rec.autos.simulators

Please find below the article I posted a couple of weeks ago, asking
the racing sim and linux community to support my Grand Prix Legends for
Linux petition. This is the last call for signatures; I'll leave the
petition up until the end of June and then mail printouts of the list
to both Sierra Germany and Sierra international.

Thanks to all those who have already signed; I would never have thought
so many of you would like to see the best racing simulation to date
on our platform of choice.

Regards & let's all help Tux the penguin to get his drive in a Lotus!

Uwe

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Linux lovers,

I've put up a little petition that I would very much like you to sign
in order to ask Sierra / Papyrus to port their award winning
Sixties racing simulation "Grand Prix Legends" to our favorite ***
platform.

If you're only halfway interested in seeing more commercial grade
games and simulation for Linux, please go to

        http://www.racesimcentral.net/

and and your name to the signers list. The petition form will remain
up for a couple of weeks, then I'll make a hardcopy and mail the stuff
to the addressed companies.

Thanks in advance for your time,

Uwe Schuerkamp
(hoover at telemedia . de)

1) It's not a Microsoft product
2) I runs faster than a Microsoft product
3) It's more stable than a Microsoft product
4) All of the above
5) Please provide explanations please! :)

Philster

Not only "not a M$ product", but Open Source. If a part of the operating
system has a bug, you have the source to that part of the operating system,
and you can find the bug and fix it, and submit your changes to be included
into the next version of the OS. Granted not everyone can program like
this, but even discovering a bug and reporting it can get it fixed from
someone who can program. You cant even come close to doing this with
a M$ OS.. all you can do is submit a bug report to them, and we've all
seen how responsive they are to bugs in thier OS (remember Win95?) :)

_Lots_ faster. Even an old 486/66 is very useful as a network workstation,
and can even act as a mail/dns/web server. I wouldn't even attempt this
on NT without a fast PII with gobs of ram and fast disk. I run a web chat
server on a 586/133mhz, and that box can (and has) served well over 50,000
hits a day.

a snip from my 486 sitting here on the floor:

 10:34am  up 103 days, 13:46,  1 user,  load average: 1.08, 1.02, 1.01

Thats 103 days without a reboot. And this is nothing for linux. I've had
uptimes of 9 months straight, and the only reason for a reboot was because
I upgraded the kernel (the heart of the OS) to a new version. NT admins
can only dream of uptimes that long. I have seen NT boxes up that long,
but thats few and far between. And with linux, seldom an application
brings down the whole OS (can you say Blue Screen of Death?). It can happen
with buggy code, but the chances that a user-level program crashing the
entire box is much less likely to happen in Linux.

Yes.. All of the above. Granted, I'd love to make my main home box a
1 OS (Linux) setup, but the support for games isn't there. Quality apps
are available for Linux such as Star Office, which can read and write to
M$ Office formats (doc, excel, etc), tons of personal productivity tools,
and lots more. And most of the quality stuff available is free/opensource.

There are a few week areas in Linux. Support for the latest multimedia
devices (dvd comes to mind) lacks a bit. But companies are stepping up and
the lag time between a new device and support for it is getting better.
Creative Labs is an example of this.. I've got my SB Live! card running
in Linux thanks to thier beta support for Linux. Hardware vendors have
started noticing the damand for support. Heck, I even got my Voodoo3
running in X Windows thanks to dedicated hard work from a guy who took
the time to write drivers for this new hardware. I believe that 3dfx has
seen this guys work and picked him up to work for them.

I have. While Linux isn't the best choice for everyone, its getting
closer every day. Its getting to the point of being able to do everything
on your system via a GUI, point and click interfaces to configuring just
about everything on your system. And great looking interfaces too. Take
a look at www.gnome.org, gtk.themes.org, and kde.themes.org. These
desktops blow anything away that you can come up with on an M$ box.

Matt

Yes. Most all distrobutions of linux are available online
for download.. it is encouraged in fact. You can go to the stores
and buy commercial versions such as RedHat, which comes with a
great big manual, and also entitles you to phone-in tech support
to RedHat. Aside from a few commercial-only add-ons, the online
downloadable versions are identical to the store-bought ones.

And for those with fast connections and CD burners, some Linux mirrors
(gatekeeper.dec.com comes to mind) carry .iso images of the latest
releases... download, burn, install :)

-Matt
de3rocks on TEN

Open Source means nothing and it does NOT make a OS or other product better
or worse by itself.  This is a complete misnomer.  And how many people
really know how to fix the very low level system bugs? Not many.  RedHat,
etc, etc are about as responsive as Microsoft in releasing patches and
fixes.

Sure.  Its very useable for those that have the know or are willing to spend
the money to train people to learn unix.  But as with any OS or server
products its not always the correct solution.

And far less useable.

StarOffice is a joke...ugh.  I don't like all the feature ***in MS, but
compared to StarOffice MS' Office and even the latest version of WordPerfect
romps all over SO.  Not to mention there has yet to come out with one good,
solid and useable GUI for Linux.  Best unix one I've seen and am happy with
belongs to SUN.  Sure, I've seen and downloaded tons of free/opensource
personal productivity tools, etc, etc, etc...and they all have massive bugs,
annoying features, don't work correctly, etc.  I suppose if you have nothing
else better to do then its cool to fix other people's code.  And the other
thing, Linux is NOT for everyone and its definetly not at this time a ***
system either.

A few?  There are MANY weAk areas.   Btw, just a month or so ago Logitech
announced driver support for Linux for its products.   Not to mention, fit
and finish is horrid.  X-windows is a dog, there aren't any good windows
managers that aren't hacks available.  And again, driver support is very
spotty so its like programming back on DOS boxes where you had to write your
own, or dig up drivers for all the specific devices you wanted to support.

<rotfl>  Please. KDE blows away the MS box windows manager? Sure, if you
compare it to Windows 3.1.  Same with gnome.  Linux has a very very long
ways to go, which is rather funny since it still is nothing more than a
rewrite of the unix kernel for the x86 architecture.

And if you are a newbie, you better get those manuals and go buy several
other
recommended Linux or Unix books to be able to learn how and what to setup,
not setup, how to configure the system, etc.  Putting 2 LAN cards in, adding
in a modem w/dual or triple dialups, etc (installing any of the latest
hardware), is not an easy or particularly fun chore.  Sure, about 5 years
ago I actually enjoyed that type of stuff...but now I have other things to
do, and hardware and software is to the point where it should damn well
install itself w/o too much problem or help from the user.

On Mon, 7 Jun 1999 09:15:08 -0500, "Chris Schletter"

...

Like NT is easy to use. It is easy to use, but not when you need to
get it working the way you really want it to. I would still select
Linux or any other Unix box over any NT machine every time, and I have
people to back me up on that.
Fact is that today's computer only get MORE complicated to run
correctly. Just a result from staying on the edge with drivers and
such, but well, my C64 never failed to boot. Until it died ofcourse :)

For now. Just a matter of time. Almost nobody uses fiber networks
these days. But they will...

Things will improve and ARE improving. SGI is supporting Linux, and I
think MS will probably begin supporting Linux as soon as Bill Gates
wakes up again, just like with Internet, and he says 'Compile that
MS-Office for Linux!'.

Again, let the more expert guys install Linux for now, but the group
of users is growing fast and thus the commercial impact and thus the
quality (or rather quantity of good quality) software.

I agree that the MS Windows manager is one of its better aspects.

So what? Unix is still the most robust kernel that exists today. I see
nothing degrading about that; in fact, I welcome that fact.

Ruud van Gaal
MarketGraph / MachTech: http://www.racesimcentral.net/
Art: http://www.racesimcentral.net/

Joe McGinn
==========================================
Staff Writer for the Sports *** Network
http://www.racesimcentral.net/***.com/
==========================================

Just a few hundred Linux users can make a modification being integrated into the
kernel. If the change/feature is really usefull, just one guy can ask for it,
and
there's a big chance, it will be done.
Try that with MS...

Do you know many secretaries who are able to configure their MS box?
I only know many secrataries sick of rebooting their MS box all the time...

For games, that's still true.

Every time I'm confronted with a file selection box containing scrolled lists,
that CANNOT be resized to show more list entries, I remember what system has
the better GUI. Or applications that reinitialize the directory each and every
time you open the damn box.

Yepp, we're working hard at making it one... ;^)

Hmm, my Logitech mouse works under Linux for ages. They just don't want to
miss the bus, so Logitech puts their sticker on them now.

Why the hell is X a dog? If you want standards, use OSF/Motif's mwm, if you
want lots of cute features like multiple workspaces, use fvwm. No hacks,
stable and reliable software.

Hmm, yeah, spotty or buggy driver support is unknown to MS users. LOL!

The features found in fvwm blows Win9x out of the water.

l8er
ronny

--
How to get rid of censorship in German game releases
<http://www.racesimcentral.net/;

          |\      _,,,---,,_        I want to die like my Grandfather,
   ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_              in his sleep.
        |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'     Not like the people in his car,
       '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)            screaming their heads off!

Open Source does in reality mean a fast turn around to bugs for the most
critical functions. The current Linux 2.2 kernel, released in February 1999,
has evolved to version 2.2.9 already, with 2.3.5 in beta. Microsoft is still
struggling to get service pack 5 out for Windows NT, a product around since 1996
and more buggy than Linux. Windows 98 Second Edition is due some time this
millenium. Windows 2000 is in big trouble from all that I have read about it. PC
Week reported that Microsoft have abandoned backwards compatibility in order to
meet deadlines, so you will have to upgrade most of the existing Windows
applications to run on Windows 2000. Do not confuse the infrequent updates by
Redhat with a slow development of Linux. Linux is moving quite fast, Redhat
choose to sample and update at a leisurely pace.

If you mean playing games, you are right. Pretty much everything else is
available on Linux, often for free, and Linux GUI's such as gnome are excellent.

There is also Wordperfect for Linux. Sure, it may not have all the feature set
of the current Windows version - which 99.9% of users never use anyway. I can
sort of understand the mad dash to always have the latest and greatest (GPL 1.1
, yahoooo), but only upgrading when an essential feature is added is a more sane
approach. I am still using the first release of the Linux 2.2 kernel, don't plan
to upgrade till 2000 sometime - unless I find a bug that hurts me or a super
duper feature is added to the most recent kernel. Also, I don't expect to reboot
the PC until then either. I would guess that on avergae I reboot my Windows 98
(Second Edition final)  box about once per day, and live with program crashes on
a more frequent basis. My Windows NT 4 with service pack 4 box is not too bad,
maybe only crashes once per week.

Agreed, it is not a *** platform - but only because the vendors are not
supporting Linux. Linux will play games just fine when they are available. KDE
is a Sun CDE clone and I haven't found any bugs in the version that ships with
Redhat 6.0, but I do prefer gnome - which does have some bugs. I had gnome crash
once in the last 4 months. I had to restart it - just gnome, not Linux.

For many, Linux is already there. Probably these users are Unix savvy and place
performance/reliability over the desire to have the latest whizzbang features
which they wouldn't use anyway. In addition, Unix is vastly more useful than
Windows in networked environments. I haven't figured out yet how to rlogin to an
NT box. Redhat, Caldera, and others, are really moving Linux fast towards the
same ease of installation that Windows has. In fact, Caldera now has a superior
installation program than Windows. Other new efforts, such as wine, have the
potential to eliminate the need for Windows at all while still being able to run
Windows application on Linux. Vmware already lets you do that, but Windows still
needs to be installed initially.

Sure, Linux is not perfect but its rate of advance is accelerating. It now
outsells Windows NT according to the latest sales figures. The mainstream market
will be exceptionally tough to crack. The product needs more ease of use
improvements, and Microsoft are not going to sit back and watch their golden
goose get cooked. The best news is that Linux is emerging as credible
competition and it is the consumers who will benefit as Microsoft react to
Linux. Already Microsoft has changed its Windows 2000 strategy towards producing
a reliable product rather than one with feature bloat. You can bet that this
shift has only taken place because of Linux.

Windows or Linux  - we all win if both succeed. I use both and look forward to
the improvements that competition will bring.

Keith.

[ Linux as a desktop OS ]

That is interesting!  I remember what system has the better GUI[*] every
time I *see* a 'file selection box' (for loading or saving).  They are
disgusting things, and whoever thought them up was obviously insane.

[*] RISC OS, of course!  http://www.riscos.com  :-)

--
Richard.

"Take these broken wings and learn to fly all your life."

Nice to know that some people appreciate decent software design!

Neil Raine
[Author of Acorn Window Manager in a previous life]