also the fault of windows for not providing a proper package management system like virtually every other OS does.
The OS should monitor what files are installed, and be able to remove them easily.
Ok, as unlikely as that sounds...
I will try with a different disk, i have plenty of spare ones sitting around here.
I do believe it is a maxtor disk too.
I might also try booting from a SCSI disk, since this machine has an unused SCSI controller.
Format it using the livecd..
Windows will read a fat32 partition larger than 32GB, it just won't format it...
For that matter, older versions of windows will happily format such a partition too.
Windows and associated apps often make it difficult to keep user data or install othe
r apps on another drive than the one where windows is installed.
The install/uninstall program of a given linux distro will often include a description as to what a particular app does, and based on this you can decide if you want to install/remove it or not...
Also you can safely install it, play with it, and then remove it again cleanly without leaving detritus laying about the disk as you would on windows.
But apt-get downloads trusted checksummed packages from your os distributor, kinda like windows update..
If you trust the OS vendor enough to install it in the first place, then you can trust their packages too.
And creating slipstreamed windows install cd's is somehow easier than installing linux?
You have that the wrong way round...
No versions of windows correctly support many modern video cards without manually downloading and installing drivers. The latest ATI and Nvidia cards are unsupported by windows and yet are picked up automatically by modern Linux distributions.
An average end user may be able to work his way through the install, but what happens when windows boots up in generic VESA mode and redraws the screen laughably slowly. Will the user realise they need to install proper drivers, or will they just assume the machine is slow?
As for monitor type, modern distributions auto detect the monitor, and already have video drivers included so the end user doesn't need to manually install them.
Video drivers aren't the only thing windows lacks by default....
If you have SATA then you need to press F5 at the right time early in the install, and load drivers from a floppy disk before windows will even install! This is totally unintuitive, and incredibly stupid that a modern sata based system would need to load drivers from floppy! Many modern systems don't even include floppy drives.
Also my Athlon64 system came with an onboard realtek gigabit ethernet adapter, 32-bit XP didn't support this by default so it installed the system without networking. I had to goto hardware manager, find the network card, click update drivers, and then type in the path where the drivers were located on a CD. Far from intuitive...
Linux on the other hand, auto detected this network card.
99% of windows users never installed the OS, they merely recieved a box preinstalled and used it... Or they used recovery CD's, which are tailored to a particular configuration.
You could preinstall any OS, even gentoo and users would get along fine.
The difference is that Linus isn't doing the bundling...
What's closer to the linux distro's bundling apps, is Dell bundling apps on a preinstalled system.
For this reason, windows should be completely minimalist and it's upto the OEM's to bundle additional software if they choose to.
That's why the OS should come with _NONE_ of these apps when shipped by microsoft...
Then OEM's such as Dell or HP can include whatever apps they want to...
Linus doesn't ship any browser with the kernel, it's the distro that packages everything together.
Well you can kill windowserver and run X11 under OSX, then you could run any unix windowmanager you like...
Tho you'l lose the ability to run OSX specific graphical apps, as the OSX window system is very different to X11.
I have a dual boot Athlon64 system, running XP x64 edition and Gentoo Linux...
The windows system will spontaneously reboot when playing games such as grand theft auto san andreas, and a few others (mostly those with heavy 3d graphics taking place)
The linux install would happily play Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake3 and a few other games all day long...
Out of curiosity i installed UT2004 on windows aswell, and it would spontaneously reboot the system after a few minutes of gameplay, no aparrent reason and none of the system components appear to be overheating at all. Changing resolution, refresh rate, or changing anti aliasing settings etc, has no effect either.
I have the latest nvidia drivers on both systems, the windows drivers are WHQL certified.. Windows isn't using any other third party drivers, everything else is using the microsoft-supplied drivers from the installation CD.
Well this is a comparison performed by a for-profit commercial company...
Do you really think they would publish the results if they were unfavourable towards the products of the company doing the comparison?
I'm sure they have done similar comparisons with NetBSD and whatever else, but the only comparisons that come out in their favour (or atleast don't show their products in a negative light) are the ones against fully features eyecandy-friendly modern linux distributions with all the bells and whistles.
Corporations who are large enough to pay for support, aren't likely to be using such old hardware in the first place...
It's places like third world countries, and poor school districts that are likely to want to reuse such old machines, and they won't be able to afford commercial support. They rely on volunteers, and those volunteers are more likely to get support from the damn small linux website, or an irc channel etc.
But you'l still have to pay for the old version of windows/office..
People in poor countries want to minimise their costs, that's the primary reason they use such old hardware...
A few dollars not spent on software can buy them more ram, or a faster cpu.