“I’m writing this on Linette, which is a pretty straightforward
Red Hat 7 Linux box. Linette logs on to Euphonia, which runs NT
Terminal Server and Citrix running. Except for the keyboard and
smaller screen at this test station, I would be hard put to detect
any differences from writing at my primary systems, which run
Windows Me and Windows 2000, and have Word on the local
machine.”
“There’s one difference, though: Over on the right side of my
screen are those “dock apps” that run under Linux. One of those
shows me CPU usage. Another shows the phases of the Moon (a bit
greater than half-moon. Clicking on that gives more data.) While
this isn’t particularly useful, it’s the kind of cool stuff that
got people excited about the Macintosh when it first came out.”
“Meanwhile, I saved this work to a file over on Galacticus, the
Windows ME system I will write most of the column on. I could be
working on the entire column here, but this works just as well.
When I’m done here, I’ll simply insert the file into the master
column file. I could also be using the various Word collaborative
tools to collaborate with myself. The point is, although there is
no Microsoft software on this machine, I am running Microsoft Word
as if there were.”