From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Subject: Re: Linux vs. OS2, DOS, Windows, PCGEOS, etc. (convince me) Date: 14 Mar 1993 17:47:17 GMT
burtp@aix.rpi.edu (Philip Nason Burt) writes:
>Linux:
> FREE. lots of public domain stuff around. nice GUIs
> implemented. commercial software prices through the roof
> (Framemaker for Windows - $500, for UNIX - $5000!!!!), you
> need a degree in systems administration to run it properly.
As usual, it depends upon what you want to do. There are a number of
interesting X-based applications under Linux. So if you want to use
LaTeX or doc (the Interviews word processor), Linux makes sense. It's
not that Framemaker is expensive, but that it doesn't exist -- Linux
is not binary-compatible with commercial versions of Unix, and can't
run Framemaker for Unix. (Also, you may be comparing single-user DOS
pricing with multi-user Unix pricing.) A possible compromise would be
to run DOS software under the DOS emulator, but that's probably not
something that someone should try if they are unwilling to cope with
system complexity, as you seem to be.
The difficulties of administering Unix are in my opinion a hoax. What
is complex is admistering a multi-user system, and a system that
provides lots of network services. A Linux system with the same
facilities as a DOS system is just as easy to administer. In fact I
find DOS worse. Real DOS systems tend to end up with lots of wierd
things in config.sys and autoexec.bat. Setup for QEMM386 is worse
than anything you'll find in Unix (except maybe X386). It turns out
that people who complain about this are normally comparing DOS systems
that someone else has set up for them (or that they have learned about
over a period of years) with trying to come up the learning curve with
Unix from scratch. Fortunately, most versions of Unix (including
Linux) come with installation tools that will set up Unix for you.
Note however that there are some things which will be complex no
matter what platform you do them on. Network configuration requires
some knowledge (largely the same) whether you do it under Unix or DOS.
Setting up and administering a multi-user system has inevitable
complexities and security issues, no matter what system you do it on.
The reason the hoax has some plausibility is that Unix systems
typically are used on a network and have multiple users. It's
absolutely true that administering our 150-machine Unix-based setup at
Rutgers is more complex than administering a non-networked DOS
machine. That has to do with what they're doing, not an intrinsic
difference between Unix and DOS. But my Linux system is a single-user
system with no networking (except dialup SLIP). My Linux setup is
simpler than my DOS setup.
SLS does a nice job of setting things up for you. For a typical
single-user system the results should be fine. I can see only two
system administration issues you'd like have to face: (1) you have to
create an account for yourself. There's a script to do that. Linux
could in fact be set up to run everything as root. Then you wouldn't
have this complexity. That would be equivalent to MS/DOS, which has
no file protection worth talking about. But I think you want the
safety of running as something other than root (and I think the lack
of it is a problem under MS/DOS). (2) if you want to use X,
configuring it can be a mess. This isn't a Unix issue. (You wouldn't
have that problem on a Sun, for example.) It's due to the fact that
manufacturers of display controllers do things to support their
systems that work only under DOS. The way you avoid this is to use a
combination of controller and monitor that someone has already
configured. The problems are primarily with people who have existing
hardware that is hard to configure. If you're buying hardware with
the intention of running Linux, it's easy to buy things that will work
easily.
But if what you really want to do is run Framemaker and other canned
packages, I doubt that Linux will make sense for you. If you want to
do both, it's quite possible for DOS and Linux to coexist on the same
machine in different partitions.
By the way, reading this group is not necessarily a good way for a
novice to get a feel for how complex Linux is. Many of the
participants here are writing or porting software, trying new and
experimental versions of the system, and figuring out how to support
hardware that can only marginally support the software. This is quite
a different thing from installing and running something like the SLS
release on hardware that has been chosen sanely.