Agriculture & Middle class Ministry  R&D Administration (DG6)	NATIONAL BOTANIC GARDEN of BELGIUM			National Botanic Garden
	Presentation of Linux
	Intro	Tutorials	Informatics

A very short presentation of LINUX

• Current state
  • In 1998, Linux has gained a very strong support from the main players in the Information Industry : NETSCAPE, IBM, COREL, ORACLE, INTEL, INFORMIX, SYBASE...
    
    
  • Mexico and France have taken the decision to introduce methodically LINUX in the schools and Universities and Research centers; the UK is evaluating the same move.
    
    
  • An inexorable move (started in the seventies) goes towards OPEN SOLUTIONS :
    see The last dinosaur
    

    "Linux has successfully doubled 24 times so far, and needs a total of
    29 to 30 doublings to achieve desktop market dominance"

    So, 80 % of the way is already done; the market saturation will be reached in 2002 if the last 20 % are keeping the same rate...

  • The growth of Linux meets those of Windows-NT, for its exceptional rate ( 221 % versus 40 % for NT )
    
    and for its absolute shipment values (morever, one copy of Linux is often legally installed on many PCs;
    
    Here at BR, ONE SuSE 5.1 copy is installed on about 20 machines.
    
    
• EMULATORS :


• WABI: the Sun International emulator for MS-Windows; it runs now classical 16 bits MS applications (Excell, Word, PowerPoint, CorelDraw, WordPerfect, Paradox...). COREL announces a version able to run 32 bits applications (compiled for Win-95/98)
  For example, we have tested our PARADOX 4.5 'BIODIV' database with success.
• EXECUTOR, a MacIntosh emulator allows to read Mac floppies, to run classical Mac applications (FileMaker, PageMaker...)
• DOSEMU, a very good MS-DOS emulator;
• Too many LINUX applications to be really aware of them
  a database of 850 packages of Linux SuSE 5.1 can be queried on our site.
• and so on...


• DEDICATED environment for well-known applications at the Botanical Garden
  • A specific tool bar with all the needed applications.
    
  • Documented menus are presented to guide the user.
    
  • Remote and local applications are launched automatically, owing to dedicated buttons [a mushroom to enter the 'MYCO' database...] and intelligent scripts (written in the EXPECT language)
  • 6 virtual screens allow to take profit of the powerful operating system (remember, no 'FATAL ERROR blue screen'...) with a clean uncluttered desktop.
    
  • Last but not least : the 'Midnight Commander', a [better than] Norton Commander clone : a very useful interface common to the two platforms.