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I had an old Elonex P75 that I used as my Linux box, the
case is very small and elonex had to make a long narrow motherboard
that used a riser for the expansion slots. Installing windows
95/98/20 on this was interesting[!]. The windows installer
would crash about an hour[!] into the installation. The way
around this was to install DOS then win 3.x and slap win 9.x
ontop of that. I asked elonex about this and they told me
I had to upgrade the PC. Linux installed without any problems,
corel linux however took about 2 hours to install and ran
like a slug.
When I tried Redhat 6.2 I was suprised, I don't like graphical
installers that sniff out the hardware and do it all. They
take to long, you usually know what is in the box and where
it is any way. Rh6.2 came up with the correct settings for
a prehistoric monitor and even correctly setup the "white
horse industrial" sound card! I had to rem it from the disk
the next day to try BSD so I didn't use it long enough to
see see any improvements over 6.1 but everything appeared
to work, conf.modules now has the parport line so printers
are detected out of the box.
A work station install took 47 minutes, that is to install
~600 Mb compared to corel linux taking ~3 hrs and win98 170
Mb in 84 mins; win 98 install is including dos win3.x install.
I have writen a simple Installation leaflet its a 10 page
pdf you can read it and print it if you need it, all the information
is on the CD's. I will make it avialable in lyx and ps. If
you want to add something tell me; I know half a dozen people
have used it, none of them commented on it, Is that bad?
I always get asked what do you do with linux? What software
is available? Well I started to use it when I was doing a
Fortran project, I had to make changes to any code I wrote
on an X terminal before I could continue on a PC. I was using
Textedit, a Fortran compiler and XVGR. I stuck Linux on my
PC and was delighted to find I could run openwindows and found
the programs I was using were on a Linux CD. I continued my
Fortran project and didn't look back. I had been writing reports
on a PC with MS Office, this mean't sorting all the work out
and transfering text files for graphs to a PC. Lets face it
MS Office isn't all that good and It doesn't like graphing
large files. So I was delighted to find LYX now KLYX, this
is a graphical frontend for Tex or laTex. Tex is for document
preparation. It saves a lot of time by doing all the formating
and the picture floating is excellent, all picture will be
placed at the top of pages and text will fill the page. I
could export my graphs from XVRG or gnuplot as .eps files,
this was good as XVGR produces nice graphs. I then found people
were using LaTex, but hand coding it, it's similar to html.
With klyx you will have to do a bit of hand coding the code
for a super script 2 is: ./(^{2}/) if my memory serves me
right.
I had to make my PC dual boot when I did a project that was
going to be used on a windows PC, the visual basic program
that ran the experiment outlined on the page about band gap
measurement. I then started to play with autocad and I am
sorry to say I don't have linux on this PC now.
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