Baslinux mailing list

[<keesan2 AT cyberspace.org>]

Now that I have pdf files sort of under control, someone sent me an .xls
(Excel) file.  It is a listing of local places where you can donate blood
this month, from the local Red Cross, which seems to be going out of its
way to make this information a secret.  (I spent an hour on the phone
getting even this far). 

There is an online site for converting pdf, doc, xls and rtf files to html
(GoHtm.com).  In addition to promising you a lot of unwanted email, it
requires Windows and Netscape or IE.  I tried anyway with lynx and was
unable to even register.  It put me in little circles reading the
agreement.  Have not tried Links 2.1.9 or Opera on it. The process after
that is to email them the file with your browser as an attachment - why do
you need Windows or a browser to email a file?

I finally tracked down the freeware program I had used with DOS.
http://chicago.sf.net/xlhtml/

There are Windows and DOS binaries.  The DOS binary is 180K.
There is also source code, 265K, in case anyone on the list wants to
compile this program.

Some features are not supported but they do not look important.  I am only
trying to extract the text.  The DOS version worked well.




It does not look like we will be getting around to making me another Linux
computer (with more than 126M hard drive) for a while yet because my
partner found at the curb a Pentium 475MHz 225MB RAM 8G hard drive with
Redhat 7 on it that he wants to play with first.  It has Mozilla 1.01 and
GIMP.  It also has GNOME, which slows it down to a fast crawl compared to
BL2 on a 486 with 16M RAM.  Or maybe GNOME wants a faster video chip.  The
8M RAM video card in the machine was bad (which is why they threw out the
computer) and the 2M RAM onboard video (VESA 2.0) cannot keep up with
drawing all those icons.  It was close to 10 minutes from turning on the
computer to loading OpenOffice wordprocessor (or seemed like it anyway -
maybe 5 minutes).  Like the Redhat 6 that I had on one computer, this
Redhat loads every imaginable TSR before you can use it.  It seems like no
matter how fast you make a computer, someone can make software that
renders it unusably slow. 

The password for root was fortunately an easy one to guess (password).

He is also busy trying to pare down Microsoft Works for DOS (from 8 to 1
disk) for a friend whose Windows keeps breaking, and we are tired of
fixing it.  My Linux has not yet broken.