Musings...

[Bob Nolte <bob.nolte@pc4u.com>]

Not to date myself, but I was born before ENIAC. I started sorting tab 
cards in 1961, and started managing my first computer system in 1968. I 
make some pretty good money now, scraping up the shards of broken Windows 
installs. NT is better, but it seems to be putting on weight. M$ can't seem 
to remember to dance with the girl that brung them, the small business and 
individual user.

Now, I'm spending quite a bit of time trying to escape the bondage of drive 
letters. Novel had part of it right, then because it did not want to make 
it's own desktop GUI, bowed to the DOS idol. Reacquainting myself with the 
concept of root seems like deja vu. I never used Unix, but most older OSs 
mounted and unmounted volumes.

About a year ago I got a copy of RH5.0 and loaded it on an old 486/80 made 
up of leftover parts (a 1gb hard drive with Netware partition still on it, 
a Panasonic 1x CD with host adapter board, an old network card, 16mb of 
RAM). I figured that if I were going to try something new I might as well 
put it to the acid test.

With nothing to lose, I tossed the CD in the drive and put in the RH boot 
disk. Guess what! It found my CD and loaded. The only problem I had was an 
IRQ conflict with the NIC. Fixed this and loaded again and all was well. 
But that's when the musings started.

Just like the person who loads Windows for the first time, I had managed to 
get the thing up and running without hardly knowing what I was doing. All 
dressed up and no idea of where to go next, I suddenly developed an 
increased empathy for the problems that my clients face. I found myself as 
ignorant of Linux as most people are using DOS and Windows. A few weeks 
spending evenings at the VoTech in a Unix intro course began to remove some 
of the mystery. Having gone from RPG, to RPGII, to Databus, to DOS, to 
Windows, to Lastastic, to Netware, and then to NT, I asked myself, "Why am 
I doing this?"  Well, at my age it should keep my brain working, so onward.

About 2 month ago I got the time to really get serious about Linux. This 
was encouraged by a dog and pony show put on by Microsoft on Windows 2000. 
I got on the phone and ordered a new K6 450 system from Penguin. It arrives 
next week. In the meantime I decided to upgrade the old 486 to RH6, but 
this time I took a lot more time looking at what was going on. I'm anxious 
to see a really well dressed up version of Linux when the new system gets 
here. Interestingly, I've never seen a Linux desktop out there in the wild 
when I'm doing my thing in the business world. We might want to think about 
taking a nice spiffy box to a shopping mall where people could walk by and 
see it on a Saturday. I digress.

VOCABULARY. Just like a little kid, I get an idea about something I want to 
do but don't know the word for it. I've got a whole pile of Linux books. 
Say I want to find a file but don't know where it is. In DOS I'd go Dir 
filename /s. After paging through several books, I decide to try the FIND 
command. This seems strange, since FIND in DOS looks inside of files. I try 
FIND in Linux, but forget to use the -name thingy. Oh yeah, I gotta 
remember that GREP is kinda like FIND in DOS. My Linux vocabulary is coming 
online at about the same speed that learning English did when I was 2 years 
old.

STRUCTURE.  I spend a good part of each day telling people to click START | 
SETTINGS | CONTROL PANEL...  Linux has it's own obscure (at least to me) 
way of tucking away the good stuff just like Windows. Problem is I'm on 
this treasure hunt looking for them and understanding them. An example. 
I've been running the Apache web server on my NT server for quite a while. 
Works great and doesn't weigh as much as IIS. Now I'm setting up Apache on 
the old 486 last weekend. The NT version even uses httpd.conf, but I spent 
about an hour looking over the Linux Apache structure, finding the file and 
changing it so the thing would start. When I was a kid we took about 6 feet 
of string and tied it into a loop. Then we strung it between all 10 fingers 
in a certain way. By manipulating your fingers and the string you could 
make all kinds of patterns. The game was called Cat's Cradle. Mess up by 
moving a finger wrong and the whole string became a mess. Now I'm sitting 
here with all these .conf files on all 10 of my fingers. Feels the same, 
but my Linux dexterity is still lacking. Guess it just takes time.

UTILITY. Now, when I get this whole thing configured what am I going to do 
with it? A few weeks ago I D/Ld Star Office for Windows. It loaded alright 
on the NT workstation but performed an illegal action in the first 10 
minutes while I was trying to import a M$ file. I just uninstalled it. I'll 
give it another try when the Penguin box arrives and I get the time. My 
point is that, like it or not, 90% of the world out there has learned Word 
and Excel. If my workstation desktop ever makes it to Linux, I've got to 
have an almost completely cognate bridge between these programs and 
whatever office suite I'm using or Bill G has to port his stuff to Linux 
(when pigs fly!). From what little I've seen, nothing does a real great job 
of taking in my Excel spreadsheet (which is full of macros and databases). 
It's almost as tough with Word. In the early 90's lawyers used to file 
documents in WordPerfect. Now they file them in Word. Ever try to move a 
complex document back and forth between WordPerfect and Word? And this was 
within the same OS. If anyone can open my eyes to something that shows 
promise in this regard I'll really appreciate it. In the meantime I remain 
pessimistic with regard to the Linux desktop in the business world.

SERVERS. Now we're talking! Linux seems to have a real opportunity here. 
Samba works great for me. Apache has found a way to make a web server for 
NT which is only 3mb to download. Try that with IIS. I have hope that I can 
implement Linux servers in small offices. My biggest problem is that (1)I 
want to make money supporting it, and (2)I don't know enough about Linux 
yet to feel comfortable. Linux would probably run as a server on some of 
the older PCs that small businesses are discarding because they're not 
speedy enough for M$ latest toys. We're talkin 5-20 people sharing files 
and printers here. Toss in a DSL line and handle http, mail, etc. Don't 
need PCAnywhere, just telnet to manage it.

LOOKING FORWARD, AND BACK.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
   The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jujub bird, and shun
   The frumious Bandersnatch!

Well, a bit of whimsy by Lewis Carroll so that we all keep our sense of 
humor. I hope that the Linux community can learn to quietly advocate the 
intrinsic value of Linux. Car dealers learned a long time ago that you 
can't sell cars by knocking the other manufacturers. Too many Linux 
aficionados sound a lot like a backslider that just got religion. Winston 
Churchill said that, "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't 
change the subject." Let's not make the mistake of banging away needlessly 
on Microsoft. It doesn't make us look that good. Let's stay positive. It 
should be OK to mention a Microsoft system in the company of Linux people 
without having to listen to a long harrang from someone. I think Microsoft 
is plenty scared about the way things are going right now, but too smart to 
let anyone find that out. In the meantime, we're better occupied with 
trying to figure out what would come next if Microsoft takes a tumble. If 
Microsoft went bye bye tomorrow, the world would still be running on its 
stuff. Let's plan ahead. There's no sense in getting into a pissing contest 
with a skunk, and it's a big skunk. The government isn't going to knock 
Microsoft off it's stride, anymore than it did Standard Oil or AT&T, but 
they certainly have its attention.

We've enjoyed quite a few years of domestic prosperity, largely thanks to 
the explosion in the information processing segment of our economy. 
Consider this. If Fuji, or Nintendo, or some other foreign corporation were 
to decide that there was a market opening for a competing office suite or 
desktop OS, what would happen to jobs in the US and our balance of 
payments? Were this company, say Nintendo, to decide to be a bully or try 
to keep it's source code secret, what would our US Justice Department be 
able to do? We'd just have our government people over in Japan whining 
about this along with the other trade problems.

This has been the longest thing that I've written in years. I hope my 
family doesn't get a copy of it and wonder why my e-mail to them is so 
short. Sorry for the lengthy epistle, but some things were on my mind. I'm 
wondering if anyone else has some similar or differing perspectives on any 
of this. Anyway, I'd had my head into puters for so many days I just had to 
sit back and reflect a bit. Hope I'm still welcome aboard ship.

Bob Nolte



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