Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, ljones wrote:

> Firstly, I'm having to use a PCMCIA based cdrom with my laptop as it
> does not have a cdrom built in. Right now I don't know how to setup a
> PCMCIA cdrom in linux so I'm having to load the DOS drivers for the
> PCMCIA cdrom first. Which works, but it dosen't work very well ;( I get
> lots of "hdc - lost interrupt" style messages and sometimes CDs will not
> read at all (the cdrom works fine in freedos with its drivers). Linux
> told me that the laptop uses a cirrus chipset for the PCMCIA port (I
> forget its model number). But I don't know how to setup this properly
> from linux (to stop using the dos driver), I have seen files (such as)
> /etc/pcmcia but I don't know if I'm even looking at the right files or
> what I'm supposed to do.
>
Well, there's a pcmcia.tgz package from Slack 7.1 you'll need to install.
I'm sorry I've forgotten which dir it's in, but you should be able to find
it fairly quickly by surfing through them.  Beyond that, I can't say much.
I got pcmcia working on my laptop, but have thus far only used a NIC in
it: I have zero expereince with pcmcia cdroms.

> Secondly the same laptop has onboard sound, the sound chip is a Vibra
> 16. From memory this too had dos-based drivers to set the card up; how
> would a vibra 16 be set up from within basiclinux? There are no options
> or controls for the vibra16 in the laptop's bios.
>
You'll need a different kernel if you want sound.  Probably the bare.i
kernel from Slack 7.1 is your best bet.  There will likely be some
module/driver loading involved as well, but that's about all I can say.  I
don't really care much for my computers making noise at me - as long as I
can get the system bell it suffices for nearly all my sound needs.  I
think Steven can help more with this sound question.

> Finally....I'd like to say X Windows installed fine and I got a 256
> colour video driver to work with it too :) ; icewm works fine! But there
> are a few other programs I'd like to install but can't work out how. I'd
> like to put on a small web browser, mp3 player and some sort of simple
> text editor or WP and a "file manager" type program.
>
There's almost no such thing as a "small web browser" in this day and age.
Dillo is tiny and works great for alot of things, but has its limitations:
doesn't do SSL or java, for example.  It renders a bit wierdly at times
too.  The most recent version of Dillo is available at my add-ons site
( cmiller.sdf-us.org/baslin ), along with a GTK package it depends on, if
you'd like to try it.  The other "small browsers" have a little better
functionality (e.g., Links2, BrowseX) but are quite alot larger - about
5MB download.  And they don't do everything the way they are supposed to
(e.g., SSL) or are in some other way deficient.  You'll never find
anything like MSIE (or Mozilla, Netscape etc) in these "small browsers."
People have reported pretty good success with Opera 6.03 - which does come
fairly close to IE capabilities.  It's probably the largest of the "small
broswers" too.

> than Netscape. For text editiing, I'd like to use Ted (
> http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/index.html ) - it is quite a large program but
> it seems that its requirements might not be too high given its user
> interface. I'm not sure about an mp3 player yet, I'm guessing xmms would

I've used Ted fairly successfully on a 486 DX2 66 with 20MB ram.  Not the
most productive hardware you could use it on, but it did run.  This would
have been 6 months ago or so: not sure how much the program has "grown"
since I tried it.  But I think it could be serviceable for you.  The other
choice is the special Abiword that Steven compiled (also on my download
site).  I guess it would be fairly comparable to Ted in terms of system
resource useage.  There are much more lightweight editors, as I suppose
you know.  BL has Nano - a really tiny program.  It won't do advanced word
processing stuff, but should suffice for other things.

> run but it'd be too resource intensive. For a file manager I'd like to
> use xwc (x windows commander) I think its homepage is here (
> http://xwc.sourceforge.net/ ) the RPM can be found all over the net (
> http://www.hklpg.org/RPM/conectiva/8/i386/RPMS.main/xwc-0.91.4-1cl.i386.html
> ) .

I like MC.  It suffices for all my needs.  The developer for Drinou has
compiled a special package for BL that under .5MB.

> The problem is that all these different programs although simple all
> need different libraries, I tried to copy the files from my mandrake 9.1
> install into basiclinux noting down where they came from (/lib) or
> (/usr/lib) noting down the names of the libraries that were needed but
> it didn't work :( .
>
I wouldn't expect that to work.  I encourage you to use console apps as
much as possible.  With virtual terminals, you really can multitask
without a gui.  Its alot less demanding on system resources and makes, I
think, older hardware alot more productive.

James