Re: OT: Wheeeeee! New PSpice Benchmarks

From: keith (krw_at_att.bizzzz)
Date: 08/31/04 

Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 21:40:37 -0400

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004 16:17:46 +0000, Ken Smith wrote:

> In article <pan.2004.08.29.15.01.37.677679@att.bizzzz>,
> keith <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:
> [...]
>>I've already started down that path. It's been bumpy but I decided when
>>I went to Win2K three years ago that it was going the be my (first and)
>>last M$ OS. When I put together this Opteron system, I went with SuSE
>>9.1. I still have Win2K on the old system while I learn my way around.
>
> LTSpice works under wine (you already knew that)

Actually, I didn't. My Linux/Opteron system is a home machine and not
intended to do anythign other than learn Linux, at least for now. I use
both Win2K and AIX at work, and the applications I use are pretty much
handed me.
>
> The old DOS Orcad works under DOSEMU with a few problems. Their ESP
> program id daft things in DOS land and they are still daft under Linux.

I have OrCad 9.x, but I never considered trying it at home (no license).
 
> Open Office works ok for most text and spead *** sorts of things. The
> chart function of the spread *** is so slow as to be near useless. I
> plan on learning to use gnuplot when I get a little time.

Been there, it's OK. ...not perfect. Indeed the only *application* M$ has
ever produced that I like is Excell. The rest is pure garbage.

> A couple of other useful tips:
>
> On any installed software, in a shell type "man nameofprogram". For the
> good ones this display the manual for the program. If the manual tells
> you that the manual is obsolete and that you should use the "info"
> system, the program is likely to work but may have a bug or two. If
> there is no man page, it is very likely that the program is quite buggy.

I'm quite used to "man" pages, having done Unixisms for some time. Though
I do find "man" pages rather terse and slightly better than useless if you
don't know what they're saying. For instance I've been trying to get my
USB flash-drive running under Linux. Cool, I can follow directions in the
"man fstab" page, except that it doesn't tell me what all that crap is!
I finally (with major help from the web) got it working, but it was ugly,
and still have "issues" (my mount point tends to disappear). Grrr.

> Old programs, that are well rung out, tend to have "man" pages. The
> better programmers still provide "man" pages. So the method works
> fairly well.

...as reference. I remember the IBM JCL manuals were chock-full of
information, if you know what they were saying. reference <> help.

> I'm far from a Linux expert but I've got it to work for me. I use SuSE
> 8.1. You've got 9.1 hopefully they've fixed the things I've had to fix
> in the 8.1 install.

I've installed SuSE at least a half-dozen times. I added a DATA drive and
it crashed the installation on the pATA drive (it got sooo confused). I
then tried installing on tha SATA drive a few times, good idea! (the
drivers don't work!).

> BTW: You can do darn near anything in a Bash script.

Oh, my! Another issue! I followed the instructions (albeit from a RH
user) on how to do a BASH script for the above flash-drive. No joy in
Mudville[*] tonight. ...and mud-season is supposed to end by May

[*] If it doesn't stop raining I'll have to throw the computers out as
anchors. A friend has already lost his
basement/foundation/furnace/water-heater to floods (though his *flood*
insurance company calls a foot-wall of water running t'wards the house
and through the basement "sepage"). 

-- 
  Keith