Questions about programs under Linux.

[Yvonne Smith]

Anna Schneider writes:
 > Insertiont the first.  I'm guessing that Emacs is going to be my oh way of 
 > doing lots of stuff.  Writing documents, doing spread sheets, who nows 
 > what all else.  I don't want the fanciest package around, I'd just get 
 > confused, but I do want a fairly flexible one.  I won't worry about it 
 > tons until I do get my computer and install Emacs, but is there an place I 
 > could look to start reading up on it?
 > 
Well, this is where *I'm* a bit confused, <smile>. If you think you'll
be spending most of your time in emacs, then wouldn't emacspeak perhaps
be a better solution than speakup? Not that I've ever used emacs with
speakup, of course, so perhaps I'm at a bit of a disadvantage to comment
on that.

As for research on emacs, you might try www.emacswiki.org It's got quite
a lot of information. Let me know if there's something else you want to
know that's not up there. Your best resource though is probably going to
be the emacs manual once you install emacs.


 > > > Umm, that kind of depends what you mean. If someone sends you a word
 > > document, there are a couple of programs to turn it into text or
 > > html. Catdoc, antiword and wordview are the three that spring to mind
 > > off the top of my head.
 > > 
 > > excel spreadsheets are a bit more of a problem. I'm pretty sure I saw
 > > something to turn them into html or something like that on the wordview
 > > page, but I'd have to go do some more research, since I haven't really
 > > looked in a while.
 > 
 > Okay, do these programs to open/convert Word documents come with 
 > distributions generally speaking, or will I have to go dig them up 
 > somewhere.
 > 
I have absolutely no idea. Catdoc's definitely a debian package, since
that's what I'm using, but I haven't used any other distributions in
ages. My best answer is perhaps you'll have to download it, perhaps
not. You'll have to look at what your distributions's got when you get
it.

 > > Umm web browsers under linux for console users are a bit problematic. I
 > > don't think there's anything we can use under linux that I'd consider
 > > equivalent to ie4 or above. The things that are impossible for us under
 > > linux that you're likely to encounter are javascriptand activex.
 > > 
 > > Javascript would be useable if we could use x-windows, but we
 > > can't. Activex will probably never be useable, since it's a microsoft
 > > scripting language. I don't know if this answers your question. Again,
 > > you'll need to be a bit more specific about what you'll want to do.
 > Well, here's the thing.  I've just become a Mary Kay consultant, and if 
 > you go to the Mary Kay web sit, (www.marykay.com) there is a section 
 > called Intouch all one word, and this section has information under it for 
 > consultants, but I can't get in with lynx.  This is a problem.  Material 
 > such as an online version of the product guide are there.  In fact, I find 
 > several parts of Mary Ky's web site to be not easily lynx accessible.  I'm 
 > not sure why.  Maybe someone on this list could look and tell me.
 > 
*sigh* well there's your problem, right there. You can't use most of
 that site, since it's mainly javascript. AT least, I think it's
 javascript, I'm not entirely sure. I don't know what your solution will
 be for that. About the only even slightly feasable thing I can think of
 that will let you look at that website on the same machine as the rest
 of what you're doing would be winforlin or vmware, which run windows
 apps under a virtual machine in linux. But honestly, I'd say that's way
 too complicated to try and figure out in the beginning.

> 
 > 
 > > 
 > > Telnet and ftp are generally used to connect from one machine to
 > > another. Almost certainly you'll want to be connected to the internet,
 > > unless you've got a network at home, and need to talk to other machines
 > > on your own network.
 > > 
 > > 
 > But see this is where I'm confused.  I've worked off of machines on a 
 > network with a couple different operating systems and you could ftp and 
 > telnet between some of those, and I've worked off of my old DOS computer 
 > at home where I have to dial up, but I haven't worked off of a linux 
 > machine that isn't hooked into a network.  That's why I'm confused.  If 
 > I'm not on a network but I have a Linux machine, do FTP and telnet come 
 > into play at all and if so how?


Well they might come into play, depending once more, and I feel like
I've been saying this a lot, on what you're doing. Telnet lets you
connect to other machines on the net, like that weather service they've
been talking about on another thread here, and ftp lets you transfer
files. In both those cases you'll need to be connected to the
internet. Is this helpful?