[sclug] Post: See you later Linux

[Alex Butcher]

On Sat, 27 Sep 2008, Luke Hinds wrote:

>>> On Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:34:51 +0100, mskadu at gmail.com said:> >
>>
>>>>> I thought I'd share my recent blog post on Linux with the group.
>>>>
>>
>>
> I have no experience of trying to install Linux on a Sony, but I understand
> your frustration, but would point out that it is not so much Linux at fault
> its the hardware manufactorers not opening their Proprietary source (in fact
> sharing it with only org, that being Mircrosoft).  So the real reason for
> your troubles (and the relative ease of using XP) is simply down to a
> aggressive monopoly of one company in the 'pc' market.

Actually, in this case, it's probably that Sony's ACPI implementation in
that laptop model's BIOS has only been tested with Windows, but is actually
buggy and/or incomplete if certain standard operations are asked of it. I
can understand why Sony would do this (the 80:20 rule), but it doesn't
endear me to their product...

> Why - I do happen to like XP, but can't handle the instabilty and I miss
> being able to write  shell scripts to do everything :)

Look into VBScript; it's better than DOS/CMD scripting even though the
performance is pretty terrible (even compared with bash scripts running on
the same hardware), the syntax can sometimes be pretty clunky and the API
exposure is inconsistent (hint: a common idiom seems to be to redirect the
output of a standard Windows command to a file, then parse the output)

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher, Bristol UK.                           PGP/GnuPG ID:0x5010dbff

"[T]he whole point about the reason why I think it is important we go for
identity cards and an identity database today is that identity fraud and
abuse is a major, major problem. Now the civil liberties aspect of it, look
it is a view, I don't personally think it matters very much."
  - Tony Blair, 6 June 2006 <http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page9566.asp>