Re: Nota Bene, XY on Linux

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Does anyone know if the Ibid module that comes with the full version of
Nota Bene WORKS? I ask because I paid good money for Ibid for XyWrite
some years ago, waited months for it to arrive, and could never get it to
work. Nor, according to Leslie, could anyone else. It kept complaining of
lack of memory. It's something I could really, really use, but I'm not
going to be stung again.
	About Xy on Linux: I'm not so sure about 16-bit. All versions of Xy are,
I'm fairly sure, written in Assmebler; that's why it's so blazingly fast.
But I suspect Xy4DOS was written, at least partly, to take advantage of
DOS protected mode. I know that TTG always ran it under (or over) Novell
DOS 7, which was Novell's superb upgrade of Digital Research's DR DOS
(after Microsoft spread what an interior memo admitted were lies about
the compatability of Win 3.1 with DR DOS 6). And Novell DOS 7 does have
protected mode operations. They happen to be incompatable with Borland's
protected mode routines, which is a pain; I have to turn Novell portected
mode off before running dBase 5 on my old Novell machine. I also recall
having frequent crashes when I opened too many files in XyWrite 4 until I
upgraded my VGA card, leading me to suspect that the old card's driver
was using some "high memory" that XyW also was trying to use; most late
DOS attempts to get around the 640K barrier involved sneaking into the
display RAM area.
	I'm not quite clear about why XyWrite would have to be rewritten in
another language. Apparently the basic hardware hasn't changed that much,
since we can still run XyW's Assembler routines on today's hardware, even
with the overhead of MS's various GUIs. So why couldn't it stay as it is,
an Assembler program, with the addition of hooks to make it visible to
Linux? Of course, the different file system under Linux is a big problem,
along with the Unix convention of making everything branch off the root,
which I HATE. I have four logical drives on my PC, and that's the way I
want them.
Patrica