I'm typing this on the F train, using the most exciting toy I've gotten in a few years. Two weeks ago, I bought an eee PC from NewEgg -- the PC1000, it's considerably larger, with a bigger keyboard and screen, than the original eeePCs. Instead of a traditional hard drive, it's fitted with a 40GB solid-state drive, and it has webcam, speakers, microphone, 3 USB ports, standard ethernet port, a wifi card, and a hookup for an external monitor. Stock, this model come with Xandros Linux -- which also helps keep the price around $400 (NewEgg). The geeky solution, however, is to add Ubuntu Linux, for which a number of tech-minded eee fans have configured new kernels and scripts. I don't have an external DVD drive, but these days, you don't need one -- using a program on my XP box, I was able to install some Ubuntu boot files to a thumbdrive, which I then inserted into a USB port on the eee. Booting from the thumbdrive while plugged into an ethernet cable sufficed to perform a complete install. (Word has it that it's possible to install Linux into one of the high-capacity memory cards that plug into the included SD card slot, but I was unable to do so.) I have used Asus motherboards exclusively in the computers I've built for the last few years, having found their design and quality to be second to none, and this eeePC is no exception -- it's light and portable, and appealing enough; the keyboard, while it won't replace your old IBM buckling spring, is nearly as good as the one on my ThinkPad T21. Over the years I had experimented with several Suse distros, as my impressions of earlier versions of Ubuntu were not good, but now I can say that at least as of Intrepid Ibex, Ubuntu is the one -- Suse's package management, which was supposed to be one of its strengths, got to be quite a mess; also, not every Suse came with Dosemu, and the ones that did proved difficult to upgrade. It took some doing, not really that much, to get the wifi card to connect to my home network, and getting Ubuntu to recognize the printer on the network was a piece of cake. Dosemu has improved since the last time I tried it, when I had to configure the DOS image myself -- now it installs the FreeDos version right out of the box. There were several bumps -- first time invoking it failed with what's apparently a common error in Intrepid Ibex, easily enough fixed. Most other issues involved common Linux hurdles such as setting permissions and creating and modifying directories, but these are good ways of learning your way around the fundamentals. (For the anachronistic: some users have installed DOS on their eeePCs -- however, since DOS is incapable of using power-saving utilities, burning through battery minutes doesn't seem worth the effort.) I've tuned a number of parameters and now have a (en)viable way of using XyWrite in either full-screen or windowed mode. One or two glitches remain: the touchpad is very sensitive, and until I suss how to disable it, causes occasional near-random cursor jumps and skips. Alt-BkSpace, which I use almost every other minute to delete the previous word under XyWrite, does not work under Dosemu, but I am hoping that might be fixed, because development seems to be active and ongoing. Though I've also tried to mount the SD card as a sort of virtual floppy designated W:, the command BC (C:,W:) BX in startup.int returns Invalid drive -- which is strange because once Xy has finished starting up, it happily responds to dir w: (and "sad w:\x\stuff" etc) Other than those issues, the installation is very fast and reliable. Occasionally a character gets highlighted for no apparent reason, but even OS/2's DOS misbehaves occasionally. My rather old xywwweb.u2 (vintage 2003), copied without change from my ThinkPad's installation along with 6MBs of zipped directories, completed without a hitch, and nothing I've thrown at it has made it hiccup yet. What suprised me most of all was that on a whim, I tried ty, 1 on a document I had onscreen -- lo and behold, the HP deskjet on my print server was turning out a very handsomely-formatted page; underline and bold also work. It's not a "better DOS than DOS," but it's as good as I need. The resources for Ubuntu are extensive -- the eeeUser forum by itself has answered nearly all of my Ubuntu-related questions, and Dosemu also seems to be healthy, with a listserv that gets about 20-30 posts a month. My uncle Arthur's notes from ten years ago were a good start http://yesss.freeshell.org/x/_linuxyw.htm and another extremely valuable resource is this up-to-date page dedicated to running Wordperfect under Dosemu: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/linux.html I've been a little anxious about need to migrate to a new platform migration ever since IBM pulled the plug on OS/2. Though my beloved OS/2 desktop has served me faithfully for 18 years now, having scarcely changed in the last ten, the disappearance of device driver support has jeopardized the long term of OS/2 - eCS, and even getting a motherboard has become an adventure. It's a positive relief, and also kind of exciting, to be able to look forward to using a robust OS, which however arcane, is designed to do what no one else but I want to do with it, and is actively maintained and updated by a large base of dedicated, smart people. I'll still keep around the XP box for things like photo editing, confounded Flash animations, and the assorted program which hasn't got a Linux or OS/2 equivalent, but as far as XyWrite goes, I feel like I just bought a second home for next to nothing. -rafe t.Attachment: ScreenshotXY.png
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