Au contraire. FoxPro works great on Linux using wine. That includes Visual FoxPro 6, FoxPro for Windows 2.6 and FoxPro for DOS - in DOSbox. In fact the oldest code I have still in "production" is an expense tracker application which was last updated on 12/20/99 to make it Y2K compatible. It runs in DOSBox on CentOS 7. Ran in DOS EMU on CentOS 6. The Y2K fix amounted to changing one date entry field to a 4 digit year. I did not change the revision date displayed on the version splash screen however - just noticed that This started on my Osborne in dBase II. Back then state sales tax could be deducted from federal income tax. Two years in a row I went through a box of receipts at the end of the year adding up the sales tax. That sucked. I started a database and entered expenses as I went. At the end of the year a report summed up the tax and provided a detailed explanation of where the tax was spent. That worked for I think one year and then the deduction of sales tax ended

However, I was in the habit of entering the data and I continued to do so. This has come in handy. The cloths washing machine went on the blink some years ago. I wonder how long I have had it? A quick browse of the data - It was 12 years old. Comparing the cost of a new one against repairing the old one... And when the opportunity for an early retirement presented itself in 2005 my fellow potential retirees ran around like a bunch of headless chickens trying to figure out if they could afford to retire. I ran some analysis on almost 20 years of data and confirmed I could hit the door. And I did

You are correct. I do NOT want/need to code anything in particular at the moment. I am after all retired When the need arises I WILL program it. I do have an interest in Gnome-Commander and would like to at least have some understanding/appreciation of what makes it up. I am viewing a much better tutorial which uses CodeLite. When I complete that perhaps I will dive head first into the G-C code and see what I can see.

Ken

p.s. Foxbase had versions for DOS, Windows, Unix and Mac. The Mac version became FoxPro.

p.p.s. I am not sure Fortran is dead. I read a while back that the national labs (Los Alamos, Sandia etc.) were looking for Fortran programmers to performance tune some of their old nuclear calculation routines. I think it was sort bounty program. And of course experienced COBOL programmers can write their own ticket these days. I read that there is a tremendous need for COBOL programmers to maintain and speed up state unemployment insurance computer systems!

COBOL is basically english. It's as simple as basic. America was rich enough to have computers in the civil service in the 60s & 70s, but not rich enough to update them in the 80s & 90s. There's that hilarious quote from IBM to factor in also: They don't seem to have copped on to the scale of progress in Electronics. It's been difficult for Electronics guys too! I heard of a chief engineer in Pye who never really accepted that transistors could produce good sound, but preferred Thermionic valves.

Fortran has it's niches, I suppose.

I always found it better to go and stick modern. It may initially be slower. I had a Dos accounts package that wiped the floor with the competition in my hands because I knew all the keyboard shortcuts. But once I scrapped it I found out how powerful the alternatives were.

Good afternoon!
Have you checked all the native Linux 2-pane file managers there are?
Try worker. Very retro, but also powerful.

Thanks again business_kid,

My Osborne had 2 180 kB floppy drives. I could fit CP/M and Wordstar on a single floppy with room to spare. That was a rather powerful word processor. Ubuntu Mate for some reason does not install vim by default. When I install it it tells me "...2.5 MB of storage will be required..." For a text editor. Newer definitely is BIGGER.

Thanks nodoho,

I have started to look at other two panel programs. In fact caja (Mate equivalent to nautilus) can be made two panel with F3. I am sort of partial to Gnome Commander as I have used it for a long time and I have been working with the maintainer as far as packaging it for RHEL/CentOS. I had arranged to get it put in the nux-dextop repo and would transmit updates there when they were available. When the nux maintainer was no longer able to accommodate updates I figured out how to build and package it for RHEL/CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu/Mint. My instructions are on the G-C web site. Unfortunately things are at a dead end with RHEL/CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 18.04 until some major code revisions can be made.

And it is also almost in the family. The maintainer, who is in Germany, works for a software company which was spun off from a US airline company. It has to do with scheduling and reservations. My cousin Brad was a VP at the airline and was in charge of the project which developed the original software!

I saw worker listed a "two panel file managers for Linux" page but I have not tried it. Let me do so now.

Ken

Hello again nodoho,

Now you have gone and done it. I started looking at alternatives again. worker looks like a possibility. However, on the "best two panel..." page I was looking at, the top rated program was "double commander." I tried that also. It is PORTABLE which is a great feature. On the other hand the Configuration; Options dialog looks more complicated than the G-C source in VS code I have started beating it into submission but the icons next to directories and files are LARGE. Makes the display look double spaced. Not an issue in worker. Perhaps I should just use Norton Commander in DOSBox. Yes, I do have Midnight Commaner.

Ken

Why is everything being compared with the nearest windows alternative of the 1980s? They went to become unsteady bloatware, in an OS that crashes, is hackable, and sucks. Microsoft made a point of running their mail server, hotmail.com on NT, their server system. Every hacker had hacking that as lesson 1 in his apprenticeship. Eventually, they got the point. It now runs BSD, iirc.

You want to learn stuff? Forget windows. Use wine, or maybe a VM for a while to wean yourself off it. I have wine under Multilib here for one Library/database type program that was never ported. The search function is far superior on the DVD. And on linux under wine you can have multiple instances of it, whereas windows would freak.

Just because a program was unfortunate enough to run on Windows does not mean the program itself is at fault. The 32 version of winfile.exe from NT correctly handled long file names and NTFS permissions, ACLs etc. I read an article some years back about the developer of winfile. A very skilled individual. At 250 kB winfile is not exactly bloated.

I run wine for the purpose of using:
FoxPro
GrabIt (Usenet nzb downloader - much simpler than SABnzbd)
Forte' Agent (Usenet reader - forget about pan it has not been updated in years, decades?)
Quickpar - a command line alternative available but Quickpar works under wine - just click the .par2 file and let it run

I run VMWare Player/Workstation. I have a couple of Windoze 10 VMs. I generally use them only when I am fighting with Vanguard (mutual fund company) web tech support when their web site is malfunctioning. They ALWAYS blame the issue on not accessing it with Windows. I test on Windows first and then tell them to just fix THEIR problem. Win 10 is probably the worst product from Redmond since Win ME or perhaps Bob.

Ken