Re: May I introduce myself to cobol?...

From: Richard (riplin_at_Azonic.co.nz)
Date: 02/17/05 

Date: 17 Feb 2005 12:12:42 -0800

> Couple of years back, Corel, based in Eastern Canada, did intend to
> introduce a user-friendly GUI front-end for Linux. The CEO got fired
and
> that project was put on hold or dumped.

That's not quite true. First of all it was 1999, and it was released.
I have a copy here including WordPerfect 8 for Linux. The main issue
way back then was installing. 6 years ago installers were a pain and
required arcane knowledge of the system. Corel uses KDE as its GUI.

These days with most distros you just put the CD in and it installs.
When I put Mandrake on my laptop a month or two ago it correctly
resized the Windows XP partitions to give itself some disk space and
installed sucessfully finding and using all the hardware.

Basically Corel was running out of money because its markets had dried
up and it was looking for new markets such as Linux for its WordPerfect
products. MS gave it some money to stop it doing that.

> GUI interfaces on UNIX/Linux systems, but none have yet taken off
completely.

All Unix/Linux can run X which is enough to get a GUI, even remotely or
on several screens. To that a Window Manager can be added which may be
a simple, streamlined one or something with much more facilities. There
were several for Unix such as CDE which was standard on UnixWare and
OpenServer more than a decade ago. Most Linux use Gnome or KDE, or
both. While these do compete (Redhat prefers Gnome and Mandrake
prefers KDE) there is no real issue as programs run on either. It is
called _choice_, something that Windows users get little of.

> The problem with the UNIX/Linux world is that there are no
> standards and everyone does their own thing

Yes, there are standards. LSB for example ensures that programs can
rely on finding stuff in the correct places. There is choice, you can
choose to use Qt or GTK or wxWindows or Glade or Tk or any number of
windowing toolkits and they will all work whether it is Gnome or KDE or
BlackBox on the desktop.

> A few years back M/F did have a Linux COBOL compiler - $4,000 CDN

They still do, and it requires per user run-time licences.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Why is KDE 4 so messed up?
    ... Sure, on the condition that KDE honors those changes, but the KDE 4.6.3 ... you should never run anything as root, ... And don't even think of installing nVidia's own driver, ... It looks like Windows 95, ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: QTRuby + QT4 + Win32
    ... If you can get the build system installed on Windows, ... But installing the GnuWin32 didn't work for me and I gave up. ... KDE techbase. ... You shouldn't need to build kdelibs in order to build Qt4 QtRuby ...
    (comp.lang.ruby)
  • Re: Install FreeBSD 6.2 and Windows XP prof in the same computer
    ... I mean is, after FreeBSD is installed, KDE is running, and the Windows ... XP prof is running on another separate pop-up windows within KDE. ... Please provide me more advices on installing multi operating system ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: Labels - Word vs WordPerfect
    ... Corel WP 7 was a perfect joy to use.. ... MVP - Windows Shell/User ... "If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept ...
    (microsoft.public.word.newusers)
  • Re: No Help Files
    ... In my programs like FrontPage, Corel, Wilcom, ... Corel doesn't even bring up a help box. ... reload my Windows XP program. ... >>I am unable to access help files in any of my programs. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)