h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

yeah see subject line

no - I'm just an hallucination

Well hi there, I'm currently using Mac OSX, but I've used AUX and Linux in the past.

I'm here too. And use Mac OS X too, even since it was "Mac OS X Server version 1.0" (really a beta for the current thing, and really ). Also some linux. And, as a regular old user, SunOS on the university system.

I am here if you guys are - my little baby at work runs on XENIX on an "industry-standard 386 computer" .

Wait, wasn't Xenix M$ Unix?

Yeah ironic eh? I finally find myself in a situation where I MUST not use windows, and the damn UNIX clone/distribution/whateveritis is still tainted by M$ .

To be honest, not really sure about the history, but get impression its just a system made by others which M$ bought/licensed for a while or something - its SCO XENIX (System V for anyone who cares) really...

Cant really be M$, cos even though the instrument attached to it works with some program on top of a MSDOS emulator on top of the XENIX bit, it still works after all these years

If I remember correctly M$ licensed it fom AT&T and later sold it to SCO...so you might not want to tell any linux fanatics that you use Xenix as they'll despise you whether it's the M$ or SCO version.

Hah, as if I had any choice in the matter .
Any complaining Linux fanatics are welcome to come and visit and do their best to port the software and the dos emulator thingy onto their favourite Linux distribution, I wont mind, as long as the ELAN5000 keeps working away... actually, would have to be there favourite small distribution, not sure theres any disk space for singing and dancing... I have 5MB of RAM and 120MB of disk space altogether - just call me PowerUser

Have you ever thought of upgrading to a pocket calculator? Or maybe a rubber button speccy/Apple ][?

Nah, but I would like my old acorn electron back from computer hell one day though...


vp

Ah, I had a BBC Master

Well I've just found this, rediscovering H2G2 - I havn't been on it for ages yet it's such an interesting forum!

So I suppose I've just arrived.

I'm a newbie, to be honest, but the prospect of Free as in Freedom appeals to me greatly.

Unfortunately, my PC has weird hardware and will not run many Unix-like operating systems

Seriously, when I tried to install PCBSD 1.4, it could not even 'exec getty'! Solaris wouldn't start X automatically, presumably due to the wrong run-level (I didn't know about run-levels back then). When i installed Fedora, it set up a bootloader so that only it was on it and when I put an new OS on there, it got rid of the Fedora one! openSUSE was unstable and the software only sometimes worked. Debian was pretty nice, but the package management isn't utterly beautiful - I couldn't configure sources.list because I couldn't find any repositories for the software that I want except for the google one. Ubuntu 64 bit 7.04 was unstable, but the new one is nice. I think I'll stick with Debian until I some day build a new computer with nice, compatible hardware and good 'invisible' hardware - it's meant to be quite good and it's the basis of many other distributions, so I suppose that it could be very useful to learn to use it.

So yeah, I've had some pretty bad experiences with it, but Debian did strike me as quite nice.

My favorite desktop environment is gnome, because it's quite efficient compared to KDE, it's nice and easy to use and it's fairly 'shiny'. XFCE wasn't pretty enough for my liking and KDE was bloated.

Anyway, I hope that served as a good introduction to myself and my slightly nerdy experiences.

Mandriva, and mandrake before it, was always my favourite flavour of linux as it tended to just work out of the box.

Hi Pedantic Programmer don't forget to checkout A458228