OT: So How Would You Suggest a Confirmed Windows User Convert to Linux?

:) I've got more useless stuff.

Yeah, a google search is probably better these days for many things :)

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John Devereux
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John Devereux
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On a sunny day (Sat, 09 Mar 2013 11:53:27 -0800) it happened Fred Abse wrote in :

In fact I use ls -rtl, as always the last entry is what remnains on teh screen, and I have an alias in bashrc (or rather zsh I use zsh as shell)

# some more ls aliases in ~/.bashrc , save you typing: alias ll='ls -alF' alias la='ls -A' alias l='ls -rtl' alias d='ls' alias lb='ls -rtl --color=none'

Na, used it a hundred times today

The issue with life is not that you never make a mistake, but that you can fix it if you do. Paranoia leads to a situation that when something goes wrong you have no clue and no experience how to fix things. We are neural nets, neural nets are not exact, it is different from math. So the art of being able to correct your mistakes is the real strength.

To never venture is a prison.

I have several networks and sometines I need to change from say 10.0.0.X to

192.168.178. , test things etc.

There are temperature monitor scripts with alarm, fan speed monitors with alarm, etc running here 24/7 that use awk to parse sensors, a lot of scripts that do a lot of things too.

You should really try the zsh shell. If you type the first character of the command you want, then cursor up will show that from history, for example if you typed ls sensors cp flip flop joe ./usr/local/sbin/myscript ifconfig

Now if you want to type that joe thing again (editor), just type j and hit cursor up.

Unlike normal history that would show ifconfig on cursor up, zsh shell looks for the first characters. It save an incredible amount of time really. So if you typed 'l' followed by cursor up, you see 'ls' on the command line

Dunno what happened to mine, but it was very helpful.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Thanks for the short, succinct reply. I will put this on my list of things to look into. When I did a little digging and found a fair amount of drama associated with the division, I figure LO is the better choice going forward. I still use an old version of MS Office for some of my business contacts, but otherwise use Open Office. I am not entrenched by any means as long as I can read and write compatible files.

I did find recently that engineering notation can be used with OO as well as MO. Can that be done with LO as well? It isn't supported very well in OO that I can see. I have to copy formatting in order to make it work it seems. I can't select a format from the "Format Cells" dialog and make it work.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

That is a very generous gesture. I may take you up on this, just not right now. I have other things I need to be doing.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

never do this:

rm -rf .*

it does what it says which is probably not what you expect.

"halt" is easier to type.

yeah, if you only reboot infrequently you may as well combine some hardware manintenance.

kind of handy as root if you want to do unusual things with the network in an ad-hoc way, or as a user just to see the current state.

Me neither what I can't do with cut I usually manage with sed

the dot seems kind of pointless there.

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

The ##0.000E+00 trick that works in Excel and PlanMaker to get engineering-ish notation (still can't set the number of sig figs) does not work in LibreOffice 4.01. It's better than it was in 3.5, in that LO doesn't just display cells full of hash-marks and the numbers that it does display are correct, just not formatted as one would like.

LO 4.01

123.450E-14 123.450E-13 123.450E-12 123.450E-11 123.450E-10 123.450E-09

Excel and PlanMaker 1.235E-12 12.345E-12

123.450E-12 1.235E-09 12.345E-09 123.450E-09

Quattro X5 (it's still around!) has a different mechanism. It includes a custom format "K Meg Gig" that produces 0.1 1.2 12.3 123.5 1.2 K 12.3 K 123.5 K 1.2 M 12.3 M 123.5 M 1.2 G 12.3 G 123.5 G 1234.5 G

12345.0 G

The as-supplied format codes don't extend down to m / n / u / p range but it should be easy to do so, following the pattern for the larger values.

Reply to
Rich Webb

Not really. What putty doesn't have is a connect / disconnect button which opens / closes the serial port. Very important to me; I use it all the time. The biggest problem with hyperterminal is that it actually is very complete. I still haven't found a good replacement. I've tried Putty, tera-term, realterm and several others but none work as easy or have the required features.

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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply 
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

- It is not compatible with Microsoft Office documents. Every simple document (containing some markup styles and images, nothing fancy) I tried failed.

- Lots of really trivial bugs with using images in documents I didn't went any further. If you look around a bit you can buy an old but genuine MS Office version from Ebay for a few bucks.

There you go. Visio just works better so keep using that. I already paid for it as well so that goes into Virtualbox. No need to contort my brain in order to use something mediocre.

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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply 
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

I didn't know that Google was missing. ;-)

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

According to BING!, it is missing a lot...

Reply to
MrTallyman

that even Nautilus (the rough Linux equivalent of Windows Explorer) seems to be a better file copier than Windows Explorer itself...

I think it goes:

dd bs=1024 if=/home/mydir of=/dev/mt0 will write 1024 byte blocks but make a direct image of the contents of /home/mydir

Reply to
T

Don't know the answer to that one - seen some recipes posted here - perhaps by you - but no got around to trying it. Let me know if you get it working! :)

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John Devereux
Reply to
John Devereux

Univac 1106 Sumits CDC Cyber 72 Kronos Univac 1108 Punch Card RJE (Remote Job Entry) Altair 8800B (Gates' very first product, MSBASIC with crude OS built in) CP/M A huge variety of dissimilar microcomputers (as they were called then) MSDOS 2.11, 3.0, 3.2 ( Remember dBase3 and Clipper? Lotus123 ) Win 3.1, 95, 98SE, ME, XP....

If he is, Don't be so hard on him.

n i

Wait.. You're advocating Linux for PRODUCTIVITY??? Seriously?

I both love and hate Windows, but is Linux stable and reliable enough to compete on PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE?

Linux seems to be in a lot of turmoil with so many different distros.

I keep seeing where some distro switches from one kernel to another... it seems like changing boats mid stream...

I've noted a few software vendors have stopped making linux versions of their products even though they were developed on linux machines!

Is that because of the kernel turmoil or just because they are selling 0 copies of their software in the linux version?

Not cheap or plentiful you mean. Norris of Control Data almost broke the company obsessing with the PLATO system. ( Vector line drawing and IR touch screens..? )

formatting link

What exactly did you mean by this? Most CRT terminals by 1975 could emulate the escape codes of a variety of other makes and models.

DEC VT52 and (later) VT100 became bigger standards than any terminals IBM fielded.

What exactly did you mean by terminal controllers? At the terminal end? Are you thinking of EBCDIC or 3270 stuff?

Reply to
Greegor

dd can't copy directories. The input and output must be a single file (or a device, pipe, etc).

dd just does a read-block, write-block loop. It's useful for e.g. creating ISO images from an existing CD:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=cdimage.iso

or creating blank files with a fixed size:

dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy.img bs=1k count=1440 mkfs -t vfat floppy.img

or copying archives to tape (which may care about the block size):

dd if=archive.tar of=/dev/mt0 bs=512

Archiving is normally done with "tar" (tape archiver). It works for files, but it's designed for sequential access; extracting a single file from an archive is slow compared to e.g. zip.

Reply to
Nobody

Jeff Liebermann Inscribed thus:

Add "Trinity" to that list. There are various distribution ISO's using the replacement Trinity desktop. I'm currently using PClinuxOS. Its fast on lesser machines where as the more heavyweight desktops are quite sluggish.

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Best Regards: 
                        Baron.
Reply to
Baron

Here's where I get into trouble with beginners. While I'm sure one of the approximately 30 assorted window managers (desktops) might be a benefit to an experienced user interested in optimizing the user interface for their purposes, it's pure hell for me when trying to support a beginning user. In self defense, I usually demand that they start with the default Unity desktop environment for Ubuntu. If that fails, then a fall back to Gnome 2: For underpowered machines, there's LXFE: At some point in the Linux experience, most users experiment with different window managers. After declaring my dislike for Ubuntu Unity, I installed about 7 other window managers. I would switch between them on login to see which one I liked best. What is important are speed, stability, reliability, and applications compatibility. Ease of use and the decorations on the screen can come later. The choice of window manager can wait until later.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Ofcourse.

The love Linux developers have for breaking backwards compatibility is a big problem indeed. The best thing to do is include all the libraries your software needs and only rely on the really basic libraries which the developers can't break. Firefox is distributed in such a manner.

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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply 
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

Will remove hidden files only.

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"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence  
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." 
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Reply to
Fred Abse

I haven't used an up-to-date hyperterminal, but iirc it didn't speak TCP/IP, which is what I needed.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

This "compatibility" is somewhat complicated.

Our IT manager frequently has to help people who can't open older DOCs with whatever current MS Office is in vogue. _Backward_ compatibility seems to be a serious problem for MS. He generally finds that the current OpenOffice/LibreOffice much better at handling older formats. Of course, whatever the reason for it, MS continually changes the file formats of their Office package, so the "free" office packages are frequently behind recent MS releases.

Running old Windows software on new Windows platforms - can be problematic. It's not as bad as DOS support being dropped, but I keep a couple of machines around only to occasionally run some legacy software (not Office) that support some legacy hardware. If you run a newer version of Windows you will likely run into problems at some time with older software. I have one Windows program that recently stopped working as the file dialogs no longer work with current XP updates - and our IT dept understandably forces updates on networked machines. My budgets are tight, I can't always afford to update infrequently used software, nor is this invariably worth the learning curve for newer versions with capabilities that you weren't interested in.

Linux went through a major transition years ago when libc5 was (partly compatibly) upgraded to libc6. Some of the problems were worked out over time. My experience is that since then the incompatibility aspects have been handled pretty well in linux-land. I've had only minor issues running Debian since that libcx transition. Where software vendors have problems is because different distributions (Debian, RedHat,...) have different ways of organizing key library and system initialization files. There have been efforts to make this more uniform but progress has not been monotonic as distributions have different goals.

Reply to
Frank Miles

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