[Sussex] Distros

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Paul Tansom <paul at aptanet.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 12:07 +0100, Geoffrey J. Teale wrote:>
> They are? I thought they were moving gradually, but by no means most
> were yet. They have never been big Microsoft fans, and this was a
> traditional stronghold for OS/2, in fact when I'm in the HSBC and look
> at their systems I can still see the familiar OS/2 Warp 4 window
> decorations, so since I'm not aware of any strong themes or window
> managers doing this (although I could be wrong if IBM has tried to match
> the desktop feel) I'm assuming they are still on OS/2 for now.

ON the desktop, sure, but the back ends have pretty much been ported
over, especially amongst the US banks.  Pretty much all of this stuff
ran on UNIX even before 9/11 AFAIK.  I've not been in the finance
industry for a couple of years now so I must admit my current
knowledge is only based on what I read.
 new tool.
>
> Suggest that they take a look at Gimpshop. Initially a Mac modification
> for Gimp to rearrange the menus to be familiar to Photoshop users, this
> has now been ported to Linux. There's definitely a Fedora RPM around,
> which I think has been tested with success on SuSe too. Windows has been
> mentioned, but I've not read of a binary package yet - although source
> is available. Personally I was a Photopaint user prior to Gimp (and
> Photo Impact before that because it was included with my scanner!), so
> the project has little impact on me - I'm pretty happy to get more
> familiar with the Gimp menus :)

I saw this on slashdot on April 1st - I assumed it was a joke.

--- %< ---

> Professional CAD and accounting software are the two I come across most.
> Although this may be more down to the lack of Autocad on Linux than lack
> of a half capably CAD application. 

I know of a company that is just starting out on a open source CAD
package.  It's going to be written in MIT/GNU Scheme but support
AutoCAD Lisp as well AFAIK.  Look out for this in the near future.

> Accounting is heading in the right
> direction, but slowly - thankfully OOo Calc is doing me well enough for
> now! 

> Oh, and educational software suitable for use in schools, notably
> LEA approved stuff. I'm not just talking good classroom software here
> either, but the backend stuff too.

LEA's are the issue, not the software, but on the FSF-UK list we've
seen movement in this direction.  Education is a very strange market
place, but there are several well funded efforts to improve the
situation.  Mark Shuttleworth is funding a lot of development in this direction.

> I doubt Games will ever get there completely given the massive
> commercial marketing and interests behind consoles, etc.. Better support
> for commercial gaming on Linux would be a very good start, and cross
> platform games a real boon. Not an issue for me though, the most I'd
> like to see for personal use is an easy was to play retro games on my
> GBA - so a few 8 and 16 bit platform emulators :) I think gaming moved
> past me sometime in the mid to late 80's!

Really the point is that games don't have an real social value so the
FSF is somewhat less concerned about them, though we would love them
to be Free Software it's not a fight that its worth our while to
fight in the short term.

-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org

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