While I was in the Navy on the USS Zephyr(PC-7) there where these touch
screen control panels, that you could adjust any function from any one
of the workstations throughout the ship.  Example, monitor each cyliners
specs from the bridge, do navigation from the engineroom, so on so
forth.
This gave me the idea of mounting a small monitor up front, PC
components in one of the back storage area.  Using a program such as
carcomp or another similar to it have the same sort of set up in my
Westy.  The only problems were that I will not use a microsoft OS in an
application like this.
Just before I left the Navy we were going to IT2000 (moving every pc and
computer to NT).  While it made sence in the procurement of parts and
support, it was an overall inferior setup.  Sorta like buying a Ford and
getting lifetime warrenty,but spends most of it's life in the shop.
Writing a point paper to try and despute with the powers that be, I set
up a system that we deployed with (3 Pentium 133 laptops with 32meg RAM
wired together with a netgear hub), one with NT and one with Linux.
Now, most of the people who deployed with this were educated just enough
to know left from right.  I had to set the systems up to be plug and
play or idiot proof. I discovered once you make it idiot proof someone
makes a better idiot.
But anyway my ersults came to this.  Linux left NT dead in the water in
this application.  Support was free and could be found anywhere if you
had Internet access.  Linux was customizable to each application and
required far less maintainance to run.
I'll keep this short, but will expand upon it if anyone is interested.

>Date:         Tue, 16 Feb 1999 07:45:41 -0800
>Reply-To:     Scott Allred <allred@EDRTECH.COM>
>From:         Scott Allred <allred@EDRTECH.COM>
>Subject:      Re: LINUX will double gerry's speed
>To:           vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
>
>Does anyone's Vanagon use either LINUX or NT?
>

Jason Yasment
'84 Vanagon Westfalia
'98 Jetta TDi
AOL Instant Messenger: jyaz2

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