[TriLUG] Journey to the Wastelands

[Rob Huffstedtler]

First, the disclaimer:  I've been using Linux on the desktop since 1995.
I know the pain of twm and olvwm.  That said, at the moment, I'm mostly
using Windows on the desktop because I don't have a client side itch
that I need Linux to scratch.

Disclaimer #2:  None of this is intended to be a personal attack on
Jeff, just a a critique of some of what he says.  Hopefully, it will
also include some tips to make the times when he has to use Windows a
little less painful.

The reason I find stories like this a little disturbing is that a lot of
linux users go off on rants about how badly Windows sucks, and then back
it up with details that can be easily refuted.  If we are going to make
a case for the superiority of Open Source software, we need to get our
facts straight.  So, some speficic points.

On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 02:09:12PM -0500, Jeff Tickle wrote:
> 
> Active Worlds crashed 6 times in 30 minutes.  Playing GTA3, the system
> would spontaneously reboot.  Startup took _FOREVER_.  And with all the
> rebooting I had to do, a lot of time was wasted waiting for Windows to
> do whatever the hell it is taking its time on...  (gee, wouldn't it be
> nice if it had a simple text-based screen that would, you know, give a
> short summary of what it is doing, and then perhaps a soothing green
> "OK" if things went well, or an attention-getting red "FAILED" if things
> went wrong?  Wow, what a novel idea...)

It's a bad sign if Windows is crashing that much (even Win 9x).  The
culprit in these cases is often a bad device driver.  Make sure that you
are up to date on your drivers.  FWIW, a bad device driver can smack
Linux just as hard (witness the earlier Ensoniq chipset drivers).  Of
course, there is a better chance that a bad driver will be fixed
promptly with Linux.  As data points, my XP machine has not crashed in a
year.  My W2K Pro workstation at work has crashed only twice in seven
months (despite the fact thatit only has 128MB of RAM, and I usually
have 600MB committed).


> 
> And I found that I have developed habits that make things go so much
> more quickly when working with text-based things.  For example, in
> Notepad, every time I went to save a file, you would see a ":s" appear
> where my cursor once was.  Moving files around using the so-called
> "convenient" drag-and-drop method was just downright painful.  So I
> tried using the poor excuse for a command line, and my habitual pressing
> of the TAB key, of course, did not do what I expected.  It made
> drag-and-drop look fast.

No problem.  www.vim.org.  Get your windows version of vim, and suddenly
windows is a much happier place.  As for drag and drop, I usually don't
use it - I use the ctrl-c or ctrl-x after selecting the files to copy or
cut them, then ctrl-v to paste.  FWIW, I think Nautilus adopted this
convention as well.  If you need tab completion, it's on by defult in
XP.  In NT/2k, you can turn it on with a registry change.  

Run regedt32, and set the value of

HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar
to 0x9

This also makes windows a happier place to live.  Of course, proper
selection and pasting, a la the default in X would be a great thing to
have.  I think there is a power toy to turn it on, but I usually just
live without it.

> Sorry.  Just had to rant a bit.  Have a great day.
> 
> -J