Baslinux mailing list

[baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 08:55:52AM +1300, Steven wrote:
> 
> MagicPoint has the ability to incorporate jpegs into
> the pages, but they are *much* slower to display than 
> text.  A 486 laptop is not suitable for a presentation
> with lots of jpegs.  My best laptop is a Pentium 100
> and it has a noticeable delay on large jpegs.

Thanks for that tip. This is a P 133 with 32 MB RAM. Some of the jpg's 
(scanned ones) are turning out to be fairly 
large--between 1 and 2MB. Would you think this laptop will have the oomph to 
handle those elegantly?

> Not necessarily.  Try displaying your jpegs at 800x600
> on an external monitor and see what they look like.  
> The laptop screen is not the best test for what your
> presentation will look like on a projector.

Ok. Guess I'll just have to get ahold of a projector and do some 
experimentation. magicpoint's drawing function looks 
like it will come in really handy.

> Have fun.  It's a little tricky getting started; but 
> once you get familiar with the syntax, it's not too 
> hard to design some pretty nice presentations.  Don't 
> forget that CTRL-K (in the BL3 editor) stores the 
> deleted lines (you press CTRL-U to retrieve them).  
> So, if you are preparing similar pages in MagicPoint, 
> you can CTRL-K a block, immediately CTRL-U to restore 
> it, and then use CTRL-U anywhere else in the file to 
> reproduce that block.  I do that a lot for the Magic-
> Point formatting lines.

Yeah, I've been using that to set up my test presentations.

> I would be happy to send you one of my MagicPoint 
> scripts.  There are also various MagicPoint scripts 
> available on the internet.

I may ask for that once I get back to more testing.

On the new BL: I may be able to do some testing with it at the same time as I 
continue to try and develop my facility 
with magicpoint. My tests are being conducted in part on the older laptop 
mentioned above which, as of the moment, has 
nothing installed on it. I'm also working with BL under qemu for this.

The new BL looks really interesting. I've fiddled a bit with jwm, having 
bumped into it first while testing out Puppy 
Linux. It has some nice features (e.g., the xml config file) and runs great 
on older hardware. How much smaller is it 
than icewm, btw?

Thanks,
James