Andy

I admit it. I’m hooked on Mosaic. You don’t know what Mosaic is? Neither did I, until a few months ago. Mosaic is perhaps the most well-known WWW browser, at least for X and Microsoft Windows. (To find out more about WWW, see the article by Bernie Thompson in Linux Journal issue 3.)

After getting Mosaic at work (with no actual Web access, but to see how I could use it to display my own internal documentation), I decided I wanted to install it at home. I don’t have Motif, which is required to compile Mosaic, but thankfully a few people have put pre-compiled binaries of different types on sunsite.unc.edu (/pub/Linux/system/Network/info-systems). Installation was easy; I just extracted the gzipped tar file, copied the binary to a suitable location, and copied the app-defaults file into a suitable location (/usr/X386/lib/X11/app-defaults). The README material from the source is also included. This is not a small package; over 1MB for the Mosaic binary on disk, and it uses nearly 2MB of RAM.

Now I can Mosaic over my PPP link from home. What fun! Interestingly, I have found that the traffic it generates is not too hard on the limited-bandwidth PPP link (except when loading large images). For the net-impaired, there is also a version of Mosaic which works over a term connection in the same directory on sunsite.

In between Mosaic-ing (OK, it does get a little boring when all you have to browse with your information browser is information you created), I had a little time to try out Frisk-0.99a, a pretty nice Risk clone by Elan Feingold (elan@tasha.cheme.cornell.edu). It is multi-player and networked, so you at least have to have loopback networking to be able to use it. Also, there is no computer opponent, although two players can share one window and one screen. It has a nice help facility, too. There is only one game style supported, but there is a lot of potential to this one.