Never mind, it's tanbgu.com. Blair Thompson is the program author--it's based on the IBM E2/E3/EOS2 editors circa 1990. You can write editor macros in REXX, which I'm very fond of, and it has a zillion other features.
For use in Linux, there's one wart--by default it wants to use the font 'fixed', which on modern hardware and >50 y.o. eyes is way too small. I'll ship you my config file that switches to a legible font if you like.
The XWNT editor runs in a Windows console window, and is my default Windows editor when I actually need to get stuff done. Trying to program in an editor that word wraps all the time is maddening.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 USA
+1 845 480 2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
There will be some discomfort for sure. But some early understanding of typical issues will make it all a much more surgical transfer. To this end try reading the support forums of candidate distributions.
Also for Distribution selection try the live disks (or memory sticks, which adds persistent file store) of several different distributions (Fedora [RedHat], Debian, (K)Ubuntu, openSuse [SLED/SLES], Cannonical, Knoppix, ...) and Desktop Enviroments (KDE3, KDE4, Gnome2, Gnome3, LXDE, etc.,). Play with the settings a bit in each. Not all hardware is supported in Linux but sometimes one distribution has support for something that other distributions don't.
Surfing the net is a lot safer in Linux, viruses and trojans targeted at MSWin vulnerabilities don't work and there is rarely a Linux virus in the wild.
BTW i suggest that you go to mixed rather than pure Linux because of the design tool issue. But that is ok, and once you gain some comfort you may be able to run windows design tools in wine or a VM running a real Redmond OS. This is the approach i am using. Give the box plenty of ram if you go this way.
For your disk duplication requirement i suggest either gparted, partedmagic, or sysrescuecd. I think all three have a usable GUI wrapped around dd which wall do among other things a sector by sector copy of the whole disk (which should keep the disk id, which may be causing the problem).
that even Nautilus (the rough Linux equivalent of Windows Explorer) seems to be a better file copier than Windows Explorer itself...
Funny you mention that. I tried to clone my hard drive to a new drive using drive vendor supplied tools and they wouldn't work (I don't recall the error). So I found a program online that claimed it would do the job. It failed as well with a read error of some file. Turned out this program actually turned my machine into a dual boot and runs under Linux! I don't think it was a full install, rather just the minimum needed to copy files. But the point is it failed just as badly as the others. :(
Still, that doesn't put me off of Linux. In fact, the suggestion of others that I try booting off a USB stick is interesting. I have a netbook that I might try that with.
Hopefully there will be a better free newsreader than Thunderbird. Sometimes this program almost sucks as badly as Google Groups. I can't believe Google is still double spacing quotes! Can't anyone get through the thick Google Head?
Will virtualization work with I/O drivers? I have a USB programming dongle that seems to be a bit fussy. It wouldn't install or run or something under Vista until I turned off UAC and some other things. It still talks about reinstalling drivers and crap every time I plug in the hardware. I can't imagine it would work in a virtual box very well.
serial port 3 outputs 5 inputs, almost certainly used as GPIO by the driver - else why ask for the I/O address?
Nut it easy to configure if you know what each I/O does.
to reverse engineer it I'd need to install some logging software and run the battery down to see what changed then plug those results into the config file.
and possbly twiddle the outputs and see if anythig happens.
returning it would take even longer.
yeah, avoid the "anyone" distros, stick to the big ones unless there's a compelling reason to go wierd.
I use it on files and other devices more often than on disks
Want 1 second of noise to test the speakers? (don't turn the volumen all the way up)
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/audio bs=8000 count=1 want a sparse file ~1 gigabyte in extent?
dd if=/dev/zero of=sparsefile bs=1 seek=1G count=1 want 1g file full of zeros
dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile bs=1M count=1K
want to read the text strings in the system BIOS ? (can help identify what brand and model of hardware is at the other end of a ssh connection)
dd if=/dev/mem bs=64K seek=14 count=2 | strings | less (BIOS is 128K starting at E0000 = 14*64K) want to extract or overwrite bytes in the middle of a file? swap the byte order order in a unicode, or raw audio file, convert text files to/from terminated/fixed-lenght lines....
I think something that fussy you won't know till you try. All I can say is I have had good experience with USB things, linux host and windows under VirtualBox.
Don't take this as a personal attack. Take it as a general criticism.
Your attitude is the root cause for poor penetration of linux as a desktop computing platform installed/configured/maintained by a single end user...AKA current windows users. The arrogance, lack of empathy for the current windows user and complete disregard for user skills/wants/needs is what is keeping linux from mainstream on the desktop. If the linux developer/user communities spent as much effort making linux simple for dummies to install/configure/maintain/use as they spend on denigrating newbies, linux penetration on the desktop would be much greater.
It's not about YOUR skills to reverse engineer. It's not about YOUR willingness to devote time to the effort.
It's about the ability of a current windows user to convert to linux, like it says in the subject line.
He bought a UPS because he wanted protection against power failure. He expects to plug it in, load the CD, check some boxes and have it JUST WORK. If he wanted a frustrating hobby, he'd already be using linux.
I'm no stranger to reverse engineering. I have 100% free time. I have more linux incompatible hardware in the pile than average windows users. I'm frequently presented with the same dilemma... Do I want to struggle to make something work so I can convert to linux and give up some things I currently use? OR Do I want to just plug it into the windows box and just keep on truckin'?
The answer is always the latter. Perhaps that will change if/when linux offers something I need that I can't get for windows.
It would help if there existed ONE STABLE default linux offering. So I could count on the next version working similarly to the last. So I could learn one set of tools. So I could learn one set of applications. So I could ask for help on the web and the answers would actually work on MY configuration. So hardware developers could have a stable target and be able to afford the support costs associated with putting "linux compatable" on the box. I'm not asking for loss of choice. I merely ask for a stable default starting point with evolutionary development instead of chaos. I don't mind investing whatever it takes if I'm convinced that the effort won't be nullified by the chaos of the next release.
I had high hopes that Canonical would take linux mainstream on the desktop. Looks like they've succumbed to their own arrogance and simply added yet another layer of chaos. Greed is just the way the world works. That's unlikely to change.
On a sunny day (Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:46:39 -0800) it happened mike wrote in :
OK, it was late and was about to go to sleep...
Linux is NOT for dummies, it is an Unix for people who are willing to spend time to learn the basics of Unix.
Linux to the desktop has been done very well by many, Ubuntu is a good example.
For the rest it is the kernel, and everybody can build his/her own stuff on top. Unlike Microsoft integrated shit.
I have encountered very few microsoft windows program that worked OK, not even counting that disaster OS it is. More hours of frustration and productivity loss, that alone created the US deficit, people staring at a MS windows screen while they should be doing something useful.
Imagine, a whole afternoon watching stupid Microsoft commercials while installing that OS!!! It is a crime against humanity!
Ubuntu installed within a few minutes, same for Slackware, same for Debian, same for most modern distributions, apart form RatHead and SuuuZEE.
There is plenty of good help online for dummies like you, but it requires a web connection and the ability to read and comprehend.
But really, I recommend, before even CONTEMPLATING using Linux, read a good book on Unix, and then play a bit with the command line, learn to write in C some simple programs, learn to use bash the shell, etc etc, the directory structure, crond, the basic networking setup. All them little pictjures that is like a supermarket where nothing is labeled so you cannot walk into the old shop and ask the shopkeeper for a part, no you have to spend hours looking at the shelves for the pictjure of the object you want. And every shop has its own pictjures, different ones, for the same thing, and it is getting worse with every MS windows or whatever they call it these days version.
It is a whole lot simpler to type a command, remember a command like saying: I want a box of 1 inch nails' versus looking at 100 objects hanging from a wall in a plastic bag.
My computah speaks ENGLISH, (or whatever language I script the commands in). The commands I make for MY work, to do things *I* need.
F*ck that imbecile crap that MS tries to dump on the masses, over and over again every new release, worse every new release, until nobody has a language anymore and can only point to a picture.
AND YOU WANT THAT???? You are lost, hopeless, all over, end of humanity, dark ages returned, Fred Flintstone. Why have a language at all, just gestures now, I wanna -> points to toilet.. dump it there, best of luck dada blah blah, WOEF by bye!
Stop any 10 people on the street and tell them what you said. See if they insist you tell them how they can do the same.
I don't WANT windows. I WANT linux to be easy to use...that means without learning to program in C. Without having to remember a zillion arcane commands that keep changing.
I just spent an hour with ubuntu. I went to the repository and asked for freecad. "Unresolved dependencies"!! No clue as to what or how to fix it. How is that better????
It's free! Windows users have to pay for our aggravation.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
Freecad... sounds like fun, I should try to install it when I get home. Di d you have to update gcc or anything?
I got a couple of 2 terabyte Hitachi SATA drives from Craigslist for $50 ea ch over the weekend. Yeah, I could have re-installed Windows... and Linux. .. but nah, I wanted to get up and running ASAP. So, clone the old 1 TB dr ive. But... I've only got one SATA connector (thin profile PC). (Or, so I thought at the time.) I used dd to send the old hard drive image (/dev/sd a) via GZIP to the external USB drive I bought from Costco (with only 600 G B free). Ok, but the next day, I get a transfer rate of... 2 megabytes per sec. O.O That'll take a few days to transfer a terabyte. Did a bit of G oogling, and apparently very large files see a performance slowdown with th e NTFS drivers... a..ha... well, ok, stop that... took the computer apart, and WOW, there are *TWO* SATA connectors in there! Well hey, sudo dd if= /dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M and I get a 120 megabyte/sec transfer rate! All done in just a few hours. Yay! Then I used gparted to expand the par titions to fill unused space, and... I'm really happy XD
Further homework: put the second 2 TB drive in the machine, and put the /h ome directory there, all by itself... haha. I hear it involves editing /et c/fstab...
Plus it comes with mind-bogglingly powerful tools. dd... gparted... all fr ee.
Plus no arrogant insistent installation of updates upon system shutdown... which I suffered through about 33 of because I had also resized an NTFS par tition in Windows, and ntfsresize had set a flag requiring chkdsk be perfor med from within Windows... grr... whose computer is it, mine or Microsoft's , anyway???
Actually, sometimes free as in speech, not necessarily free as in beer. =)
But not usually pain-free, I agree =)
True. I'm still a couple of decades away from being able to hire my own IT staff and not have to deal with any of it at all, though =) and besides , it's kinda fun. Nothing quite like building a Linux machine for your son , and then realizing that it doesn't like the wireless network adapter, so you have to go through an "ndiswrapper" adventure... but then you get it to work, and you feel nearly invincible.
staff and not have to deal with any of it at all, though =) and besides, it's kinda fun. Nothing quite like building a Linux machine for your son, and then realizing that it doesn't like the wireless network adapter, so you have to go through an "ndiswrapper" adventure... but then you get it to work, and you feel nearly invincible.
I wasted enough time chasing incompatible hardware issues (forget software nonsense). I gave up that endless task about eight years ago. I have far more productive things to do, like pick my nose.
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