[Coco] OT Linux question

[Andrew]

This -may- turn into an overly long rant; we'll see - but you've been 
warned!

First - regarding the OP's question on PDFs:

I run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (which is getting long in the tooth, but it does 
everything I need so far); I have a number of utilities installed for 
the purpose of PDF rendering, chief among them "ghostscript". There's 
also "evince".

For PDF creation, though - it's actually kinda murky to me! I know that 
it works (I do it fairly regularly) - but what's doing it, I don't know 
off-hand. Looking thru my package manager, I see a lot of stuff checked 
for PDF usage; one that stands out is something called "UniConvertor"; 
but IIRC, most of the stuff goes thru ghostscript (for postscript 
output), and then on to a pdf via ps2pdf - all of which seem to be a 
part of the ghostscript package.

So - I guess the answer would be "ghostscript"; I've never had a problem 
generating such files; in fact, I've got my scanner set up to easily 
allow it to sense the press of it's "quick buttons" and scan a document 
to a PDF file. It took more than a bit of fiddling around to get it to 
work, but now that it's set up, it works well (though usually for 
scanning I break out XSane).

I've been using Linux in one form or another since about 1995; I first 
started off with an old plaything distro called "MonkeyLinux" (which is 
still available, btw); it ran on top of a DOS filesystem (if you can 
believe that!). I had it running on a 386 laptop with 6 meg of RAM 
(story in itself).

I started playing with Linux after a friend introduced me to it; I don't 
remember the exact specifics, but I do know it involved some hacking on 
an old pizzabox SPARC machine. At any rate, I could see there was a lot 
more power there; it reminded me of the time I had spent playing with 
AIX on an RS/6000 box one of my old employers had. It also reminded me 
of the fun and spirit of the Color Computer, OS-9, as well as my old 
Amiga boxes.

I didn't jump ship from Windows immediately; it was a gradual 
transition, but by about 1998 or so, I was completely on-board. The only 
time I use Windows now is when it's for my work or something; although 
I've been contemplating setting up another box for when my Oculus Rift 
arrives (though even there, I will have options under Linux as well).

I think that's what I like most about Linux - the extreme number of 
options, in addition to the open-source nature of almost all of it 
(about the only closed source stuff I have on my Linux box is the NVidia 
graphics drivers, and a copy of EagleCAD that I installed to play with 
once). I like the fact that you can get just about any modern platform 
to run Linux; heck, even my phone (Android) runs Linux! My TV runs 
Linux, now that I think about it!

Yes - there are some things that Linux isn't good for; as Bill (IIRC?) 
mentioned, for audio workstation use (talking production here - regular 
audio output and such works just fine for day-to-day stuff), there are 
limitations. As with everything, though, over time even that will be 
overcome.

I would say most of the issues with any development on Linux, when it 
comes to needing hardware drivers, is the reluctance of hardware 
manufacturers to write drivers, or release the specs to allow the 
community to write drivers for the hardware. Instead, most of the time 
the community has to resort to a reverse engineering effort, and that's 
only available for the "popular" hardware. Anything niche will have few 
or no developers around with the skills to reverse engineer the 
hardware. It's been this way for a long time, only barely moving in a 
different direction over the years.

Other than that, I've rarely found an area of computing that Linux was 
up to the task for. To say that Linux isn't advanced or capable is 
either outright lying, or ignorance of what it can do (and I highly 
suspect the latter). The majority of the internet and the web relies on 
Linux; most web hosting uses it extensively, Google uses it extensively, 
heck - I bet even Microsoft uses it extensively, but are keeping 
tight-lipped about it (that, or they have a large backroom of monkeys 
whose only job is to regularly reboot their servers).

Yes, I am a Linux "fanboy"; I'm not wedded at the hip to it - show me 
something better, with open-source code, and a large community of users, 
I'll have a look. BSD is something I have looked into - but what I hate 
about it is its "brains-fall-out-open-license"; both Microsoft and Apple 
LOVE BSD - because they can easily take what they want from it, and not 
give anything back if they don't want to (talking source code, etc 
here); Apple has contributed back, but I have no doubt that they 
probably took some things and didn't contribute anything back for it, 
but we'll never know what those areas were. Doesn't matter though; the 
license allows for it.

Which is why some companies hate Linux - because of the GPL. But some 
"get it". Some (companies and individuals) understand that they may not 
always be around, but that they want their code to live on. The GPL 
allows for this to happen. Think about all the struggles our CoCo 
community (and other "retro" communities) have had (and continue to 
have) because of "closed-source"! Richard Stallman foresaw a lot of this 
back in the 1980s when he set up the Free Software Foundation and the 
GPL. There's always been this "struggle" in the microcomputer world over 
source code and software. I'm not really sure why; money plays a big 
role in it - so does an "art vs. engineering" aspects of software and 
software development, I think.

The sad part about it all is that given mere years of time passing, 
software becomes obsolete so damn quickly, so why is everybody so intent 
on keeping it secret and unavailable for so long? Ok - well, that does 
it; like I said - fair warning and all.

/rant

Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona
http://www.phoenixgarage.org/