Re: eeeditor

["Raphael Tennenbaum" raphael@xxxxxxxx]

don't know how I missed this, Patricia. as for rotating the screen, I know it can be
done in both the Xandros default installation and the custom Ubuntu kernels,
though I have not tried, & am a little hesitant to experiment because while compiz
can do some entertaining and astounding tricks -- the desktop cube, which
rotates virtual workspaces on the display, is the most famous one -- it's a beast to
configure, mostly because it presents so many options.

after spending a lot of this inclement January handcuffed to it, I'm comfortable
enough in Linux to be able to waste time tweaking, though I count being able to
have Xy always open on its own desktop, with Firefox and my Palm
calendar/taskbook just a spin away on the other desktop, as productive. Ubuntu is
clean, handsome, and well-supported by many knowledgeable and helpful people
-- which is necessary because it's almost impossible to remember all the zillions of
commands and configuration options.

as for Xy, over the weekend I'm going to see about getting it working on the gnome
clipboard. have filed a Dosemu bug report to see about getting Alt-Backspace to
work correctly -- near as I can tell, DE returns an incorrect value on the keypress
(0E00 as opposed to 0EF0) -- and losing Alt-Bk is like taking the eraser off the
back of my pencil. failing a resolution of that issue, I believe it's possible to roll
your own keyboard driver for DE, though it's a little mysterious.

-rafe

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:42:23 -0500, Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:

>J R FOX wrote:
>> Yes, but do you need to scroll around constantly, in the course of doing your
writing, because of the screen size ? I think that had been a primary objection, and
-- at least for me -- it would become a drag fairly quickly. The characters you
type need to have not only a requisite size and sharpness, but (in my opinion,
anyway) you also need to be able to track wide enough lines at any given time for it
to be appealing. Otherwise, it's fine just for memos. You know, I wouldn't want to
write anything bigger than a haiku on my Brother labelmaker . . . .
>
>Yes, scrolling left and rght is a royal pain. (And very bad Web
>design, though few Webmasters seem to know it.)
>
>But the screen shot Rafe posted on 1/13 seemed to fit the whole
>page within the screen. And, despite its being gray on black, I
>could read it.
>
>Which suggests a real possibility for these netbooks: a workable
>e-book reader. The existing ones (Sony's and the Amazon Kindle,
>which one open-source guru calls the Swindle) have two major
>problems: 1) Too small. Not just for type size, but for the
>amount of text that can be read in one fell swoop. 2) Proprietary
>formats, which leads to expense and the scholarly ethical issues
>of DRM. But a netbook could read (in Xy or any decent plain-test
>editor) the Project Guttenberg material and PDFs. Which is pretty
>much everything one would want.
>
>Three lbs. is not light, but the hardcover tome I'm reading right
>now weighs that.
>
>So the questions are
>1. Can a netbook screen be rotated, so that it appears in
>portrait, rather than landscape mode?
>
>2. How about changing screen colors in Xy? It can be done in Xy4
>under Windows, by making changes in settings.dfl. Does that work
>in Linux too? And can you do it at all in Xy III (which I haven't
>used since 4 came out)?
>--
>Patricia M. Godfrey
>priscamg@xxxxxxxx
>