Baslinux mailing list

[Lee Forrest <lforrestster AT gmail.com>]

This deserved a better response, but I had to do some
websearching first, because Ron refers to some things I knew
nothing about.

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 01:27:49PM +1000, Ron Clarke wrote:
> Hi Lee,
> 
> On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 14:53:54 +0000, Lee Forrest wrote:
> 
> >> I would agree with "inferior", but it is still useful for
> >> a whole variety of purposes. I still use it daily - my
> >> business runs almost entirely in DOS.
> 
> > It has some neat apps that should be ported to linux.
> 
>    Agreed, and vice versa !
> 
>    And there are.  :)

Like what? I'm not counting utilities that make it possible for linux
to deal with DOS files/filesystems etc.

> And in my view, the best DOS prog that I would like to see ported to
> Linux is Arachne.

wikipedia:

Arachne is a full-screen [24]Internet suite containing a         
graphical [25]web browser, [26]email client, and dialer. It      
primarily runs on [27]DOS based operating systems, but includes  
a few preliminary builds for [28]Linux. Arachne was originally   
created by Michael Polak (under the label xChaos software, later 
renamed to [29]Arachne Labs) in the [30]C language and compiled  
using [31]Borland C++ 3.1 compiler, but since been released      
under the [32]GPL as Arachne GPL.                                

Arachne is currently the most advanced graphical web browser     
available for DOS as it supports many file formats, protocols    
and standards. It is also capable of displaying between [33]CGA  
640x200, two color and [34]VESA 1024x768, high color modes.      
Arachne is specialized for aged systems which do not have any    
[35]windowing systems installed.                                 

/quote

(The linux link is to the wikipedia linux page, not to a page
with information about the linux port.)

Have to say that doesn't interest me a bit. I don't like monolithic
apps like that. I want my web browser to be a web browser and my email
client to be an email client and my internet connections to be done by
a seperate utility. The html-rendering part I'd like to be a seperate
utility, as well as the image-displaying part.

Nor am I interesting in letting myself being dragged around by M$
web browser and web-page designers.

I'm refuse to to waste my time and resources installing and configuring new 
software
and hardware because some business wants to display some new kind of 
eye/candy.

Arachne is, it says above, very advanced. But it won't be if it isn't 
constantly
changing for the above reasons.

I'm sick of it. Links is a good browser. If I go to a page that doesn't make 
sense in
it, or has most of the text embedded in images, or that requires one to 
install an
executable, etc, etc, that site is _history_. There's a hundred others that 
have the
same information but don't squander resources like that.

I do not care what IE can do. In fact, what it can do is have sexual
intercourse with itself. :-)

HTML 1.0 is just _fine_. Text and static images. Like a magazine. That's
enough to convey, effectively, all the information that anyone really
needs about anything. Music can be sent in written form, standard notation
or tablature or whatever. News/talk radio can be transcribed.

> But it needs someone who speaks C, and is able to
> commit the time.

I am thinking about cutting my work week in half and studying
C and assembly. Not to learn to write applications, etc, because there are
more than enough great ones already in existence, but to learn to
modify and adapt and trim them down.

But I am not going to help anyone try to keep up with M$. 

If I put 10-20 hours a week into it, I could probably learn enough to do
what I want in a year or less. I have "The C Programming Language" by 
Kernighan
and Ritchie, ANSI edition. And the answer book. And the two-volume "C for 
Dummies".
And an assembly course in PDF that uses free and open source apps.

But writing full applications is serious, full-time work, and I'm not into it.
Just a tweak here and delete there to make a baselib support an app or an app
work with a baselib. And to remove the fat or fix a bug.

> > My first OS was XP.
> 
>    Oh, bummer !

It's wonder I wasn't frightened away from computers altogether, isn't it?

The more I explored it, the more I discovered that they were _deliberately_
obscuring its mechanics from me, and that really pissed me off.

It had a sort of commandline, the corpse of the DOS interface,
and they made it as scary as possible, with this deep, glowing
black screen which I think was not just the black of no image,
but a 3-D sort of blackness that was designed to be intimidating.

They didn't want you playing with the internals of _their_ OS.

And that MicroSoft Knowlege Base was a complete waste of time.
All I ever accomplished there was becoming more confused, and it
soon became obvious that this was what they wanted: "You are just
a stupid consumer. This stuff is way over your head. Go play some
video games and leave this to people with brains and specialized
college degrees".

> > I hated it and before I knew there _were_ any
> > alternative OSs.
> 
>    My first OS was NDOS running a BASIC translater on a Z-80, 3.9 MHz,
> with 16 kb RAM. I still have the hardware.  :)

Really? Even the steam engine? :-))

> > It was the section on DOS in my first computer book that led me to
> > linux. I was fascinated by the commandline interface and the lack
> > of animated paperclips and puppydogs.
> 
> And my very first contact with computers (apart from a Honeywell at
> my college in the UK which used punched cards) was an HP 3000 mainframe,

Still around. Still being used. Series is up to 9000. The size
of a refrigerator. Didn't find any mention of speed or RAM or
diskspace or processor type or busses... Does it have a bunch of
parallel processors?

Is this the short of machine unix use to run on exclusively, one computer
and numerous work stations? 

> running a shell for BASIC, at a TAFE evening course in Warrnambool, Oz.

TAFE. Big vocational training outfit. Like a university, with branches all
over Oz. Looks like a very good organization.

What courses did you take? 

> > I was just about to install (or attempt to install) DOS 6.22 when I
> > learned about linux.

>  Actually, I think you might have enjoyed it. I have always enjoyed
> the challenge of making a limited facility/environment do what it is not
> supposed to be able to do.

You know, I think I am more interested in getting linux to be
more like dos, than vice-versa: I want to remove all that (to me)
useless, wasteful functionality that linux now has.

We should meet in the middle somewhere! :-)

Don't you think it is rather odd that two people with such diverse computer 
backgrounds
would end up at the same place, _here_?

Lee

-- 
BasicLinux: Small is Beautiful
http://www.basiclinux.com.ru