On 25 Dec 2003 at 14:19, Day Brown wrote:
[SNIP]
>BUT- I have no way to get online with dos anymore. All three of my local
>ISPs have win xp servers which use MS-CHAP, and there's no dos ppp
>driver that can work with it. LSPPP mentions expressly that it does not
>support MS-CHAP, saying it is rare. But I think there is some planned
>obselescence at work, for only the most recent distros will logon on
>either. KPPP sometimes works. But if people have trouble logging on, why
>then, just buy the newer distro from REDHAT. I think Redhat has figured
>that out.
I believe I recall that "epppd", a DOS PPP package, does support MS-
CHAP, though I'm not sure. I admit, I have an ISP which provides a text-
based login, so I haven't had to investigate that.
While it is true that purchasing newer distributions and installing
them will often give you up-to-date software for that Linux
distribution, there is nothing which is preventing you from download
and installing the appropriate package with the newer PPP software, or
at worst, downloading the source code and compiling it. While this
often isn't the easiest task... it is one of the better things about
Linux.
The planned obsolescence that I see is on the part of Microsoft and
especially the ISPs - many ISPs don't want to support anything other
than a very limited "standard" - which is "newer" consumer PC with
Windows. I've had trouble getting any support for Mac OS X with the
local ISPs - never mind Linux. It's laziness and unwillingness to
spend the money to hire and train the tech support...
>The xp servers are sold with cd burners so that the isp can just hand
>new customers the windows install disk. Redhat, Suse, or whoever, gets a
>copy of the ISP install cd, and tweaks the ppp driver to work with
>whatever the windoz server wants.
>
>Then too, after you do get online, I increasingly noted that arachne
>could not render the pages. Again, I see that the software houses sell
>webcrafting tools to the hosts, while they give away the browsers to
>render them. Only, increasingly what I see is that the tools are used to
>create banners, popups, popunders, and other crap that we users dont
>want. But they are selling the advertising, using our screens to display
>it.
Much of this is poor WWW-page coding. If people would adhere to the
standards, then standard WWW browsers would have a much better chance
of rendering the page. There are pages that I find which can only be
rendered well by one of the following: IE, Netscape, Mozilla, or
Opera... and sometimes I have to try all of them!
>I'd like to see us setup a spam free VPN, but til then, I need a browser
>that can deal with it. Which means opera or mozilla. but there's no dos
>versions. Although, since I see there are some for os2, I wonder if
>something cant be done with DV on dos. Nevertheless, the one other
>option is something like BL, which lets you boot in dos, then when
>you're done with the dos tools, use BL, then xwin, then maybe the
>browser.
I've been using Mozilla Firebird with great success on my primary WWW
browsing machine at home - AMD233 w/64MB and Win95. It's remarkably
fast, and quite robust.
>BL says it runs on 4 meg dram. I dunno how it can handle webpages in
>that....
Well, that's because the WWW browser included in it is an older version
of "links", a text-only WWW browser. It is, however, _very_ fast at
page rendering, and I use it a lot of the time. Newer versions of
links also have some graphic support, and "Dillo", a graphical browser,
is also regarded favorably.
I did set up BasicLinux 1.8 with X and Netscape 4.05 on my 386sx25
notebook computer, with 12MB of RAM, and it works okay in 640x480x256
resolution. It's no speed demon, but it does work... though without more
RAM, I can't really open more than one or two pages at a time, or it starts
swapping hard.... But that's Netscape 4.05, I'm told. It does use up
something like 8MB of RAM to load. I've been trying to get an older
version of NS, but haven't been able to download it from the Netscape
WWW site.
Anthony Albert
===========================================================
Anthony J. Albert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
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