David Neeley wrote:
Stephen,
If you have the hard drive space, you might also consider installing
Linux on the machine to dual-boot. The machine I am using at the
moment is a 600-mhz Pentium II I picked up for very little...added a
hard drive I already had and stuck in 512 MB of RAM I also had. It
works very well indeed.
Thanks for the input. I have an 80mb drive that dual boots
WinXP and FC4. I was after solving the specific problem that
LyX doesn't work on Windows98 just XP. On the developer list
they put a fair amount of work into getting Win98 working for
those users with old machines and laptops, before giving up.
Some Windows users are not technically savvy and are intimidated
by the idea of hardware installation or installing a new OS.
Cygwin was made to run on Windows, not on Linux. So I was
announcing the first purely Windows software solution to LyX not
working on Win98. I thought it might work because Claus Hentschel
released LyX1.3.1 which worked with win98 and Cygwin. LyX working
natively (not X11) and then only for WinXP is less than a year old.
Nico Jabin wrote me about using LyX on Win98 so I wanted to test
(Re: Installing LyX 1.3.7 on Windows 98 - no appropriate help found)
the install procedure before telling him that it would work. I
found only two things not covered in Enrico's original simple Howto.
Enrico wrote:
"Thinking about it, maybe you don't have C:\cygwin\bin in the Windows
system PATH. If this is the case, then you can solve your problem simply
copying lyx-x11.exe to C:\cygwin\bin and then creating a shortcut
to C:\cygwin\bin\lyx-x11.exe."
---------------------------------------------------------------
You are right. I tried earlier to put Cygwin in the Path, but the
C:\ autoexec.bat had 0 bytes. So I cleverly appended C:\cygwin\bin
to the autoexec.bat which exists in the C:\windows\command\EBD dir.
and copied that file to C:\. That proved to be a big mistake.
Now the C:\autoexec.bat file contains
SET PATH=C:\Windows;C:\Cygwin\bin
doskey
which works *very well*!
If, after installing cygnus, you get the message:
Out of environment space
add the line
shell=C:\command.com /e:4096 /p
to your c:\config.sys
The CD problem is easily solved--especially if you have a computer
flea market or a recycling center.
If you look on any sizeable newsstand, you can find magazines with CD
versions of various Linux distributions--or you can order them from
places like cheapbytes.com. Another source is to order a CD for
free--although it may take a while to arrive, from Ubuntu's "shipit"
program. I use Kubuntu, the KDE version, which is also free.
These sound like good resources for those with only dialup.
My win98/modem is for backup when the dsl rarely goes down.
I could have put a network card in it (also have to drill
hole in wall for cable)or a spare cd but letting the dialup
download run at night was less work.
LyX, as you may know, has two UNIX interfaces--one uses an XForms
frontend, the other uses the QT toolset--which is also that used by
KDE.
I was going to install KDE on Cygwin but they terminated the KDE
X11 port to Cygwin windows. They have a native port in the works now.
You will find that Internet surfing and most other activities you do
will go faster in Linux than in Windows--although there will be a
learning curve involved. If you have a few GB of hard drive space,
though, you can easily set up the machine to give you a choice at boot
time between Windows and Linux.
I like "yum install lyx" on FC4. I figured the user already knew about
Linux when he asked his question about Win98 (Cygwin is not standalone)
so I was giving a win98 specific solution. I notice Bruce Byfield has
written several articles about O0o as superior for technical writing
than Word. But he doesn't think people are likely to change to it.
David
Regards,
Stephen
