Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

I've learned a couple of things.  The first is that, at least in some
ways, Abiword is more capable than WP8.  One can make a table's columns
span pages with Abiword.  That doesn't work with WP8--at least not the
free version I'm trying.  OpenOffice Writer won't allow that either, but
the development branch does, and this is supposed to get fixed for good in
the 2.0 release.  But I digress . . .

An initial attempt at installing WP8 under BL3 has failed, as expected.
A couple of failure points: the installation routine failing to find awk
is the first.  Should I do a symlink to busybox where it expects to find
awk, Steven?  Or just install the full version?  Second, the graphical
install fails to start (goes to text-based): I think this is because it is
not finding the libXt.so.6.0 file I copied over from Slack 4.  I'm not
exactly sure why it's not finding it, since it's definitely in the right
directory.  I'm wondering if it's because the lib file needs to be
symlinked for some reason?  I note that on Slack 4, libXt.so.6.0 has a
symlink in the same directory with the same name that points to it.
Could this be why the WP8 install routine is not finding it?  I'm not
quite clear on why this sort of symlinking is done.

Finally, it's been a real pain getting the necessary files into the BL
target machine.  It has no floppy drive or CD, and everything must be
loaded via the network.  I tried ftp, but it fails--same failure I ran
into earlier that had something to do with rpc.portmap or something like
that.  I can't recall how I fixed that before when I did finally get ftp
working.  So, I tried loading files onto my local webserver and retrieving
them with links.  This was mostly successful, but certain files would just
not download right.  Finally, I searched the archive and found the
commands needed to give username and password with wget so I could use it
to load the stuff from my ftp server.  Then, I finally managed to get
everything loaded onto the machine as it should be.  wget doesn't have a
manpage in BL, but I think it needs one.  And it needs one that gives the
syntax necessary for username/password protected servers.  Incidentally,
it is

---------------------------------------------------
wget ftp://uname:passwd AT ftp.server.addy/filename
or wget ftp://uname:passwd AT ftp.server.addy/dirname/filename
---------------------------------------------------

James