Our ISP stopped “supporting” W-98 a couple of years ago, so I can no longer connect to internet with my old collection-of-spare-parts back up box which does not have sufficient RAM to run XP. About all I use it for now is a spare word processor.
A friend gave me a LINUX emulator CD, and it was pretty interesting - connected on line, too. When I tried to install a version of LINUX that I downloaded to CD tough, I was too old and stupid to install it; something about “tarballs” (???).
I guess Linux and such is only for smart people, and that leaves me out. Pity; had my hopes up for a while there.
Yea, eventually, all systems outgrow the hardware (and hardware outgrows the software). Sometimes it is best to give up the ghost and expand our horizons. Of course it does seem to cost...so expansion can be slow...
Linux is a derivative of Unix, and Unix was developed by programmers for programmers.
The cherished dream of Linux zealots is that they’re going to displace Microsoft (and for some of them, Apple as well) from the desktop. It won’t happen, because of your experience.
Here’s the brutal truth: Unix systems are about as friendly and forgiving as a bucketful of badgers.
I’ve used Unix systems since the mid-80’s, so I’m well used to the crap that Unix dishes out. I also use Unix systems because they’re very productive for programmers. For programmers, there was never anything like Unix before it came along. Programmers and software jocks were the cobbler’s children of the computing world from the 60’s until the 80’s - companies investing in computers would often not give programmers a budget for tools. There was no standard set of tools on many systems. The first three jobs in my career, I re-wrote the same collection of tools I carried around with me on four different systems. When I got to a point where I was working on a Unix system, I didn’t have to write my tools. Every Unix system came with a bunch of tools that was largely the same from system to system. It was hugely liberating.
But for end users who just want to have a simple, lightweight system to use? Unix is hell.
A “tarball” is a collection of files into one file, the name of which ends in “.tar” or “.tar.gz” or “.tar.zip” or “.tar.bz” or something similar. The suffixes with something more than merely “.tar” are “compressed tar archives.”
When you get these tarballs, you uncompress them (if they were compressed) and then feed them into the tar program to unpack all the files out onto the disk, with a command like:
“$ tar xvf tarball.tar”
and you’ll see the ‘tar’ program extract all the files.
If the tarball were compressed (eg, with a .gz suffix), you’re uncompress the tarball and then feed it into tar:
“$ zcat tarball.tar.gz | tar xvf -”
and so on. The “zcat” command uncompressed the .gz file and writes the result to the “standard output.” If you didn’t re-direct the output into the tar program with the pipe “|” command, you’d get a huge screenful of stuff and then you’d be left with the original .gz file and no net results.
By shoving the output of the zcat command into the input of the ‘tar’ program, you’re seeing why Unix is a favorite among programmers. You don’t write one program to uncompress *and* un-tar a file. You have a program that only uncompresses the file and writes the result to the standard output. And then you have a file that creates or reads tar files.
In Unix, you use the power of of input/output redirection (the “pipes” facility) to glue these smaller, discrete programs together into more a much more capable system. That’s why programmers love Unix. And the complexity of this trivial example is why users who are not computer nerds hate Unix - often with a passion. I went through this example to give you an idea of why nerds love Unix and rave about it...
But you see why I don’t think Unix is going to take over the world of users who just want to browse the web and write spreadsheets and letters any time soon.
TCP/IP networking is TCP/IP networking. If you plug the right IPs in the right places, it shouldn’t matter one bit what OS you’re using to connect, so long as you have a working NIC with drivers and it supports TCP/IP correctly.
Our old ISP “didn’t support Macs”...by which they meant their installer cds didn’t. If you set up the connection manually, it worked just fine.
I guess Linux and such is only for smart people, and that leaves me out. Pity; had my hopes up for a while there.
I may be too old and stupid to set up Linux - my son did set up a version of it on a memory stick for my netbook - but I'm not too poor to get a Mac. And OS X runs under Unix.Works for me . . .
And will run the Firefox browser.