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Re: Advice to newbie, please



Rudi Borth <rborth@orc.ca> writes:

> I am considering switching the operating system of my personal
> computer to GNU/Linux, and I would appreciate some guidance regarding two
> elementary questions: 
> 
> Q1: Would this make sense for a single user who is not a programmer? 
Yes!  A  486-25/8MB  is  a   clunker  in  MicroSoft,  and  a  powerful
workstation  in Linux.  Especially  if you're  willing  to do  without
X-windows.  I  run  X-windows  but mostly  because  Netscape  requires
it. I have run  X-windows on an 8 MB machine, it's  just not very fast
but it works.
There   is   a   browser   called   lynx   which   works   under   the
console.  Apparently  you  can  get  WordPerfect 5.1  for  linux  now,
presumably it runs on the console as well. There are several tools for
reading MSWord files, eg catdoc  and wordview.  zgv is an image viewer
that works under  the console. And so on. You can  find out more about
all this once  you get linux installed and  the basic networking stuff
working. 
As far as hard drive space  goes, you could try installing from floppy
(get  the  floppy images  from  www.debian.org)  and  then, once  your
networking is up, download only the packages you need. 
-chris



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