🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin Thompson writes:
 > Thank you *very* much for your summary, it was very useful -- I'm toying with
 > buying this product (well, and a PC :) Real Soon.  I'm encouraged by your
 > note about speed -- is that with V.42bis compression, or just straight 9600?
 > I had one question from your post:

I turned the modem compression off, as per NCD's recommendation.

 > > although I've had a great deal of frustration with the keyboard, especially
 > > with respect to the modifier keys, auto-repeat, etc.  I can go into more
 > > detail if you like.  
 > 
 > Doesn't sound like a minor point at all to me -- one of my main concerns (I
 > use a Sun at work) in having a PC or Mac is the different keyboard.  Does
 > your post mean that you have problems getting the equivalent of a "meta" key
 > to work?  One of the main things (I use GNU Emacs) that's important to me is
 > being able to use Meta as a toggle, unlike Escape as a prefix key (if that
 > makes sense).  Are you unable to do that?

Yes, I can do that.  Alt means Meta.  The problem is that the Sun
keyboard has Control to the left of the 'a' key, and Alt below the
shift key, where newer PC keyboards have caps-lock to the left of the
'a' key, and Control and Alt below the shift key.  This confusion
would be certain to give me Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but I can fix them
in DOS via a TSR someone here wrote, and I can fix it under Windows
via a KEYBOARD.DRV file I got off the net, and I can fix it in DOS
PC-Xview via an xmodmap file.  The problem is that whatever method I
choose, PC-XView gets a little confused, and does things like
auto-repeat the alt and control keys (DOS), or gets confused about the
caps-lock state, making it impossible to type small letters (Windows)
until you unconfuse it via the magic shift-caps-lock sequence that I
found accidentally.

But for the DOS-based product now, things work OK, except for the
caps-lock key, which I never use anyway, and the auto-repeating alt
and ctrl keys, which don't affect Emacs.

By the way, the PC-Xview that I'm currently using is an "Evaluation
Copy", and I don't know if they've released it yet.  Buy no version
prior to 4.1.  Stock XRemote/PC-Xview for Windows V3.0 was essentially
unusable.

If you're buying your PC for the purpose of running PC XView, make
sure you get a fast hi-res graphics card!  Mine is a Tseng-4000 based,
and it could be a bit better, especially on Emacs scrolls.
-- 
Joshua Marantz                          You make my life and times
Viewlogic Systems,                        a book of bluesy Saturdays
josh@viewlogic.com                      And I have to choose...