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William,
As the Author of all 4 editions of Que's Using Linux I may have some
experience :). First its a great day to day operating system for surfing
the internet and communicating with the world. Netscape Navigator is
available as are a variety of other internet related tools. The newer
distributions make installation a snap and any techical problems are
just a news group posting away (or a quick search of the web) - no
paying $$$$ to wait on a tech support line for [no] help.
You'll also find a few office integration products that include word
processors, spread sheets, and presentation programs - some can even
exchange data with Microsoft product (abeit typically older versions
like Office 95 etc.) I use Applixware although its a resource hog like
most other integrated systems. I anxiously waiting for Corel to release
its Linux office suite soon - hopefully WordPerfect and the rest of the
components will work out well.
Can Linux crash, yep every once in a great while you get a kernel panic
or a hung process, but my systems (I run Linux on 3 of my 4 home
machines and on 50 of my 54 systems at work) are very stable when
compared to windows machines. I will say that NT 4.0 with all the
service packs has been relatively stable for me, but the apps
(notoriously word and IE) can consume a huge amount of memory - and it
still baffles me why it can take upwards of 30 seconds to load a 40 page
manuscript on a machine with over 9 gigs of hd and 128 megs or ram and a
PII!
Unfortunately, for Traders you wont be running your windows programs
there. Even with some of the Windows emulators, none will run Trade
Station, although most DOS based programs should work fine since DOS
emulation is pretty good.
A little voice in back of my head keeps nagging me to write a
SuperCharts-like program for Linux, especially with the forming standard
on chart-info storage, but alas my days of hacking code are fading fast.
Anyway, I can not promise much on any hand holding, but I am certainly
glad to answer any questions you may have and help out with what I can.
Again - Linux is a great OS for the Internet (since most of the Net was
born under Unix - of which Linux is a derivitive) but I'm not sure how
helpful it would be to traders at this moment. If you get most of your
info from the web, via email, or use a DOS program you should have NO
problems - but if you rely on a great many Win32 [ 95,98,or NT)
programs, then Linux wont help much.
HTH,
--Jack
> From: "William L. Mabee" <wmabee@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
[snip]
> Have given considerable thought to swithing to
> a public domain operating system. Think
> its called Linux. Anyone have any experience
> with it.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
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