[RndTbl] Missed the meeting...

John Lange john.lange at open-it.ca
Wed Sep 13 17:41:00 CDT 2006


I also regret that I missed the meeting but I have one question which
was probably asked at the meeting.

Instead of going Windows and kludging it with *nix apps, why not go
Linux and run the one or two things you need from Windows with Wine?

I see from the slides that drivers were a major part of your motivation
so that obviously wouldn't be solved with Wine but that seems to be less
and less of an issue these days as pretty much all the major device
makers are releasing drivers for Mac and Linux. Not knowing specifically
what devices are giving you grief its hard for me to judge.

You did mention printers; I haven't had a problem with printer drivers
for quite a while now especially HP printers which have drivers shipped
with most every distro now.

I recently installed Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on a machine and I
was so impressed I've been installing it on all my desktop machines. So
far I put it on two laptops (an old Toshiba satellite pro, and an IBM
Thinkpad T42), in both cases everything, and I mean _everything_ worked
right out of the box (yes, including the ATI drivers for onboard video
card and the dual head display, onboard Wifi etc.)

I fear you switched just when Linux was finally getting good on the
desktop....

Of course, that being said Windows does have its uses. Besides being the
number one platform for spyware it also makes a pretty good gaming
machine. ;) In fact I keep one around for just that purpose.

John

On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 17:12 -0500, Gilbert E. Detillieux wrote:
> Tim Lavoie wrote:
> > I was hoping to go, but couldn't make it. How *does* Gilbert make make
> > a happy transition. (and of course, why?)
> 
> I've updated the meeting write-up online to include the slides of my 
> talk and bookmarks for the various utilities I described...
> 
> http://www.muug.mb.ca/meetings/06-07.html#sep
> 
> > I have to use MS-everything for work, but do use putty, Cygwin and VNC
> > for at least accessing remote Linux systems or the Cygwin shell
> > utilities where I can. 
> 
> We're pretty much on the same page, then.  I also mentioned a virtual 
> desktop utility called "Virtual Dimension", the "True X-Mouse Gizmo for 
> Windows", and several handy extensions for Thunderbird (a couple of 
> which work in Firefox too), which I've found useful to add.
> 




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