From owner-freebsd-newbies Fri Mar 26 19:42:48 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from pop02.globecomm.net (pop02.globecomm.net [206.253.129.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2E14914E93; Fri, 26 Mar 1999 19:42:45 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from zen@buddhist.com) Received: from WhizKid (r45.bfm.org [208.18.213.141]) by pop02.globecomm.net (8.9.0/8.8.0) with SMTP id WAA14374; Fri, 26 Mar 1999 22:42:50 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.19990326213540.008f2c90@mail.bfm.org> X-Sender: stanislav@mail.bfm.org X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.6 (32) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 21:35:40 -0600 To: Marty Poulin From: "G. Adam Stanislav" Subject: Re: Linux vs. FreeBSD: The Storage Wars Cc: unknown@riverstyx.net, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: References: <3.0.6.32.19990326093033.00919230@mail.bfm.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org At 10:50 26-03-1999 -0500, Marty Poulin wrote: >You'd be surprised what you can get away with without having to resort to >Windows. These days the only thing I need to boot down to microsoft for >is to surf the web using all those funky multimedia plugins that haven't >been ported to BSD (yet). And the odd game. Well, I really do not care for those funky plugins. And the only game I play under Win95 is Free Cell anyway. But I do have some programs that have their own file structures, and I have much work done in them. For example, NoteWorthy Composer is a shareware program I have registered and used to compose music with. >I agree, it can be a challenge to find answers at times, but that's where >the archives and mailing lists and FAQ's come in really handy - there is >no way I would have accomplished a fraction of what I have done if it >wasn't for all of the online help. Yes, without support from mailing lists I would have probably given up long time ago. The FAQs are useful for basics, but most of the time I have not found the answers I was seeking. Occasionally I did. I guess the type of questions I ask are not frequent (used to drive my college professors to insanity). :-) >Check out www.afterstep.org, www.windowmaker.org, and when you upgrade >your RAM, I recommend taking a look at KDE - a very "windows-ish" Desktop >Environment that I have come to really like. (www.kde.org) Interesting. I received your message right after I spent considerable time at a place that compares various window managers (got there through a link from FreeBSD.org). I was going to download KDE, but came up on another stumbling point: Just which of the gadzillion files do I need. Boy, do I hate ftp! Just a list of file names with no description. Gosh, it's been some ten years since I heade the Opus development team (Opus being a BBS program that used to be very popular in DOS world). We offered file downloads with description of every file on every single Opus BBS, and we did not invent the idea. Yet, years later, the Internet is still stuck with something as user-unfriendly as ftp. And it is so simple to emulate what we did in the BBS world with plain HTML (also downloads faster than ftp). I don't understand this ftp mentality. On my system I do place all downloads on the ftp site but make symbolic links to all files within the web site and make html pages which describe each file and let you download it by just right-clicking on it. It is so simple to do and makes the files available both by ftp and html without the need of wasting additional disk space (I love symbolic links!). But back to the topic of desktop managers like KDE. Does all X software run under all of them, or do you have to have different software (I mean applications) for, say, KDE and afterstep? I got the impression from KDE web site that applications must be written specifically for KDE... (Incidentally, it is a funny name to me: In Slovak, my mother tongue, "kde" means "where.") >>Computers were so much simpler when >> I was 15! > >Heh - back in the days when "GUI" meant that someone spilled their coffee >on the punch cards... Hehehe, that would have been a disaster! Punch cards were neat back then. I was quite impressed by what they could do and what we could do with them. When I first saw a punch card sorting machine at the age of 15, I was quite awed by its speed. I was a high school student in Slovakia--we were the only high school class in all of Slovakia that specialized in computer programming back then (1965). They took us to a company that had those sorting machines (and other machines). They showed them to us but pretty much did not allow us to touch them. :-) Heh, those machines are ancient history today (but the high school is still there and even has a web site :->). Adam --- Want to design your own web counter? Get GCL 2.10 from http://www.whizkidtech.net/gcl/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message