Heimo Claasen wrote: >[...] You know that I had asked about the on-goings of the "project", and I >was glad that James repeated the question - triggering your highly >appreciated respnse. > > I thought those messages had made it out way back when, but apparently not. I should've re-posted it sooner. Sadly, I have no time available these days to play with DOSemu much.
>No problem with cleaning the cut/pasted salad but some content questions >raise. Though I gladly wait for the FAQ. > > I can do up some rough notes easily enough. Does anybody have any interest in doing a web page or similar? >I think the primary orietation you mentioned - re-activating existing >HW/SW in an adapted context - is precisely what's needed. > > If subscribers on this list are any indication of what's typical, most surv-users seem to have a "more modern" machine these days that should be able to run Linux quite well, even if it's not their primary machine. Many hint that they have a couple of PCs, so the "gateway" approach probably offers a good opportunity to get old systems online regardless of local ISP offerings. This is precisely why I need to know WHAT ppp options aren't working for folks. I've yet to encounter an ISP that was impossible to connect to with Linux, but if somebody has -- please share WHY (not just that "it was too hard.") >BTW, one seldom mentioned but crucial aspect in this is access to >archives of all sorts. >Blatant example: with the usual equipment installed to-day, you cannot >access any more official (DOS-).PDF documents stored at the time by many >gvt. and public instances (in wide parts of Western Europe); "paper >trails" are difficult to find and incomplete, and "there is a 10-years' >gap in public memory", according to historians and librarians, caused by >arbitrary changes in proprietary document formatting. The stuff is >still there, available but not accessible. > > A couple of options here: 1. Use the gateway machine to run the required reader software. Although much maligned, PDF is a published standard, and a number of readers are available. This will be less the case with e-books and other highly-proprietary formats, though PDF is still often an option. 2. Transform the content itself. This again depends on the source documents, but I've become adept at saving PDFs to DOC, then converting those to e-book formats. Similar things can be done for other formats, depending on your specific needs. This WILL NOT work for intentionally proprietary formats with "digital right management" and the like, but then they're not supposed to. - Bob
