Costas,

For the past two weeks I've been playing with it, setting up Samba, primarily to affirm that it will work as a server for a VFP app. Lots things to tweak!

Inprise, through Interbase, has made that client server product available. Another which is getting a lot of positive reviews is Solid Server, check the www.solidtech.com weg page. It's not too big and they clain it's maintenance free. I have some 24,000 record payroll tables I want to test with it for starters.

Then of course there is PostGRES which comes with the Red Hat distrubution.

The big questions is what to use for a front end? There is a bewildering array of languages and toolkits:
Widgets: QT
GTK - and probably more

Desktops: FVWM
KDE
Afterstep

Languages: C++ (GCC)
Perl
Python
Tcl/tck
Pascal
Java ??? (May be most likely, may have good IDE?)
plus Smalltalk, LISP, SCHEME and on and on and on.

Makes me long for the simplicity of the MSFT approach. "We've packaged it for you, here it is." (Never mind that we are in release 6 and still haven't fixed bugs discovered in release 2 -- and we'll re-invent it and charge you more in 18 months.) Where are my visual tools???

And finally - the desktop, where MSFT has won the war. I have no experience with Linux word processors, spreadsheets, presentation prgrams. I did install WordPerfect for Linux - behaves and prints just like WP for Windows. Refreshingly unexciting.

Conclusion - at present Linux is for the server, it may be for the database server. You have to be too much an enthusiast, or have a very deep hate for MSFT, to want it on the desktop.

Regards - Miles Thompson

BTW - I think there is a dBase clone, butnot visual.


>I was wondering if anyone out there is experimenting with Linux as a server or desktop? Now with all the major DB vendors supporting it (except MS of course) it may be an opportunity for a Foxpro clone for that platform. Maybe Inprise (Borland) can port their dBASE.
>
>I personally would love to see Linux become an alternative to the MS stranglehold. I think for many of us who constantly battle and fear what MS will do with VFP this could give us something to leverage against MS.
>
>Costas