David Jones wrote:

IIRC, Boot Commander will let you have up to 26 bootable partitions.

Along the same lines, an easier approach would be to put Fractint on a bootable CD with freedos. The only complication is that if you are using Windows XP and have an NT file system, you won't be able to save the files to a hard disk. So it would be necessary to make a special FAT32 partition on the hard drive to save the files. Not too hard. I'll look into this later this summer. Freedos makes this possible, otherwise it would be illegal. This idea could be extended. We could make a Linux bootable CD that ran Xfractint, and then you COULD save the files to the NT file system, but then you'd need to know something about Linux. There are many solutions, all of which require SOME special computer expertise. Tim

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 20:15:40 -1000, David Jones <gnome@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:

Even with a FAT32 partition, does FreeDOS work with modern sized drives?

Yes. I have a 120 GB drive with a 5 GB FAT partition with FreeDOS. I was using that soley for Fractint, until I tried Linux and Xfractint, which is much faster for me. If you want to dual boot with Linux as one of your OSes, try Mandrake. The installer is better WinXP and WinME, IMO. Also, the partitioning tool is able to resize FAT (I've tried this, it works) and NTFS partitions (haven't tried it). It comes with two bootloaders (LILO and GRUB), and if you install it after installing windows, it will see all of the OSes on your system. All it will cost you is time to download it (3 CDs, 650 MB each). JPK

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, jpkotta wrote: (...)

If you want to dual boot with Linux as one of your OSes, try Mandrake. (...) My computer says "Designed for Windows NT and 98" and I don't even believe that. (If I did, then I wouldn't hav tried Linux). As far as I'm concerned it was designed for DOS and Win3.1, which would be a bit nicer if MicroSoft's Win32s would install again (because I can quit from it without rebooting the machine).

Actually, this contraption has two warning labels. The other is "Intel Inside", but at least Linux wil tel you if you hav one of their buggy chips. _______ Wyszkowski's Second Law: Anything can be made to work if you fiddle with it long enough.

On 12 Jun 04, at 6:16, Paul N. Lee wrote:

Tim Wegner wrote:

...

Along the same lines, an easier approach would be to put Fractint on a bootable CD with freedos. ........... We could make a Linux bootable CD that ran Xfractint.....

Or better still, have a FractInt CD that could be dual purpose for most any environment, whether Win-9x, NT, XP, MAC, Unix, Linux, etc...

The CD could also contain a complete collection of all the previous versions of FractInt through the years.

I have a copy of the last native OS/2 version, PMFractint 17.2. And there could be pars and formulas and color maps and all that fun stuff, too? 8-)

And if there is still room on the CD, a copy of the "Fractal Creations, 2nd Edition" companion CD.

That would take proper legal arrangements, right? Tim has those rights, right?

Plus, have the FractInt manual available in Text, MS-Word document,

No need for Word format - PDF is fine for those who want to print a copy. HTML is fine for online reading. If necessary, I'd even do without the Text version.

PDF format, and HTML.

This would make the CD something like a "Deluxe Colletor's Edition". Or if ready by this August, a "16th Year Anniversary Edition".

Totally cool and worth spending money on! 8-) David gnome@hawaii.rr.com

Tim Wegner wrote:

David asked:

...

...

And if there is still room on the CD, a copy of the "Fractal Creations, 2nd Edition" companion CD.

That would take proper legal arrangements, right? Tim has those rights, right?

I have the rights, it would be no problem. I'd check with the various artists represented on the CD as a courtesy, but I would not expect any issue.

Trouble is, I do NOT have a soft copy of the book itself.

Bummer. Means you need someone who has a copy of the book and could put in the contents somehow. Not having seen the book, I expect that entails graphics, too?

...

Totally cool and worth spending money on! 8-)

Believe me, it's not worth the effort for money but it is certainly feasible to put a lot of old stuff on a CD as a volunteer effort.

Sorry, didn't mean to say it worth paying to make ... just saying I'd consider it something worth buying! -- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com

David Jones wrote (responding to me):

...

Trouble is, I do NOT have a soft copy of the book itself.

Bummer. Means you need someone who has a copy of the book and could put in the contents somehow. Not having seen the book, I expect that entails graphics, too?

I have hard copies of all my books. I just don't have the final pagemaker files. So if we want to put the book on a CD, we'd have to scan the book. Probably not worth the trouble. The CD could be a bootable CD that boots to Freedos or Linux and allows running Fractint. As has been pointed out, we could stuff a whole lot of images and PARs on the CD. My timing was not too good to talk about this, since I'm about to take off on a vacation of several weeks. I'll be back in early July. This project could take a while. The good thing is that anyone with some energy and ability to work for a few months in their spare time could help. Another group project I have been thinking about for a long time is to make an animated really really deep zoom. 1. We'd have to identify the target, preferably a migit at 10^1500 magnification (or thereabouts). I say a midgit, because if you zoom into the Mandelbrot without really seeing where you're going, it's hard to avoid zooming into a truly self similar region. That happened to me on my first attempt, and my image at 10^1500 was just a carbon copy of a much shallower zoom. Paradoxically, zooming into a midgit (which appears to be a self-similar Mandelbrot set) is actually guaranteed to be novel. The down side is that you have to let images develop pretty far in each step in order to copntinue zooming into midgits. 2. Decide the zooming algorithm. I have found a simple rotation along with a linear zoom is effective. Gives the effect of spiralling out of control while falling. We'd probably have to rotate the palette as we go, or else designe a very special palette. 3. Generate the PAR files. COuld probably do this with a simple program, or maybe used the existing fractal animator program, which if memory serves supports arbitrary precision. The programn that generates the PAR files necessarilt has to support arbitrary precision. 4. Rendering the images. This would be the "group" part of the project. List members could render the images and send them to a central place. 5. Combining the GIFs into an animation. There's an animation like this on the Image Lab 2nd Edfition CD, but it only goes a bit past the limit of double precvision. I rendered the images with a hacked up version of Fractint I have that uses 80 bit long doubles instead of doubles. Tim

jpkotta wrote:

On the subject of deep zooms, I wonder if it would be worth it to change the arbitrary precision library to GMP. It's much more sophisticated than the home brew one Fractint currently uses, with FFTs and such, and it's free (GPL). Maybe after all the other bugs are fixed...

Or Michael C. Ring's portable arbitrary precision library MAPM: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~ringx004/mapm-main.html Regards, Gerald

I'm not aware of any bugs or problems with Fractint's arbitrary precision library, It supports all the main transcerndental functions and it's certainly free. Have you had problems with it?

No, except in Xfractint, but I'm sure that's not caused by some math bug. I can't zoom past the double precision limit, though I can render pars that use arbitrary precision. The bugs I was refering to are just general bugs that would take precidence over improving something that isn't broken. I was just wondering out loud if the arbitrary precision stuff could be faster.

Tim, If you need any help, I'd be glad to assist. Marco

-----Original Message----- From: fractint-bounces+mreinig=pacbell.net@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:fractint-bounces+mreinig=pacbell.net@mailman.xmission. com] On Behalf Of Tim Wegner Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2004 12:53 PM To: Fractint and General Fractals Discussion Subject: Re: [Fractint] Re: Multiple Boot for FractInt Users

David asked:

...

...

And if there is still room on the CD, a copy of the "Fractal Creations, 2nd Edition" companion CD.

That would take proper legal arrangements, right? Tim has those rights, right?

I have the rights, it would be no problem. I'd check with the various artists represented on the CD as a courtesy, but I would not expect any issue.

Trouble is, I do NOT have a soft copy of the book itself.

...

Totally cool and worth spending money on! 8-)

Believe me, it's not worth the effort for money but it is certainly feasible to put a lot of old stuff on a CD as a volunteer effort.

Tim

_______________________________________________ Fractint mailing list Fractint@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fractint

Paul asked:

Do you actually mean the physical book itself, or a digital copy of all it's contents??

I have copies physical books. I meant I unfortunately did not get the final Pagemaker file that the book was printed from.

You already have the 458-MB companion CD ISO image in your possesion. The rest of it is available if you so desire.

In case anyone hasn't noticed, I have put the FC2E CD online as an ISO file at www.fractint.org.

I will volunteer my archives and time for whatever it will take to create and complete such a project. But once finished, will the total size of all things included require two CDs (or more), and how will this collection be made available and distributed??

You would be a great person to coordinate such a project. We could distribute ISO images. There's probably a bit more capacity at fractint.org to host the images, but we can check into the hosting issues when we get there. I don't want to make unreasonable requests of Damien Jones, but so far he has been very accomodating. I doubt the online FC2E ISO image has caused much fractint.org bandwidth Don't everyone start downloading the CD all at once :-) I'm sure we could get some volunteer to burn CD's and mail them out for a nominal fee. To my way of thinking, the most important part of this project is making a bootable CD that runs Fractint. That's probably not too hard. How big the whole project is I couldn't say. I'd suggest limit the project to one CD for starters. I'm willing to work on this, but keep in mind I have a very full life, and can only work on a project like this in fits and starts. And further I'll be away (mostly ) for two weeks starting June 16th. I don't see this as a fast project. But then if it doesn't depend on me it could be fast <grin!> Tim

Tim Wegner wrote:

Paul asked:

...

I will volunteer my archives and time for whatever it will take to create and complete such a project. But once finished, will the total size of all things included require two CDs (or more), and how will this collection be made available and distributed??

You would be a great person to coordinate such a project.

I was really not looking to be a coordinator for such a project, just a volunteer worker. But if this is to actually proceed, and nobody else wishes to take on the role, then I do not mind attempting to keep things running smoothly.

We could distribute ISO images. ......... ........ I'm sure we could get some volunteer to burn CD's and mail them out for a nominal fee.

Once the ISO images are made available, then anybody willing to be listed as a "Volunteer CD Burner" could distribute mailed copies to those without high-speed connections. This could reduce costs of mailing based upon whom is closest to the requestor, especially when overseas and coutries are involved.

To my way of thinking, the most important part of this project is making a bootable CD that runs Fractint.

I agree, and to have it work in as many environments as is possible. The supplying of .FRM, .MAP, and .PAR files along with the CD is the easiest part, since these collections already exist. And I already have both MS-Word and RTF copies of the FractInt manual which can be easily converted into a PDF file.

I'm willing to work on this, but keep in mind I have a very full life, and can only work on a project like this in fits and starts.

If anybody else out there that wishes to get involved in some way, please send or post an email to one of these Lists: mailto:Fractint@mailman.xmission.com mailto:Fractdev@mailman.xmission.com Or privately to one of the other volunteers: mailto:twegner@swbell.net Tim Wegner mailto:mreinig@pacbell.net Marc Reinig mailto:JackOfTradeZ@comcast.net JoTz mailto:Paul.N.Lee@Worldnet.att.net Paul N. Lee Sincerely, P.N.L. ------------------------------------------------- http://home.att.net/~Paul.N.Lee/PNL_Fractals.html http://www.Nahee.com/Fractals/

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, Paul N. Lee wrote: (...)

I will volunteer my archives and time for whatever it will take to create and complete such a project. But once finished, will the total size of all things included require two CDs (or more), and how will this collection be made available and distributed?? (...) I don't see that this _should_ be the case, except in the most stubbornly computing intensive renditions that just won't look good without passes=1 and periodicity=0 and over fifty thousand iterations (where it _really_ might make sense to download it over phone lines) or complexity akin to the fractals that mask "FRACTINT" off within the equation.

Otherwise, if I snipped it before, then Jim Muth might offer his parameter files compressed to consume less than three meg. The fractint mailing list archives might be of use to those doing research offline, or just for distributed archival purposes. That would probably come to less than fifty meg as a zipfile or gzipfile. (The viewer would be a small fraction of that if it wasn't a browser, that case adding nothing). The curiosity, to me, is paring down what is already a minimalistic distribution of Linux: Knoppix. I would already list a kernel, a compiler, XWindows, XFractint, GhostScript, The Gimp, and Lynx as bare essentials. (Plus DOS flavours of GhostScript [5.10 seems to be the final version for MS-DOS], Lynx, and FRACTINT). That might be half or more of the 700meg of space on a disk, but highly functional as a stand-alone product, *IF*WE* disallow rendered graphics that are not written into software. That's not to say that individuals would be prevented from including some personal choices in renditions. (It costs less to stamp CDs out than to burn them, but you would need a minimum order or a contract for distribution to make creating the plate for that economical). That's my wish list for a burn. Comments welcome. I've made no promises of production or scheduling, but I hear an echo for wanting to include Knoppix or a similar minimalistic distribution of Linux on an ISO 9660 image. The DOS version? At least until border tracing and palette editing work nicely with XFractint.

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Paul N. Lee wrote: (...)

Even uncompressed as plain text, the whole FractInt Discussion List from 1997 to present is only about 65-MB (which is only about 24-MB in the .ZIP format).

I'm glad that my guessing is only off by half. Sizes like that tend to be unmanagable under DOS. The remaining question is what format the zipfile should expand to. One single mail file? Divided into months? A Database? My inclination is the single mail file for portability, although that _might_ break some of the smaller DOS internet clients like NetTamer (I've never tried it for anything like that size, and it's not even on my hard-drive at the moment, but it's usable, perhaps as low water mark). I've only been wet behind the ears (and hot under the collar) with Linux for a year, so I'm not sure what to think of David's exclusion of MySql. Storing the messages in a format for Structured Query Language might be just what some Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Mathematics would order.. Perhaps it could be done with a script that would turn the mail file into that databasing format, but don't expect that to be rendered any time soon, unless it happens to be old hat to someone on the list.

SherLok Merfy wrote:

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Paul N. Lee wrote: (...)

...

Even uncompressed as plain text, the whole FractInt Discussion List from 1997 to present is only about 65-MB (which is only about 24-MB in the .ZIP format).

I'm glad that my guessing is only off by half. Sizes like that tend to be unmanagable under DOS. The remaining question is what format the zipfile should expand to. One single mail file? Divided into months? A Database?

My inclination is the single mail file for portability, although that _might_ break some of the smaller DOS internet clients like NetTamer (I've never tried it for anything like that size, and it's not even on my hard-drive at the moment, but it's usable, perhaps as low water mark).

I've only been wet behind the ears (and hot under the collar) with Linux for a year, so I'm not sure what to think of David's exclusion of MySql. Storing the messages in a format for Structured Query Language might be just what some Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Mathematics would order..

Perhaps it could be done with a script that would turn the mail file into that databasing format, but don't expect that to be rendered any time soon, unless it happens to be old hat to someone on the list.

I think it better to turn the mail archives into a browseable set of HTML pages. That would break them down into manageable sizes, organize them by date, topic, etc, maybe. IIRC, there are Perl scripts that can break a mail archive into HTML pages. Not old hat to me, but I've run into the results of such scripts many times when searching on Google. David gnome@hawaii.rr.com

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Tim Wegner wrote: (...)

Trouble is, I do NOT have a soft copy of the book itself. (...) I was _wondering_ why someone in my province (Telus was their ISP) was making OCR records of the book. I just hope that the book is reasonably complete with regards to description of the parameters.

(The graphics would be quite tossable compared to indefinite or arbitrary resolution).

One of the problems in the creation of a Fractint collection would appear to be the creation of a "soft" copy of "Fractal Creations". Now I have only the First Edition, but I tested the feasibility of using OCR to make that soft copy available. Just a couple of pages conviced me that this is do-able, altough a lot of work is involved. My question is...is it worth doing? If anyone would be interested, I might just go ahead and acquire the Second Edition, and plunge into the task. John Wilson ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul N. Lee" <Paul.N.Lee@Worldnet.att.net> To: <fractint@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2004 1:31 PM Subject: [Fractint] FractInt Collection -- Volunteer Project ??

Paul N. Lee wrote:

...

Tim Wegner wrote:

...

Along the same lines, an easier approach would be to put Fractint on a bootable CD with freedos. ........... We could make a Linux bootable CD that ran Xfractint.....

The CD could also contain a complete collection.....

This would make the CD something like a "Deluxe Colletor's Edition". Or if ready by this August, a "16th Year Anniversary Edition".

Well, we now have four individuals willing to devote an amount of time to this effort of putting together some aspect of a CD concerning FractInt. It would take way too many more people to do this as an anniversary project for this year, so establishing it as a collector's edition might be the most reasonable choice.

Besides trying to get volunteers that are willing to devote a good deal of time to some area of the project, coordinating those volunteers will also need to be handled through some mechanism. It could be done through a new and separate email discussion list, where everyone involved could know what is going on and the current status of the project.

Also, a central collection site for the depositing of generated material would need to be established. Probably the easiect to setup, maintain, and have access to, by a variety of participants, would be an FTP location on some reliable server.

Hmm, I have a bit of a problem. I purchased a copy of the Second Edition, and started to OCR the thing into Word documents. However, my OCR software, ABBYY, is coughing and choking over some of the "artsy" pages. Somebody decided to print the text *over* faint fractal backgrounds, and the software has trouble resolving these "unknown characters"! The problem is not *too* severe, but more than a normal amount of manual editing is required. I'm going to persevere for a little while, at least, but at my age I wonder if I shall live long enough to complete the task! John W. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul N. Lee" <Paul.N.Lee@Worldnet.att.net> To: <fractint@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 5:38 PM Subject: Re: [Fractint] FractInt Collection -- Volunteer Project ??

John Wilson wrote:

...

One of the problems in the creation of a Fractint collection would appear to be the creation of a "soft" copy of "Fractal Creations". Now I have only the First Edition, but I tested the feasibility of using OCR to make that soft copy available. Just a couple of pages conviced me that this is do-able, altough a lot of work is involved. My question is...is it worth doing? If anyone would be interested, I might just go ahead and acquire the Second Edition, and plunge into the task.

There is still a lot of good and useful information about fractals for the beginner and intermediate levels. And when (or if) FractInt is ever upgraded emough to be more inline with today's applications, then the references to the program would still be useful.

The full text of the 2nd Edition should probably not take up more than 1-MB as a text file. What will increase the size of a complete electronic book are the illustrations, charts, graphs, tables, etc.

I think that what I can do is to put the OCR'd text into a folder on my web page, where it can be available at will. Oh, and I *do* have Acrobat Distiller, and can produce a .pdf when it's all complete. That's why I chose to save as a Word document initially...there's a direct link from Word, which will also write a very convoluted HTML. This will still not be fast. I have a learning curve to follow with ABBYY, which is new to me. (I see that it has a "recognise background" function, but I've no idea how that could operate). Once I develop a technique and a couple of macros I might be able to get an assembly line running! John W. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul N. Lee" <Paul.N.Lee@Worldnet.att.net> To: <fractint@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 7:42 AM Subject: Re: [Fractint] FractInt Collection -- Volunteer Project ??

John Wilson wrote:

...

Hmm, I have a bit of a problem. I purchased a copy of the Second Edition, and started to OCR the thing into Word documents. However, my OCR software, ABBYY, is coughing and choking over some of the "artsy" pages. Somebody decided to print the text *over* faint fractal backgrounds, and the software has trouble resolving these "unknown characters"! The problem is not *too* severe, but more than a normal amount of manual editing is required.

John, if you want to send the "raw" text from after doing the Scan and OCR routine, then I do not mind going through that and doing the editting. We can get a lot accomplished together that way.

After I complete the text editting, I can then upload that to a central location for others to download from. And eventually have a PDF version available as well.

SherLok Merfy wrote:

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, John Wilson wrote:

...

One of the problems in the creation of a Fractint collection would appear to be the creation of a "soft" copy of "Fractal Creations". Now I have only the First Edition, but I tested the feasibility of using OCR to make that soft copy available. Just a couple of pages conviced me that this is do-able, altough a lot of work is involved. My question is...is it worth doing? If anyone would be interested, I might just go ahead and acquire the Second Edition, and plunge into the task.

For the graphics, it would be useless. The question is still good if someone wants to re-use the text in a word processor or desktop publisher (in an approximate fashion), and that might as well be a personal negotiation with Tim Wegner. Perhaps shoot him an example, but last time I read anything about it (and I'm replying to e-mail in chronological order), he was on holidays, so you can expect a lot of lag time on the reply.

Best way to handle the graphics would be to include the PARs and regenerate the images, then pull them into the text appropriately, and provide it as a web page on the CD. -- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Tim Wegner wrote: (...)

This idea could be extended. We could make a Linux bootable CD that ran Xfractint, and then you COULD save the files to the NT file system, but then you'd need to know something about Linux. There are many solutions, all of which require SOME special computer expertise.

Knoppix has been recommended to me, and from what little I know about it (one, bootable CD, that doesn't need access to the hard drive unless you want swap space for virtual memory) it would make Xfractint more easily portable, right down to "The GIMP" and print drivers or ghostscript for making PDF that seems to be in favour with the print shops. This is how I do that now (with GhostScript 5.11), after printing to a PostScript file with Opera 3.62: @echo off gs386 -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE#pdfwrite -sOutputFile#%1.pdf -f %1.ps The hard part is burning these massive files to a CD-R. We'll hav to send Mister Osuch some bad drugs or loose wimin or something to get him to bring Xfractint to the same calibre as the the DOS version (actually, XFractint probably has bigger calibre, but there are still a few things in it that are broken). Either that or everybody who works with Fractint will be stuck with more than one operating system. _______ Shaw's Principle: Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, David Jones wrote:

Knoppix works very well. I use it by booting from CD, also have a system here running Knoppix installed on the hard drive. Don't know how much space on such a CD XFractint might need, but the Knoppix CD is already crammed full so some stuff would have to come off. But for a purpose-built XFractint "Linux distro" - you couldn't start with anything better!

I'm not sure how to burn ISO imajes with Windows XP (XCDRoast is quite new to me, too, but I've managed to use it for burning fractals), but if you come up with a disk, then maybe a web page of links to tarballs would be of use to me when I'm borrowing the neighbour's bandwidth. (Windows XP [even when it's running Mozilla] tends to drop both FTP and HTTP connections that are dragged and _dropped_ directly to the folder for CD burning, but it can still be done by dragging and dropping to a temporary folder, than dragging THAT to the folder for burning optic storage.) The bootstrap might preferably be a script for the burn, which seems to make it almost necessarily a multi-session CD. I would download a little script on a floppy for the first session under Linux, burn that, then drag and drop the rest of the packages onto the CD with Winduz. If I RTFM, then I might figure out how to do it as an ISO under Winduz, but now that I think about it, I might not want to. Like, maybe I want a font editor for Type 1 fonts and you don't even know where one is (and each session of a multi-session has about 13meg of overhead). Plus, for your own benefit as a likelihood, and perhaps even mine regarding the bandwidth I could consume with simultaneous connections to multiple servers, a page of links to the packages takes up a whole lot less space than an imaje of those packages. _______ Murphy's Corollary: It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

My Linux distro of choice (LibraNet) uses GRUB, but I've been getting away from multi-booting machines for the last couple of years. I do my Fractint work on the OS/2 box - Fractint works fine under OS/2. When I shift my main production work from OS/2 to the faster (of my two Linux boxes), I think I'll go with Xfractint and check out some other native Linux fractal apps. I could also use Win4Lin to run ChaosPro. David dvjones@ksbe.edu jpkotta wrote:

If you want to dual boot with Linux as one of your OSes, try Mandrake. The installer is better WinXP and WinME, IMO. Also, the partitioning tool is able to resize FAT (I've tried this, it works) and NTFS partitions (haven't tried it). It comes with two bootloaders (LILO and GRUB), and if you install it after installing windows, it will see all of the OSes on your system. All it will cost you is time to download it (3 CDs, 650 MB each).

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 11:53:39 -0500, Paul N. Lee <Paul.N.Lee@Worldnet.att.net> wrote:

...

Greetings,

Here's something I just discovered which may be of interest to those wishing to have dual or multiple booting operating systems, especially those experiencing problems on Win-NT, 2K and XP environments.

MasterBooter ------------ This boot manager lets you install and run up to six operating systems on a single PC. It comes with a powerful partitioning program. You can password-protect operating systems, hide and unhide FAT partitions for compatibility, set up a custom delay time, and more. This version adds internal Zip drive support. Version: 3.3 Price: Free trial ($20 to purchase) Download MasterBooter now at: http://pcwnl.pcworld.com/t/119319/8726782/515704/0/

-- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com

SherLok Merfy wrote:

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, jpkotta wrote:

...

All it will cost you is time to download it (3 CDs, 650 MB each).

Over phone lines that's about twelve days, so the magazine is probably cheaper. Jenerally, I would say that Linux was born on the net, it grows on the net, and I wouldn't recommend taking anything more than a package at a time from the net. Try a minimalistic distribution. Maybe you can even figure out how to use SRPMS.

Debian distros handle package dependencies much better than Redhat's RPM system does. I think with customization and stuff, you could get it down to a much lower size. For example, an XFractint Linux distro disk doesn't need to have MySQL, Apache, mail servers, development tools like PHP/Python, hordes of games and apps and word processors, KDE or GNOME (IceWM would be plenty, and fast even on slow hardware with little memory), OpenOffice, etc. If then zipped up, I'd think you could get it down a lot smaller. -- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com