Re: Desktops and Office Suites
On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 06:54:34PM +0100, Mark Lucas wrote:
> I'm sure this question must have been asked a thousand times but I have
> searched the web and been unable to find an answer. So here goes:
>
> I've installed Debian 'Potato' on my Toshiba Laptop (Pentium 75, 24Mb RAM,
> Colour DualScan LCD panel) and all seems to be singing in console mode. I've
> configured XFree86 with Sawmill and Gnome and it all works except that my
> monitor can only display 640x480. The resulting problems are:
> 1. Windows being opened up that are bigger than the screen area meaning I
> often can't get to the 'OK' or 'Cancel' buttons. I want to tell all the apps
> that the creen only supports 640x480 so that it can work properly.
> 2. Icons, menus etc. are all too big leaving me with very little workable
> area.
>
> Can anyone help with the following:
> 1. Where do I go to sort out these config issues?
Hmm, well, some apps accept command line options, some have config files, some
are just rude and you'd need to file a bug to the upstream...
> 2. Is Sawmill/Gnome the best GUI? I think KDE would be too slow
Gnome is not a GUI. Gnome is that "desktop environemt" stuff, as such it
contains a window manager (there's your GUI), button bar, task bar, some
sort of icons-on-the-desk trick (gmc, in the case of Gnome) and oh, about a
half dozen "under the hood" apps trying to help keep it all together.
KDE is a different desktop environment...
It is possible to use a Window Manager without the "desktops" and only have
one extra app for buttons if you feel like it. I find fvwm very comfortable
to use on smaller screens, and the debian package "menu" means that my right
click still has all the apps available to me.
In addition many wm's allow you to tweak custom menus of your own, so once
you decide what your favorites are, you can set up options with command lines
demanding better geometry. I'm familiar with the Huge Window problem, as I
only have an 800x600 screen on my favorite laptop, myself.
> 3. Is there any good office software that would run OK? I wanted to use
> OpenOffice but that seems to need a minimum of 800x600 resolution. Abiword
> seems to run but there is very little screen are left with all the menus,
> toolbars and status panels.
I'm afraid I haven't tried any at 600x480 small; however, if you can train
your theme to use smaller fonts overall then menus etc will waste less space,
and if your chosen word processor can be told to get rid of its button bars
most of the time, you could probably retrieve a fair amount of screen estate.
Perhaps you should consider using a webpage editor as your word processor.
Unless you are sharing document types I can assure you, most people can't
tell when beautiful column layouts came from
<table><tr>
<td>bla bla yak yakkity yak...</td>
<td>bla yak yak... (more on page 2)</td>
</tr></table>
...the main trouble being decent pagination, when time comes for printouts;
but html2ps can help with that, assuming ghostview doesn't annoy you too.
> Thanks,
> Mark
Good luck. My usual mehtod is to use a virtual screen that is big enough for
these aps, then spend a bit of mouse-a-robics moving around to where these
fatsos keep their buttons and so on. Although most people find using a big
virtual screen AND multiple desktops confusing, I find it helpful to reduce
the clutter to something I can deal with.
* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
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