Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>

Just my $0.02.

> My neighbor's Windows (2000?, ME?, about 600 MHz) computer has been 
> having problems for a year or two and he says now it is dead, won't 
> even boot into Windows, and he suspects a virus.  We are going to 
> use F-Prot on it.

Make sure the hardware is good.

> He tried to fix it with XP, which would not fit into memory or disk.

I find this surprising, as XP's minimum is a Pentium II. Although I
haven't tried it, I'm fairly sure it would work on my older PC, a
PII-300, 8GB HDD, 192MB RAM.

> He says his friend with a Mac never gets viruses

Not many non-Windows boxes do. :)

> and he will 
> consider a switch away from Windows. He did not know you could 
> browse, do email, and write documents without Windows or Mac 
> software.
> 
> I will offer him BL3 or BL2 with Abiword and Opera (which needs a 
> library update to the SW81 library) - or would the latest Mozilla 
> (needs 64MB RAM 52MB hd) work with BL3 or BL2 if I upgraded the 
> library to 2.3.2?  It also wants gtk-2.0 and xft (neither of which 
> I have ever used) and xfree 3.3.6 and libstdc+++.

That's a lot of updating. Better to start with a larger distro if
you want that, I think.

> Has anyone on 
> this list got it working with either BL

Not I.

> and if so is one better than the other? Today they came out with 1.03
> (security fixes to favicons etc. - what is a favicon?)

If you go to certain web sites, larger GUI browsers will take this file
from the webserver called a favicon (it's just a standard icon) and
put that as the web browser's icon, which you can usually see on the
taskbar and titlebar of the browser window. IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Firebird
are all known to do this. I can't see much of a security problem there.
Someone must have really botched the job the first time around.

> Would it make any difference whether I use BL2 or BL3 for the above?

Probably not, as long as you're updating everything. BL2 is usually
suggested for larger uses.

> He does want a graphical browser, and links graphical does not 
> handle all websites (javascript is incomplete).

No web browser can "correctly" handle 100% of all websites. IE
won't handle Mozilla or Netscape-specific things. Mozilla won't
do IE-specific things. Links can't handle certain things. If it
works on links, though, anything can handle it.

> He did not mention 
> needing sound, which is good since I have not had much luck with 
> Realaudio.  I can probably get an SB16 playing CDs for him.

If I have the webspace I'll put up my static version of MPlayer.
It's very nice. I can play DVDs on my PII, play many different
A/V files, even do a little video editing. Of course, it's a
huge binary, but IMO worth it.

David
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