[vox-tech] Demonstrations of Linux flexibility?

[Karsten M. Self]

on Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 02:06:57PM -0800, Robert G. Scofield (rscofield at afes.com) wrote:
> On Saturday 05 March 2005 13:26, Troy Arnold wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 03:07:09PM -0800, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> > > I'm looking for examples illustrating the flexibility possible with
> > > GNU/Linux.
> >
> > How about the ability to tailor your working environment to the
> > abilities (limits) of your hardware?
> 
> Or how about getting the computer to multi-task for real.  I use the
> printing example, and Pete Salzman uses the MP3 example.  
> 
> Suppose you have Linux and Windows 98 on a dual boot, and you have
> Open Office for both OS's.  Start printing a 30 page paper in Windows
> 98 and you will find that the computer is useless until the print job
> is over.  

Whilke there's a fair amount of Win9X/ME floating around businesses,
_most_ of them have caught up with the past five years, and
multiprocessing under NT-based 'Doze tends to work pretty well, most of
the time.  This is also sort of a hard story to tell. 

> You can't surf the web, you can't start another word processing
> project, you can't play Solitaire.  But if you reboot and print the
> same 30 page paper out in Linux, you can work flawlessly on the
> computer while the paper is printing out.  (I don't know what would
> happen with Windows XP.)

Well....

...you could do what I did and run a friend's "compute pi to arbitrary
precision" script, which both hogs all CPU and fills all available
memory to point of hard lock....


I think that the multiprocess / multiuser aspect is probably one worth
looking at -- the example of having different web sessions running under
different users for web design is somewhat useful.


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    And we decided that one big pile was better than two little piles,
    and rather than bring that one up, we decided to throw ours down.
    - A. Guthrie
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