Re: The Microsoft stranglehold on its users....

I've read the online version of Linux from Scratch. It makes
everything a lot easier these days.

I copied the whole thing but can't find where I stored it. Now, you have
to buy the book (if you can find it [I have not tried]).

The book version listed on amazon.com is from 2000, and is probably
way out of date by now.
According to

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
http://cart.cheapbytes.com/cgi-bin/cart/0970010004.html

it looks like the last published version of the book is from 2005,
which may possibly be slightly out of date too. I've been looking at
the latest versions at

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/read.html

I found that to be the best. LILO had bugs and it was a trap because to
uninstall LILO you had to get a successful boot into Linux and uninstall
it from the utility. You could NOT just blow the partitions and reformat.
Same problem with System Commander. Probably all of the boot managers use
tricks to defeat default boot records. At one point I had to use a disk
editor and just zero out everything at the master boot record area of the
disk.

The machine I was using in those days was used by a few other folks
besides myself. So I couldn't just wipe out MS-DOS and Windows 3.11
because I wanted to. This was in the days before Windows95 was
released. When I "inherited" several pentium machines years later, I
usually kept several MS-DOS boot disks with the DOS fdisk command, in
case LILO malfunctioned or died. At least with the DOS boot disks,
fdisk can restore the DOS bootup record. Usually I kept the first
partition running MS-DOS for software which didn't have a useful Linux
counterpart at the time. (Mostly silly DOS based video games in those
days).

But, this is where the whole SW culture is going: forcing
you to spend more money on things you don't need, or should not need, and
guarantee revenue (socialism for the corporations, but not people) through
actions on their part to foist this *** onto the rest of us.

They just blame it "complexity" messing everything up. Product
liability regulations + laws hasn't caught up with them yet.

Welcome to the modern 21st century where the economy is based on "spinning
your wheels" rather than real productivity (i.e. making things that work
or services that serve).

Makeshift work for nothing.

I could write a whle book, myself on Linux and SW experiences. But, on the
whole, SW is the first commercial business in history to come out with
something that you pay money for and what you get is at least partly ***
for your money.

I disagree. The experts for that are the movie and music industries,
or more generally the "entertainment" business going back to the early
part of the 20th century. ;-)

.