Re: Advice to newbie, please
On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Rudi Borth wrote:
> Q1: Would this make sense for a single user who is not a programmer?
You do not have to be a programmer to use Linux.
> My system has been made Y2K compliant with HOLMFIX, shows the date
> correctly, and includes: CPU 80486, 25 MHz, RAM 8 MB, SuperVGA
It will be a little difficult to make Linux run efficiently with 8MB of
RAM and 160MB of disk space. You can run fine with 8MB of RAM if you
don't mind X being slow (X-windows will be slow if you have less than 16MB
of RAM) but 160MB will constrain what you can do - especially since
you'll need to allocate 20MB or so of it to swap space.
In 1995 I stuffed Slackware installs into 100MB, but I don't know if this
would do very well with a modern Linux system. Most Linux distributions
fall into either the category of extremely small minimal systems, or full
featured systems. A fully featured system can be pared down to fit into
100MB, but only by an advanced user, really.
It's hard to say how I would think you should proceed. If you can find
one on CD, an old Linux distribution from 1994 or 1995 - the era your
computer dates from - would probably be the easiest to get running. Such
a system would be filled with security holes. But it would work, and fit
in your disk space requirements. Unfortunately some modern software will
probably not run on such an old system.
A better option, if you can spend a little money, is to buy an old 500MB
or so disk drive. This will be enough to hold a minimalist, but still
modern, system. If you are willing to live without X, you can do fine
with your current system. But this will make you unable to use Netscape
or Opera. (You can still use Lynx, of course).
> CD-Rom readers
What is this? Do you mean software to access the CD-ROM? This is
built-in to Linux.
> XTreeGold v3.0
XTree is a disk utility, right? Midnight Commander is probably the
closest equivalent. However if you gain a little experience with the
command shell you will find that it is quite powerful especially compared
to DOS, and you don't really need such utilities.
> Word processor SemWare Editor Junior
I am not familiar with this product. However Linux has emacs, which is a
text editor more powerful than most older word processors, and joe, which
is a clone of Wordstar. There is also StarOffice, which closely resembles
modern MS Office, but which will exceed the capabilities of your system.
> Basic, C, C++, Forth
The default Linux compiler GCC can easily handle C and C++ code. There
are BASIC interpreters, but I am not familiar with them. I've seen Forth
utilities also but have absolutely no knowledge of them.
> Chess, FreeCell
I don't know if there is a FreeCell equivalent or not. There are plenty
of other simple addictive games if there is not :} There are definitely
chess programs available, but the only one I know of, XBoard, requires X
Windows.
> Internet software: Trumpet WinSock v3.0 Rev C, Opera v3.62,
> Eudora Light v1.5.4, WinTel v4.3.5, Telix for DOS v3.22,
> AtomClock, Integrity Master v4.21a
The equivalent of WinSock is built in. Opera is available for Linux.
Eudora is not, but Pine and Mutt are more capable. I don't know what
WinTel is but if it is a simple Internet tool, an equivalent is probably
available for Linux. There is no Telix, but Minicom is almost an
identical clone of it. I don't know what AtomClock or Integrity Master
are, but there are lots of clock utilities available - but you'll find
that Linux does not lose time like DOS does, so you probably don't have to
worry about it so much.
> HTMLed, RoPS, Acroread, MSWordViewer, WinJPG29
HTML editors are kind of scarce for Linux, actually. Emacs has an HTML
mode but it is by no means WYSIWYG. I don't really do HTML so I can't
help with that. I do not know what RoPS is. Acroread is available, along
with Ghostview which can view PostScript files. Both of these require X
Windows. MS Word Viewer is not available. I know StarOffice can read
Word files but it will be too much for your system. There might be a
converter to change Word documents into text files so you could view them
easily. There are a variety of image programs available - XV can handle
most image viewing and conversion requirements, if you need an editor the
Gimp is available which is a photoshop clone. Your system can
handle XV but probably can't run Gimp.
The good news is that every program I have mentioned is available at no
cost and most of them come with source code. It's the Linux way :}
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