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

Will Hatch wrote:
>
> download abiword to another computer, burn it to a cd, and 
> then try to install it to my BL3 machine from the cd.  

You might want to wait a bit before you go through that trouble.
I tried running AbiWord on BL3 yesterday and got the expected
Xserver/font error messages.  These are clearly caused by Xvesa
(or the way Xvesa is configured).  Note:  I regularly use the
same AbiWord package on BL2 (with non-Xvesa Xserver).  AbiWord
works fine; it is Xvesa that is the issue.

Xvesa is a great concept:  a slim Xserver that works with a 
variety of video cards and provides reasonable resolutions 
(unlike the VGA16 Xserver, which is the default for BL1 and 
BL2).  However, Xvesa is only half-baked -- it is riddled 
with fishhooks.  It clashes with some versions of DOS, its 
treatment of resolutions is strange (buggy?), it doesn't 
appear to respond to some of the parameters it is supposed 
to, and it fails to work with some X applications that work 
perfectly well with other Xservers.

For that reason (and others), BL3 is not currently a good 
platform for expansion.  For that I recommend BL2, which 
was designed to provide a standard Slackware glibc2 platform.

It is probably possible to install a standard Xserver on BL3
and get it to run AbiWord.  It is probably possible to install
glibc2 on BL3 and get it to run up-to-date applications.  But
they will bloat BL3 considerably and reduce performance on old
PCs.  

BL3 was designed with one goal: to provide low-RAM 386s/486s  
(especially laptops) with a useful Linux.  As time goes on, I 
hope to provide (with the help of users) more and more add-ons 
that work on the lean BL3 foundation (busybox, Xvesa, libc5).  
Hopefully, AbiWord will go on the add-on list soon, but first 
we need to figure out how to get Xvesa to accept it.

Cheers,
Steven