Screw Drivers and PDF Files

[Stan Barr]

Hi,

Scott Stevens said;
> On Fri, 3 Jun 2005 00:28:31 -0400 (EDT)
> der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote:
> 
> > >> You are making life difficult if to don't have a tool for reading
> > >> PDF files.  I think you can buy a nice one for a few hundred
> > >> dollars.
> > > You can buy a used PC for tens of dollars.
> > 
> > Including the monitor and the license fees for all the necessary bits
> > of software?  And including someone to be its sysadmin?  I'm certainly
> > not about to baby along a machine running closed-source software.
> > 
> 
> I bought a few skid of Dell Optiplexes at auction about this time last
> year.  I got approx. 80 machines for $40.  I've sold 30 or so of them
> for from $20 to $80 each on eBay.  
> 
> All of the above machines are very capable of running NetBSD.  There is
> a useful NetBSD package in the pkgsrc collection called xpdf that will
> read and (somewhat) manipulate PDF files.  It is trivial to print from
> xpdf to any common postscript printer, or to almost any non-postscript
> printer with a printer filter script that uses ghostscript.  
> 

This machine is an Optiplex GXpro - Pentium Pro 200 - running Linux and 
I do almost everything on it that's not done on the Macs.  Excellent
reliable computer, it's been running continuously 24/7, barring hardware 
and kernel upgrades, since November 1999.  A 10 quid ($18) Brother laser
printer takes care of printing - actually the printer is attached to
an even older 486 running FreeSCO to act as a print server for the
entire network.  You *can* do these things real cheap! 

-- 
Cheers,
Stan Barr  stanb at dial.pipex.com

The future was never like this!