-=> CHARLES ANGELICH wrote to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE <=-

 WC>> Vimage

 CA>> Steven is thinking of removing the vgalib from BL2. If he
 CA>> does then LINKS will no longer display graphics on demand.
 CA>> I've mentioned I disagree with this change.

 WC> Depends on weather or not he includes an alternative, I'd
 WC> ask him first.

 CA> That was already mentioned. He feels those who want LINKS to do
 CA> the graphics can install what is required themselves. I doubt a
 CA> newbie could manage this feat.

I'm a newbie and fear it not however I've way to much time to
devote to it and am not a typical newbie.
He'll likely lose the bottom third of those who might use
his release with changes such as that thus preventing them 
from moving ahead with Linux.
As Steven said himself it''s an excellent learning tool
that sharply reduces the learning curve but not if he
makes it for bleeding edge hardware as that'll run Windows XP.
Plus I'm so technonuts even scragging the drive with 
a screwup overwriting the MBR and FAT only held me up
a few hours. Still have to retrieve the MultiMail .tgz
and and ftp software for Win 98 for my software modem
but that's it. I _do_ still have to unzip BL 1.8 to get
the image and boot.bat to get into the install on hda2
but I've already booted my old Slackware, hda4, release off
of rescue disk successfully.

 CA>> It might be a good idea to get that elist working at your
 CA>> end if at all possible.

 WC> I've got SUVPC? hooked up but not yet the monroe? list,
 WC> which is the better of the two?

 CA> Weeeellll ... on the tmonroe elist there was a female secretary
 CA> who was very adamante about using DOS to do her word processing
 CA> even though her supervisor used MSWord. I advised her to go
 CA> with the flow and use MSWord. This angered her and afer several
 CA> messages were exchanged between us she finally admitted to
 CA> being legally blind (which I did not know until then). I said
 CA> that I had been told that Microsoft had accomodations in their
 CA> OS and their software for sight-impaired persons as far back as
 CA> DOS and she went ballistic. Apparently she cannot afford a
 CA> Windows compatible screen reader 
 
Or perhaps JAWS audio software for the sight impaired?

 CA> and is afraid to ask her
 CA> company to buy one for fear they will end her employment rather
 CA> than spend the money. 
 
Uh last I knew the government gave tax breaks to employers
who hired the impaired so I'd think they'd want to keep her.
The impaired are also often far more productive being 
well motivated.

 CA> I suggested gov might pay a portion of
 CA> the cost as an incentive to her employer and she only became
 CA> more angry.

 I think they have a program to underwrite part of her salary
 as well.

 CA> I tried pointing out to her that my own website's were capable
 CA> of being used by text-only browsers (cheaper screen readers)

 And even my old SoundBlaster card has SBtalker that'll
 read aloud a text file.

 CA> and that I had links to Microsofts free updates to make DOS
 CA> work for sight-impaired persons. I explained that I had read
 CA> the 'Bobby' website about arranging access to impaired persons
 CA> and followed most of their suggestions. She insisted I was
 CA> prejudiced against her and ANOTHER female jumped in also
 CA> sight-impaired and the two of them began a series of personal
 CA> attacks and insults aimed at me (daily). When the guys joined
 CA> in on their side I dropped tmonroe.

 Hmm, that's one file I'd lost in the crash anyway, list server
 address, maybe I ought not go there...
 
 CA> Steven Darnold left tmonroe some weeks before I did without
 CA> telling anyone if that means anything? He was having problems
 CA> there too.

 Nope, I'm not going there.
 I will inquire of Mr. Darnold about my SMTP problem
 however as it's drivng me NUTS.

 CA>> There are people asking for 'wireless pcmia networking' to
 CA>> replace things like vgalib within BL2. At present I am the
 CA>> only voice that disagrees with this.

 WC> Try this, something I've recently discovered. I ran either
 WC> telnet or scan into outgoing.verizon.net, change to your
 WC> SMTP setting, and got the DNS, plugged "scan"
 WC> ????.????.????.???? and Basic Linux started at 255 working
 WC> on downwards identifying each and every available port!
 WC> Neato though now I need to read up on scripts to take that
 WC> and direct the output into a file.

 CA> AFAIK the same as DOS, "> " will redirect it to a file?

Tried that, didn't work, also tried >>.
It creates the file but nothing there.
I recall Ron at Abilities giving a very short script using
grep that searched the entire drive for a pattern
in every file and every directory.
I may look for that disk on the off chance I saved that to
file, unlikely though that may be.
This would be very useful in both learning Linux _and_ 
figuring out how to fix my SMTP authorization problem.
 
 WC> Yes port 25 comes up .email.conf's default SMTP, identifies
 WC> itself as such and proclaims it "open", but that still
 WC> doesn't tell me what to do about getting mail out.

 CA> It's a long-shot but the port being there does not mean the
 CA> server is actually monitoring the port?

Naw, it's looking for my user name and password which is provided for
in the .fetchmail.conf file but not .email.conf,
that much I know even if I don't have the book definition
of Verizon's error 553 code.
 
--- MultiMail/PBellDOS v0.42