[X-Unix] Ubuntu [Was: Poke...]

[Doug McNutt]

At 08:46 +0100 8/14/08, Simon Forster wrote:
>On 14 Aug 2008, at 03:42, Doug McNutt wrote:
>
>> Echo the giggle but the truth is that I'm having more fun with Ubuntu.
>
>So how is it? Are you productive with it or is it simply a time sink?

I'd say not yet productive but a whole lot more fun than OS neXt and X-code. My productivity machine remains this 8500 running OS 9.1 with MPW, Excel 2001, Nisus 5.1, and Eudora 5.1. My G4 running 10.3.9 does my CAD stuff with Vectorworks and perl. BBEdit worksheets sort of work but it's not nearly as well as MPW.

The Intel box running Ubuntu with two monitors and an Nvidia "video" board was 2 k$ cheaper than a Mac Pro would have been and it does my web stuff with Firefox quite well. The claws email client is much like Eudora and NOT like AppleMail. I did have to shut down my Mac IIFX to make room. Ubuntu even talks to my SE/30 file server which is more than OS 10.4 and higher can do. There is no suitable open source CAD software for the electronic design that I do. When I do need OS 10.5 it's available on the lady's machine at the other end of the house but that's pretty much only for art and entertainment.

But the best part - the time sink - is that gedit is truly extensible and if I don't like it the source code is right there for recompilation and that's true of everything else. Gtk and gnome need something like Inside Macintosh with its 10 volumes still on my shelf. My goal is to make gedit into an editor-shell the way MPW worked. But. . . finding the information I need is a problem. It's somewhere out there on the web but reading source code is the only way to get real truth and that keeps changing with an update or two every day. I am running BIND and thinking about qmail for the extended family. ssh is pretty much a pleasure and I find myself logging in from the G4 regularly.

Most of all, I feel like I know what I'm doing. It's almost like the old days with a Control Data 3800 and a 56 kb/sec link to Houston. System updates came as a tape of card images with INSERT and DELETE items for the assembler.

I'm at the point where I occasionally try to use CONTROL-C,V instead of COMMAND-C,V on the Macs and that scares me.

-- 
-->  The best programming tool is a soldering iron <--