intro and info about my bn

[Notelinux is a list for discussing freesoft, and related topics]

Hi all,

My name is Derek Roberts. I am seventeen, diagnosed with ROP, and have
a bn MPower bt 18 that I don't really care what happens to. It's about
three years old and is starting to show it's age. I sent it to hw
about a year ago and they were complete ***holes. They said the
battery was just fine (It was only able to hold about 8 hours of
charge at the time, with nothing plugged in) and that replacin git
would cause me $150 (so much for extended contracts!). They also said
that, for whatever reason they would need to replace the braille
display instead of clean it and that if I wanted a flash disk
replacement (it had been acting funny, saying the drive can not find
the sector requested. I later found out that all I had to do was
delete the broken file and haven't hda any problems since) I'd need a
mb replacement too. the final cost was about $3000, if memory serves.
Dispite all this, my bn still performs ok. As I said before, the flash
disk is still perfectly usable. The display is still readable
(although some of the dots don't show up correctly) The battery is a
different matter. It only holds about 2 hours of charge turned off,
but I've heard of people taking their bn to a local best buy or
battery place and having the battery replaced, so I'm not incredibly
worried there. My main box has a 2ghz processor, 2gb of ram and a
232gb hard drive (with 6 partitions, 3 dedicated to yucky windows
vista if I need it, the other three dedicated to linux). I've also got
an older box (697mhz processor, 7gb hard drive, 256mb of ram and a
serial port). I'm learning a few languages (right now python, c++ and
maybe perl). I've thought of running linux on a bn for a while. I'd be
happy to do anything to my bn that would help with this. I don't
depend on it for anything, so don't really care if it breaks. I heard
about this list from a google search (reverse engeineering
braillenote, which brought up the discussion from the speakup list) so
figured hey, they're already working on it, and I don't realy use my
bn much anyway so what the heck? lol. Anyway thought I'd give an intro
and stuff, if I (or my bn) can be of any help, please let me know!

Thanks,

Big D, Relient F, Derek Roberts, or whatever.