The opinions presented in MailBag are those of each individual author; AboutLinux and associates do not accept any responsibility for the postings in MailBag. Published with the permission of the author.

MailBag #4: Success & more

October 26, 1999

[Editor: In this fourth MailBag column, I address e-mails from four readers. More analysis & commentary after each letter...]

Patrice's Linux Experience

[Patrice's experiences point out that there is a definite need for better internationalization support in Linux software and that motivated users will persist and get Linux running...]

From: Patrice St-Gelais
Subject: AboutLinux Feedback

Hi,

Your new site is going to be very interesting.

I decided to give you feedback after reading the MailBag section and "Where will we be tomorrow?"

I "play" with Linux since 20 months. I got into the wagon by curiosity and because I am fascinated by the Free Software movement, in this era where USA are patenting genetic sequences and common sense concepts applied to e-commerce.

The only task I do only with Linux is Internet surfing, since 1 month. My only frustration with it is the lack of french support in the Linux version of Netscape. My family and I have not yet migrated to Linux for our other current tasks: edit MS Office documents for work, ray tracing, drawing, playing with children CDRom.

I have two networked machines, in dual boot. I had experimented with success a lot of funny things: Samba and NFS networking, internet sharing with firewalling, parallel pov rendering, etc.

I agree with most of your article. I think Linux is here to stay and would probably be one of the dominant desktop systems 5 years from here. However, it is only mature as a server (the http server works "out of the box"!). The GUIs have rough sides, KDE being the most usable. And Linux applications MUST offer total file format compatibility with dominant applications like MS Office, as long as they would be dominant in the workplaces.

About the installation, Linux could be a nightmare. When I installed RH 5.0, 20 months ago, it was not too hard. However, I recently upgraded my two OSes on my two machines, after upgrading the hard drive on the main one. I installed Fat32 partitions, and needed a new Linux kernel to recognize them.

The Windows installation took about two evenings, and the Linux one... two weeks. I am still not able to setup some functions correctly, like NFS (I don't really need it at home...).

NEXT: the rest of Patrice's experience

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