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1.99n status report



Hi Folks,

For the last two or three weeks I've been saying that 1.99n is "at
least" a week away.  Now I'm changing that to 1.99n is "about" a week
away.  Specifically I think we'll be done with the 1.99n code by next
Wednesday and that we'll spend the later half of next week testing and
then get 1.99n out on the ftp sites by Monday the 12th of June.
However, our record for predicting when the experimental releases will
come out has been bad in the past, so more slippage may occur.

One nice thing about the slippage is that all of Mat's new blitter
will be in 1.99n as originally planned.  For a while we thought he'd
only get half of it done for 1.99n and it wouldn't be present in its
full glory until 1.99o, but this is now not the case.  Mat has already
finished the new blitter and is now working on retooling the dividing
line betwen the portable graphics that all Executor ports use and the
implementation specific graphics routines.  This retooling will
greatly help us with a NEXTSTEP port and an SVGAlib port.  In fact, it
will make an SVGAlib port so easy that we think we'll have one out
very soon after the NEXTSTEP port is out again, which should be "soon"
after 1.99n is released.

Just as a reminder, here are the major new things in 1.99n:

	*many* bug fixes

	ability to format floppies

	much faster blitter

	Tex-Edit (it will work this time)

	Ability for programs to detect that they are running under Executor

	Access to DOS drives other than the installation drive from E/D

	Access to DOS drives from E/L

	Font/DA installation (bitmap fonts only)

	low-level foreign keyboard support (not directly usable by end
	users, but usable by some of our testers, and a good step in the
	right direction)

Thanks for being so patient.  We're working hard on coming up with
hard dates for the "hackathon" period before 2.0 officially goes beta.
We're getting very close to having all the 2.0 functionality in place,
and once that happens, we'll be able to devote all our resources to
making more and more apps run flawlessly.

We're also moving forward with funding so that we'll be able to get
some quality documentation, packaging and ads for 2.0.

	--Cliff