Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

I have finally accomplished the goal I set myself two years ago of no 
longer needing Windows for anything, as of yesterday when I got the 
scanner and Abiword working.  I needed a combination of BL2, BL3 and DOS 
and some parts of SW81.

1.  Copying CDs with cdda2wav (from SW81) or readcd and cdrecord (from 
SW71) except for one burner that won't work with BL2 but does work with 
DOS cdroast (but I don't know of a way to burn music CDs in DOS - is there 
one?).  The bug in cdrecord has been fixed in a recent kernel 2.6 so if I 
ever learn to compile my own kernel and modules I could use the new kernel 
with BL2.

2.  Realaudio (but it only works on one BL2 computer so far and segfaults 
everwhere else, even if I move the nonworking hard drive to that one 
computer where the original drive works).  Needs SW81 glibc.

3.  Scanner - BL2 with the SW81 sane 1.0.8 package and the SW81 adaptec.s 
kernel works with a UMAX 610S scsi (no parport support for umax) but I 
could not get it working with SW71 kernel and aic7xxx.o (won't find the 
scanner).  Nor will my other computer with SANE 0.57 (which I compiled) 
find the HP scanner that works in win31, though it at least finds pnm 
devices.

Scanimage is much simpler and faster to use - CLI instead of a big colored 
3D gui with tooltips, and I don't need a mouse for it.


4.  Opera 7 (with SW81 glibc) - and also Firebird or whatever they were 
calling last year's version.  And lynx 2.8.5.1 but that works in DOS.

5.  xpdf for viewing the most recent (pdf 1.5 and JBIG2) pdf files, tho 
DOS has convertors to images or text (if you have a page with both of them 
you need to have a good imagination).  Available precompiled for SW81 
glibc.  My last challenge is gs 8.50, since the DOS port is a bit slow and 
is not set to do JBIG2.

It is interesting that I needed SW81 glibc or kernel or packages to get 
all of these to work.  Perhaps some day when pentium laptops can be found 
in dumpsters there will be a BL4 based on SW81.

6.  Yesterday I got BL3 abiword working (in BL2 it won't work with my 
XVESA setup due to a problem finding fonts or something) so I can now 
maybe stop using WORDVIEW.  Antiword and catdoc missed sections of some 
WORD files sent me, but so did wvware, which is used in Abiword.  People 
do however seem capable of converting WORD to rtf for me sometimes.
And WORDVIEW is only for Word 97 but Antiword is more up to date.  And 
WORD cannot convert to text and preserve charsets like the linux/DOS 
convertors  -  all the 'foreign' characters become ? ?? ??? ? .

7.  With much help from Christof, I can now print Czech and other Latin2 
characters as downloadable fonts on an Epson LQ.  In DOS copy/b FONT lpt1. 
Can this be done with cat FONT > lp0?  Do I need some switch equivalent to 
/b?  He says the fonts can be loaded in DOS and used in linux.

I was not using Windows for anything else.  What do other people still 
need it for that linux cannot do?


keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org