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Re: debian on laptop w/ limited ram/speed/HD



Matt Price wrote:
Hi everyone,

A middle-aged (~4 years old -- so, not old, not new) laptop is about
to become available to me, and I'd like to install debian on it.
The system is an HP Omnibook A4100,
P-II 300
96 meg ram
20 gig hard drive

I'd like to take the machine on a month-long trip, where I'd use it
mmostly for writing and checking email.   My *preference* would be to
run:

-a minimal GUI
-mutt, plus something to fetch my mail from a remote location

and... -openoffice.
sigh.  I'm a bit concerned that openoffice can't feasibly be run in
such an environment; but I'm revising a book manuscript that was
originally written several years ago in Word, and I really, really,
really don't want to have to edit it in emacs or something.

Abiword looks good and seems compatible to certain degree (install
from testing).

So does anyone have suggesions about -tweaks to get debian to run optimally on a (relatively) small
memory/processing speed budget;
-favorite lightweight window managers;

IceWM is great (for me). It has windows-like taskbar and menus, but
no permanent desktop icons. The config files are easy to understand
for customizing the start menu. It's fast too.

-if necessary, alternatives to / modifications of OpenOffice that
don't require quite so much room to work as the standard OO
installation needs?

Would it perhaps be useful to compile stuff from scratch, rather than
use generic debian packages?

Doubt it.
As a last resort, you could install wine/win4lin.



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