h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

.scr is usually a Windows screensaver and is a very common virus medium. I would delete it and notify your collegue that they may be infected. Noting of course, that it is possible for viri to spoof the from and to lines in the SMTP headers.

Thanks Marv . I'll delete it on the grounds that it's either trivial or a virus and I can do without both.

Sounds like a plan to me

Anyone here have any experience with Real-Time operating systems, or specifically a real time version of Linux? I'm thinking about running.

dave

*innocently* Running for what?

erm, running it. Real time linux. Actually, ideally I'd run it on my data-acquisition computer in lab, and write code to use the data acquisition hardware in real time. But for starters, I thought I'd try just real time linux on a separate, extra computer, see how that went/how I like it.

Never run it.

I can't tell whether GDZ is telling you not to run it or saying that he's never run it.

But I'd love to do exactly the same as dave would, experiment on an older computer. At the moment, certain apps crucial to my business will only run on Windows. At least the copies I have are for Windows.

I have never run it, sorry for the confuzzlement.

I'm actually going to run it on my new computer. A friend is moving to Singapore and is selling me a dell desktop P4 2.4 GHz for $350. I'm going to put linux on it, and keep my "science critical" data analysis program on my old Win98 machine.

What's the data aquisition from/using. There probably is already stuff out there to do some of the hard work for you.
Try looking at http://www.imca.aps.anl.gov/~lavender/linux_daq.html and http://www.llp.fu-berlin.de/ these list stuff that is supported and have more info on there.
It's all a far cry from when I wrote basic programs to control and get the data from all sorts of fancy HP kit (network analysers, meters etc) over GPIB. Plotting out the results and printing it onto dot matrix printers, lovely pictures

My friend M was showing me her G4 laptop, it was all shiny and had a wide screen. The icons did pretty things when the cursor ran over it. Needless to say I was dead impressed.

I am trying to figure out what distro I should use on my laptop. It is an ancient P90 toshiba with 48Mb RAM and a 4.3Gb hdd. I would like to use X on it, but I am not sure that my system would be up to spec. Any suggestions, Phil?

It should be useable with X (just about). I'm not hot on what distros are best right now. If you want to optimise things for just the P90 (and have a fast connection and are willing to wait) then using Gentoo will allow you to get everything compiled just for your laptop. This may be overkill or a bit more involved than you want. Other than that check out the linux laptops pages to check everything works on your model.
Oh and you may not want to load everything including all the eye candy features as these will chew up processor and memory, a simple window manager will do what you want (I like WindowMaker, a NeXT Step clone, as a nice clean interface).

*strolls in, not understanding much of what have been said*

Would anyone happen to know how to edit a pdb file? What do I need?

I've got something called modmaker.exe but it only works for editing/creating pdb files for a Palm game called Aldon's crossing (one of my 'projects I'd love to do if I had the time' is creating a game based on the Kalevala epic).

The pdb file I'd like to edit is a sort of dictionary (searchable) and it just contains text (well, at least the bit I see when using it).

Nope I know nothing of that T.

Have you tried palmgear.com, T?

There may be a program (possibly freeware but likely not) available for editing/writing pdb. files. But for it to run on a pda you will probably need a prc. file too.

Thanks Caer - the pdb file came with a prc file, so that's no problem - it's just that there are some things that are missing in the 'dictionary' which I'd like to add...

*off to check the palmgear site*

Thanks Phil. I've looked at some of those before. Part of the reason that I would write my own is that the actual DAC hardware is ancient. I don't remember whether I found a linux driver for it or not...probably not as it has "DMA" and other features which preculde multitasking and any sort of modern memory architecture. That's why I was thinking real-time would be the way to go, b/c the the OS would allow the direct access between card and computer all the time, no fuss, no muss.

Thanks for the link to Gentoo, Phil. I will likely give that a go. I think that their documentation is far better than any I have ever read before. I will try to port my laptop to gentoo as soon as I have the time.