On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, Paul (NCC/CS) wrote:

> But I NEED certain tools to do day to day work with, at
> work and at home. I need these to work straight away.
> Least mucking about possible. I need Netscape browser,
> Netscape mail, Staroffice for microsoft word docs because
> I must be able to read and respond to these in my job, and I
> need to run ORACLE so I can carry out development
> work in this area. Also it would be nice to be able to run
> some things like the Real audio player that I suddenly
> needed the other day.
>
> Now all the above apps are Linux binaries run under
> emulation. The trouble is that there all collectively
> flakey. Some are a bit buggy. All are hard to upgrade.
> Some don't work as well as they should. Some don't
> work at all. And the round and round the circle problems
> with the package source system experienced by Gan Uesli
> Starling is something I am quite familiar with. I often
> end up having to upgrade my entire OS and package
> source and packages to get one new app to work.

	The linux emulation may not be perfect, but I've found more often
	the problems are in the linux binaries and libraries - the apps
	behave similarly on a linux box.

	Netscape:
	    I use the linux netscape on my NetBSD/i386 box and have
	    found it no less reliable than running native. In fact
	    the only real difference is that it crashes very seldom
	    when displaying flash (unlike on a redhat box). If you
	    want a reliable netscape, turn off javascript.  I've
	    also run the opera browser (again under linux emulation),
	    a native mozilla, but tend to run galeon (native) pretty
	    much exclusively as a browser of choice.

	Word docs:
	    Someone is working on a netbsd port of StarOffice (to
	    sparc intially as it happens - I've run it but my sparc
	    box only had 16MB at the time :), though as ever if
	    people are willing to contribute time an i386 port
	    should not be a problem.  I've found both gnumeric and
	    abiword have made significant leaps in usability - I
	    now no longer just reject word docs when they are
	    emailed to me. I'm no sure that is an improvement :)

	Packages:
	    NetBSD is working on cleaning up the way sets of binary
	    packages are built and made available. I tend to build
	    from source on one machine and use the binary packages
	    from there.  I've started using pkgsrc on the formula1.com
	    live linux servers which has significantly reduced the
	    effort in keeping them up to date and correct.

	NetBSD has a lot of areas in which it should, and hopefully
	will improve, but in general I've found it sucks less than
	the alternatives.