What does this tell us?

by William Henning
Editor, AboutLinux

The Linux community needs to get the word out that there ARE many applications available for Linux.

If we look at Patrice's needs:

1. edit MS Office documents for work
2. ray tracing
3. drawing
4. playing with children CDRom

Linux can clearly satisfy at least the first three (StarOffice, PovRay/Blender, Gimp), and while some of the children's CD titles would probably run under Wine there is currently a dearth of educational titles for Linux.

Skipping over the installation difficulties Patrice solved, there is still the problem of processes that could not be killed; while I have not encountered it to the extent Patrice has, I have run across it in the past, and I assure you it is most annoying. Fortunately I have not seen the problem lately, newer distributions seem to be quite good about recovering resources from zombie processes.

I have to agree with Patrice, the support offered by the Linux community on the net is unmatched in my experience with commercial operating systems. About two years ago I was installing a Novell server, and I ran into a problem; after searching the net I gave up and called Novell, only to be told that each incident is $200 - that there was NO installation support included in the OS price!

Novell is not the only one who does this; about a year later we were fighting with installing SCO at work; it had trouble recognizing a "supported" SCSI controller. We called SCO, and got "Sorry, you have to pay $$$ per incident" - again no free installation support.

I have to wonder how long people will put up with such answers when leading Linux distributors offer 30-100 days of installation support with their ~$50 packages.

Please don't worry about your English! Your letter was quite understandable.

Regards,

Bill

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