Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:
> 
> Day Brown wrote:
> >
> > Well, if manifest.gz, or any of the man/info pages are
> > inconvenient, is there a way to port these *ascii* files
> > to dos, and use familiar dos tools to search, read, edit
> > them?
> 
> Sure.  Just gunzip and copy to a DOS partition.  No problem.
> 
> > One of the things that annoys me about Linux is how long
> > it takes to pull up informative text,
> 
> Linux is not the problem.  In Linux it takes me only a couple
> of seconds to pull up informative text.  In fact I find it
> easier to get useful information in Linux than in DOS.
The problem with Linux is that there is so *much* documentation. 
The advantage of dos docs is that they *dont* include the functionality
needed to support multiuser networks because it is a single user os.
DRDOS's 'DOSBOOK.EXE' uses an ANSI color scrollbar system that is far
easier to navigate than mono man. But of course, it has very little
about maintaining networks, permissions, mounting drives, or installing
printers. Hitting the 'print screen' button dont need much explanation. 

> > only slows down the interface
> 
> It sounds like you have overloaded your hardware with
> unnecessary bloat (eye candy?).  I use an old PC and
> it gets info plenty fast (because it runs a lean Linux).
Well, BL is in a class by itself. The first time I did 'man' was with
Redhat 5 on a 486. It took so long to pull up the pages I thought the
system was crashed and it was trashing the drive. 

The eye candy is unavoidable if I want the functionality to click on
links mentioned in email I've tried ximian and some of the other Linux
email tools, but there quite often seems to be some conflicts with the
way the browser wants to do things. This aint the fault of Linux per se,
but the way that email and webpages interact. I imagine that arachne
would have the same problems, but I cant use it anymore. A clue that
backwards compatability is being lost in favor of multimedia
applicaions.