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Re: [MiNT] OpenSource
> > Martin-Éric Racine <q-funk@pp.fishpool.fi> writes:
> > > At least specify "Linux i*86" as most things cannot, for
> > > instance, be used on Linux 68k. All the precompiled stuff
> > > without sources is specifically for "Linux Pentium".
> >
> > Well, most things I use on my x86 box here at work are
> > available for m68k as well, precompiled. I use Debian.
>
> GNU stuff, sure. Star Office and other productivity apps, no.
On Mon, Feb 21, 2000 at 10:26:31AM -0500, Katherine Ellis wrote:
> What I see is that most of the stuff (important) are only available for
> i386 mainly (big app, netscape, plugins for it, word perfect, sybase,
> applix, Staroffice, and many more which i don't draw a list, could be too
> long). The linux68k as I see it is mainly getting gnu app, which is quite
> unfortunate i have to say.
Well... If you don't need Windows Office compatilibity or same user
interface, Open Source has at some pretty good alternatives for this
functionality.
IMHO KDE Office seems very promising and dowadays Kdevelop is widely used
for C/C++ development management. Gnome has also some nice stuff. And
now that Sun bought Star Division, StarOffice is open source too.
Netscape is Open source (although plugins might not), PostgreSQL is 99%
compliant ANSI SQL database and if you are satisfied with faster but less
ANSI SQL, you can use MySQL too (not free, but open source, most common db
in www-servers AFAIK). I think there are ODBC interfaces to both Postgres
and MySQL.
> When I ask the question to some linux68k users(with all respect) about
> what app they use, and what equivalent do they have for DTP, Music,
> graphics in TC mode, word processing. They basically answer that if they
> need to run any of these they would have bought a wintel machine which is
> the best to do such.
Gimp is no Photoshop, but for non-professionals a pretty good alternative.
If one is doing technical oriented (mathematical) document processing, LyX
(www.lyx.org) / LaTeX is an excellent choice.
There are some forays into music and DTP area in Open Source too,
but nothing compareble to Cubase & Calamus though.
The real trouble is, who is going to port all of this to MiNT :-)). The
sources are *huge* (X, Netscape, StarOffice...). New stuff uses all kind of
neat unix stuff which is lacking in MiNT (such as dynamically loadable
extension modules, mmap(), infinite stack and so on). :-/
Flexibility, modularity etc have also their own costs. This kind of
functionality needs quite a bit of CPU power & RAM (KDE & Netscape is slow
as dog (=swapping lots) with less than 64MB ram, as is compiling with
optimizing large C++ classes using templates).
Using Linux at work,
- Eero http://www.students.tut.fi/~t150315/