[PLUG] deep philosophical question

[someone]

> Possibly running linux on something non-dell would help?  Maybe a mac.
> 
> --Eric

My 7 pound Dell Inspiron 5100 works very well with Fedora Core 5 Linux.
Heck, I even got a working battery life indicator moving from Core 3
to Core 5.  The bigger problem if you standardize on openoffice is that
a document made in the 2.0.2 version isn't compatible with the typical
OO install found on Fedora Core 3.  Oops!  Another problem with Fedora,
which is becoming a growing issue, is short lived repositories.
I think yum is doing more harm than good these days because of how
fast Fedora turns over.  You are almost better off ignoring updates 
and moving one whole release at a time.

Proprietary anything on Linux is going to suck until the producers 
of it are willing to either a) future proof it, or b) support long 
term updates for it.  I have been playing with savannah's 
yealink-module to try and replace a proprietary usb phone driver
for example so that I can move Fedora Core 3 systems to say 
CentOS 5.  I have avoided Ubuntu so far because of the whole 
proprietary drivers thing, but my brother John has adopted it
heavily.

Hibernate is pathetically broken on PC's in general.  I don't
think being a Dell, Toshiba, etcetera has much to do with the
problem.  The people who implement ACPI hardware and write
software, including bios, to work with it must not talk to
each other much.  Apple isn't cloned as far as I can tell,
so there aren't as many apple power management implementations
as there are PC ones.  If PC makers were not afraid
to share their power management designs with the OSS community,
perhaps this wouldn't be such a big problem.

Things that tend to be a problem on laptops are 
incompatible special function keys.  This is easily 
solved by connecting the buttons to the device they 
control directly in a standard way so that you don't 
need to have a special keyboard driver or map.

I have been watching ReactOS, but I am very 
discouraged with the project.  They are getting 
a lot of regressions with each release and making 
inaccurate claims about when new releases will 
come out.  At what point is implementing an NT 
like system that is stable but not 100% compatible 
better than copying something which is badly broken?  
The theory of ReactOS is plug the Windows driver in 
and it will just work.

Freedos is supposed to move to a post 1.0 release.

I found out that I can run Wordperfect 6.0 dos 
using freedos.  It would be nice to find a free
freedos compatible word processor that is open 
office compatible.  Too bad I don't have a 
simple dos based note taking system for what 
someone is telling me on the phone.  A simple
spreadsheet for phone numbers would also be
nice.

A 486 DX2-66 is not the best Linux machine even 
with 20 megs of ram.  Even in tab window manager, 
mozilla 1.1 is not fast enough to access horde 
webmail imp comfortably.

How hard would it be to port mozilla to freedos?

Clearly, the Linux community can improve 
compatibility over time with the diverse hardware 
that exists.  Supporting some hardware sooner 
means proprietary drivers, which IMHO are still a 
huge headache.  An idea I have is to discourage
the writers of proprietary software from burning all
paper copies of their source code and deleting all
digital copies when they are done selling it.

Michael C. Robinson