Re: XyWrite Mac DOSBox Printing

[Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx]

Robert Holmgren wrote:
> ** Reply to message from Harmon Seaver  on
> Wed, 15 Aug 2007 08:48:28 -0500
>
> Thanks, Harmon -- nice summary, cuts to the chase. Do you run
> any Win32 apps?

  Not much at all, just a few utilities that come with various hardware
like my light/sound machine, DeLorme's Topo map, things like that.
Actually I bought a Mac originally because I was a long time OS2 fan and
had bought Ventura Publisher and Adobe Pagemaker for OS2, so when IBM
pulled the plug on OS2, I looked at my options, ether upgrade Pagemaker
to win9x or the mac version, and since I was a sysadmin having to deal
with a whole lot of win machines daily, I decided to try a Mac, figuring
 it couldn't be get much worse. I was pleasantly surprised to find out
how much better it was, and that was back in the mac OS7 or 8 days. My
staff was aghast, of course. Heresy!


> If so, what emulator(s) do you use (or
> recommend, even if you don't run Win32 apps) on Linux, MacOS,
> OSX?

  I use VirtualPC on the Mac, although not much at all anymore. It
works great, I just linux mostly and use wine, dosemu, and bochs. I have
a copy of vmware for linux here that I used to use a lot, but kept
having problems with the license when I upgraded linux so gave up on it
and use bochs instead, which works just as well and doesn't need a
license, of course. Wine has really come along tho, and works
surprisingly well for a lot of stuff.

 May I also ask which distros you prefer, for which tasks
> (in particular, for serving, and for app-heavy enduser)?

  I've used most linux distros at one time or another, starting when
there wasn't any such thing, just what Linus created, then slackware I
think. I used RedHat for a long, long time for everything, then got
increasingly annoyed with them for changing where they put things
continually, and finally got absolutely infuriated one day when I
upgraded sendmail on a server using their latest version, which shut off
all email services to all the libraries in about a third of MN. Turned
out they had decided that most of their users were homeusers who didn't
need to be running a SMTP server, because their ISP provided that
service, so they disabled it. No warning, of course. You can imagine the
number of angry phone calls I got, before I figured out what was wrong
and got another copy of sendmail from elsewhere and got it configured.
Which wasn't all that easy -- sendmail never is -- but RH's rpm had also
changed some other config files in the system that you wouldn't
necessarily think to look at when playing with sendmail -- argghh!
  I went back to Slackware briefly then went to Debian, which was a bit
of a learning curve, but I've been pretty satisfied with that for years.
 I think it was putting linux on my ipaq -- the Familiar for that is
based on debian -- and I had also installed debian on a Dec alpha
machine I was playing with, so decided to consolidate across the board.
 I'd trust it for anything, and the development happens fairly quickly.
Don't, however, do upgrades from the "testing" or "unstable" versions on
machines that you really need working. 8-)
  I've looked at the BSD world a bit, but that's a whole new learning
curve, and actually a lot of BSD stuff seems to be filtering into
Debian. Also have looked at Gentoo, which seems interesting, especially
since they seem to really be doing a lot with embedded linux, which I'm
really interested in, but those people seem to be speaking a whole
different language. Suse has been recommended to me by a lot of people,
but it's based on redhat which I would touch again. In fact I think I
blew a job interview a few years ago because they wanted a "redhat
admin", and I had years of experience running it, but couldn't help
giving my opinion of it. I guess deep down I didn't want the job. 8-)

--
Harmon Seaver