Baslinux mailing list

[3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org]

James Miller wrote:
>
> it seems nothing wants to boot from the first HD partition.  

Maybe FDISK /MBR (from a DOS boot floppy) could help?

> Have you used it for some presentations 

Yes.  It does everything I need.

> (recall you saying how you used Arachne and some html files
> in the past as a power point stand-in)?  

Using Arachne was OK, but it lacked some important features.
In particular: the ability to reveal pages line by line or
paragraph by paragraph.  With Arachne you get the whole page
all at once.  There are several fancy features in MagicPoint
which I don't use but will probably appeal to other people.
Like: graphical or multi-colored backgrounds and text that
shoots in from the side of the screen.

Despite the additional capabilities of MagicPoint, the speed
of display is pretty similar to Arachne running in DOS on the
same hardware.  Fancy graphics or multi-colored backgrounds 
in MagicPoint do take noticeable longer, but I do very little
of that in my presentations.  One nice feature of MagicPoint
is that it preloads pages into memory, so while you are talking 
about the first page, it is already processing the subsequent
pages.  This speeds up page display on old laptops. 

> Are the pages this one uses html too?  

No, they are easier than html (once you get used to the codes).  
It takes me less time to do a MagicPoint page.

> Btw, my PCMCIA card for that laptop uses the module you've 
> included.

That's great.  I looked through the database for PCMCIA network
cards and around three-quarters used pcnet_cs, so I'm pretty
optimistic.  The other big one is 3c589_cs.  It's only 11kb so
if some users need that, I might be able to add it in a future
release.  Or, if users think the wd (non_PCMCIA) module is more
important, I could add that.  

I am determined to keep BL3 small enough to fit on two 1.44mb
floppies.  It's currently at 2,875,393 bytes.

Cheers,
Steven