Re: STANDARD SOFTWARE COMPATABILITY
On Sun, Nov 29, 1998 at 03:03:23PM -0800, Eddy Wurm wrote:
> Dear Debra & Ian Murdock,
>
> I am a potential user of Linux and am looking to buy an IBM clone PC.
> I've just checked your site and have not found answers to the following.
>
> Are standard programs like Adoble Graphics Studio, QuakXpress,
> LightWave, ...etc., which are available for Microsoft and Mac OS, also
> compatible with Linux? Are Linux developers working to make the different
> packages (Debian, Red Hat and Caldera) transparent to each other?
You are asking two things. The presence of commercial software that
runs on GNU/Linux is a question to pose to the developers of those
software packages. As users request support for this platform,
developers will see the demand and commit resources to the task.
At present, only a handful of developers have announced support for
free UN*X, Informix, Oracle, Corel (right?), but no Adobe or Quark
AFAIK. There are other packages to perform these tasks, though.
For example, Applixware offers desktop productivity software.
As for inter-distribution compatibility, most of the modern
distributions use compatible configuration methods such that RedHat
packages and Debian packages may be installed on the other
distribution. Debian has a tool called alien that imports RedHat
packages. I'm not sure if RedHat has a tool for importing Debian
packages.
Now, what do you mean by 'transparent'? Are you looking for
inter-host transparency or a common administration architecture. The
former should be present. The latter is an area of active development
and is, therefore, not standardized.
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