LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 03:04:55 +0930

MS (temporarily) off the hook - laughs on way to bank!

The MS break-up thing.

By now, everyone will have read the plethora of comment on
the MS victory in the anti-trust thing, and all the
comments about how this is a good thing or a bad thing,
and how the Supreme Court has said that maybe the
penalty (the break-up) would not have achieved the
desired remedy, and therefore even nastier things
might happen to MS when the cogs have turned.

But someone in the slashdot discussion said that it didn't matter
because windows was losing against linux anyway.
I doubt this very, very much. 
But then I had a look at the new google directory thing:

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/

Under OS links for the two OSs, I see:

Windows:	 617
Unix:		1151
Linux:		3863

Hmmm. I guess that's to be expected from the
distributed nature of linux development.

But maybe, just maybe, the linux world really is winning.
I know that Google may have an in-built bias too because
it is based on linux.
But MS are having big difficulties getting companies to
get onto the latest OS recently.
I'm beginning to sense that a collapse may be nigh.

The recent panicky statements by MS about the GPL have
ionically given credibility to the GPL.
(That's why they didn't want to mention the L-word for
so long.)

I think that MS must have done a really thorough analysis
and discovered that the GPL _is_ enforceable.
Otherwise they wouldn't be so panicked about it.

The future of linux victory may not be what most people
hope for. Rather than a world in which linux takes over
and makes lots of money, I predict that linux will take
over and the entire software economy will collapse.
People will just stop paying for software.

===================================================
The Gnome-doesn't-start-up thing.

Here's a possibly useful piece of linux information.

I just wasted a couple of days of frustration trying to work
out why I couldn't get this to work:

  startx gnome

Well, it turns out that (at least in SuSE 7.1), if you use the
C shell (tcsh) as I do, then the gnome path doesn't get
loaded up correctly into the PATH variable, and the X windows
just stops with no window manager.

Isn't that great. Your screen just goes blank if you
try to run gnome from a console C shell.
Obviously the distro developers don't run the C shell.

I just wanted to mention that in case anyone else 
runs into the same problem.

I'll get out of your way now.
Cheers,
Alan Kennington.  

-- 
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