> I've tried sending the message below to the softcon
> list, but it's not going through.

Same problem here.  Half a dozen of my messages to softcon.com
have not gone through.

> BTW: on Opera and advertising banners. Have you discovered
> the F11 key? This gives you fullscreen Opera and, at least
> on my monitor, gets rid of the ad banner.

Yeah, the banner goes away, but so do all the buttons. :-(
Actually, what concerns me more is how (apparently) Opera
goes off and fetches new banners from the net.  Such virus-
like behaviour makes me uneasy.

> as I understand it, we're shooting for 486 16 MB RAM with swap
> as a sort of "sweet spot" performance-wise.

I realise that a modern javascript-capable browser is never
going to run really well on a 486.  However, I will be using
a 486dx with 16mb RAM as the measuring stick.

> The little bit of fiddling I've done so far with Netscape 4.7
> on my 486 66 DX2 (AMD) with 20 MB RAM (30 pin simms) and 40 MB
> swap has shown that it borders on intolerably slow. But I need
> to do some more fiddling: all I've done so far is start the
> browser. I haven't connected to the 'net yet to start surfing.
> But it doesn't look hopeful at this point.

Thank you for the input.  That's a perfect machine to test it on.
I've been testing Opera and Dillo on a similar machine.  Dillo is
quite fast and responds well, but it crashed on me twice and it
doesn't do advanced stuff (like javascript).  Dillo has wonderful
potential, but needs a lot more development.  Opera is much more
capable and does everything a browser should; however, it's pretty
slow on this machine.  I don't have my Slack71 CDroms yet, so it's
running on bloated Slack81 libraries.  I'm hoping that it will
perform better on a slim Slack71 (BL2) base.  There are also some
internal Opera settings that might speed things up (once I work
out how to tweak them).

> It's a huge portion of KDE, and I can't believe *all* of it
> is required "just" to run the browser :).

I have found a Konqueror-embedded site which provides source
code just for the browser.  Once I get Slack71 up and running,
I'll have a play with Konqueror-embedded and see if I can get
it work.  Actually, I'm more optimistic about this option since
I heard that Apple is using a Konqueror variant for their new
browser.

> I've got lots of HD space on some of my machines, all kinds
> of versions of Mozilla,

Speaking of Mozilla, I got it up and running yesterday on my
P166 (64mb RAM).  It was slow.  About as slow as Opera on my
486-66 (16mb RAM).  Galeon was better, but it required all of
Mozilla *plus* several additional libraries (libraries that are
not used by Mozilla).  That gives Galeon the biggest footprint
of all -- definitely not suitable for BasicLinux.

> On your HD problems: couldn't the BIOS on the machine in
> question be misreading the HD parameters?

That seems to be the most likely reason at the moment.

> As I understand it, DOS is much more reliant on BIOS info and
> settings than Linux. That would, maybe, explain Linux's capability
> to boot the HD (- with a floppy assist) and run from it, while DOS
> cannot boot, owing to the BIOS misreading the HD parameters and
> thus being unable to find the boot sector (thereby reporting "no
> OS found").

And even though DOS can boot successfully from floppy, it is unable
to access the HD in any way (although the HD works perfectly in DOS
on another computer).

So, if we assume that this is the problem, how is it fixed?  The
computer was working happily in Windows until a couple of weeks
ago when the user (it's not my computer) started playing with Linux.
He decided to clean the HD (a Quantum) with the Quantum zero-fill
utility (he subsequently ran zero-fill a second time a few days
later).  Is there any way this could have affected the BIOS?
The only reason I ask this is because, in trying to assist this
user, I reproduced his actions on my own computer.  After running
zero-fill the second time, my system suddenly stopped booting.
First, I got was a blank screen and a string of beeps from POST.
Next power-on, I got a CMOS checksum error.  All my CMOS settings
had been wiped -- so I reentered them and tried again.  Blank
screen and beeps.  I reset several more times with the same
result.  Then the system booted and worked normally.  But the
next time I reset, blank screen and beeps.  This went on for some
time.  Occasionally it would boot, but not usually.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but it is interesting that both
of us had CMOS problems after using zero-fill (twice).  My own
problem disappeared (suddenly and totally) when, on one of the
rare occasions that the system booted, I did: fdisk /mbr.  Since
then that system has booted perfectly many, many times.  However,
unfortunately, the user who prompted this line of investigation
still has the problem.  It can't even do the "fdisk /mbr" because
it comes back with a HD error.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Cheers,
Steven

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