hi Raymond,

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 07:21:40PM -0700, Raymond Zeitler wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'm a new d:b user. I have used MS-DOS since 1985 and Windows since
> 1997. But the Windows activation process makes me nervous. Suppose
> Microsoft goes out of business, and I need to reinstall Windows?
>
> So I have a question: Can you tell me how to run Internet Explorer
> on d:b, please?


LOOOL

BTW i also kind of remember switching from Amiga to MS-DOS (painful
memories!) and besides the 64k memory paging that made us all hate
Bill the noob, there was some interesting stuff to do with borland
turbo pascal. but maan...

> Anyway, I'd been thinking about switching to open source for many
> years.

hell yea. esp. the GNU project and the Linux kernel (but well also BSD
eh) they rock . really feels like learning, no shit.

> I am already using many great programs: Emacs (since 2000), GIMP,
> Firefox, OpenOffice, MPlayer.

Emacs rox. many of us use it too...

> I still need to find a password manager

have a look at org-mode by Carsten, it has org-crypt extentions that
let you crypt-on-save sections of a document with different keys..
org-mode is an plain text outliner basically, and it's awesome. we are
also hacking some stuff on top of Emacs and org-mode that will go in
dyne:bolic in some future. secure stuff, transparent, versioned. rox.

> [...] and an OS.

for an OS, we are a kind of no shit alternative. dyne:bolic is shaped
by people familiar with Slackware since its early days (and also with
ftp sunsite mirror and yggdrasil FWIW) and kept minimal. hopefully the
manual is useful, if not feel free to contribute corrections!

> The inability to view Flash is inconvenient, but maybe Flash
> content can be converted to Gnash and viewed that way?

you can also go dirty: download the proprietary flash plugin and
modify it (the DOS way, HEX on the binary) to link libc5 instead of
libc6. it's DIRTY, as it should be using such crap :)
sorry. mouthfull of copromedia.

for the rest yea, gnash is OKe. i look forward to the standard to
change, with HTML5 and standards for which there some free software
licensed cod available.

> I downloaded d:b because it is intended for old, slow computers.
> I'm trying it on my oldest computer, Pentium III 500MHz with 128MB
> RAM. I was really happy that it loaded and works. And I found an
> even older computer at work: Pentium II MMX, and it runs on that!

cheers :) i love to hear that, it makes me always feel like the
mission is accomplished :) myself i never really had much money to buy
computers.

BTW, Brahman Prince: i suggest you buy EEEPC computers, if you have
enough money... it's about 300 EUR over here. BUT they are worth it,
not expensive, they are RAZOR SHARP, can do everything and on the
road. i have an EEEPC 1005-HA and WOW. WOOOW. never without.

but ok it's still a lot of money. look for friends with old laptops is
also always a good option, with a bit of tweaking and some modern
kernel they should be supported.

speaking of kernel, i'll give coordinates for a new build that i'm
trying, get into it if you like and let me know how it spins :)


> I'd like to help this community by testing, writing / editing docs
> and creating updated packages (Emacs23.2 for starters, once I figure
> out how).

be most welcome :)

> I do some coding (scripting) but it's mostly in MS-DOS scripting
> language or a "Variant" of Basic. (Users of Basic might get that
> joke -- Variant is a undesirable catch-all data type in VB and VBS.)

have you had a look to Gambas?
it's in the devel.dyne module. start Gambas and see :)
it's the paradise of VB aficionados in GNU/Linux land! great proj.

> One thing I noticed is that the packages that I downloaded from
> Extras have a .exe extension that has to be removed (renamed) before
> they'll get loaded. Perhaps that info should be added to the
> website?

w00t? .exe? that extension stinks man, we are not using it. can you
point out where did you exactly found the link? w00ps?


> Before I end, I want to thank everyone for all the hard work that
> you put into this. Well done!

and I and I sayz thank you! :)


- --
jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org

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