>Agreed, (at least partially) but not because of your arguments. It does
>not matter if there are ports of all - you have also got to find them. Is
>there any central Linux packages storing place? And what if when it is
>a.out and you need ELF or vice versa or the shared libraries don't match
>and work with that precompiled program? Porting programs is usually no
>big fun - as is building them if you could get them built.
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/ (or go to one of the numerous mirrors like
the one found at ftp.cdrom.com) there is also one at mit that is a
different archive, but that one is more for kernal hackers. Or you could
go out and buy a CDrom with one of the many fine packages of Linux,
Slackware, Debian, or RedHat. Since Deb is installing now she would get an
elf system, and since elf systems support both a.out and elf, she would not
even notice that there was a file format crossover for Linux.
>You don't like kaffe, do you? As far as I understand, for Java you need a
>compiler and the JavaVM to run it on... And I rather would not have Java
>in my kernel and rather execute Java programs the way I do with
>tcl and perl... And I would not like perl or tcl in my kernel.
Java is compiled by the person who develops the program and released as
bytecode, thats why it displays reletivly seamlessly in Netscape. By
having java in the kernal means that the Linux kernal acts as the Java
Virtual Machine. So it becomes far easier to run java on the machine. You
don't need to run it as files of another program (appletviewer), Linux just
treats it as another executable. People are currently writing standalone
apps in java with the intent to use them cross platform. Linux supports
this better than any other OS at the moment.
>OOPS! Something I somehow missed! I know I'm BAD, BAD, BAD - but try out
>Tcl/Tk - as long as you stay with the scripts and don't go to embedding,
>there are lot's of easy and beautiful things to be done. You can make
>*interpretid* programs which run as fas as equvalent compiled programs
>under Windows. It's easy. It's beautiful. But it is not compiled and so
>many people don't like it.
Along with the "why schools teach windows" argument, production people
outside of the academic world use perl. You will find that most
professional web shops will use perl rather than tcl/tk. I'd go with perl
first, it's a bit more omnipresent.
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taylor@hotwired.com