Re: debian on laptop w/ limited ram/speed/HD
-- Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> wrote
(on Friday, 28 February 2003, 10:05 PM -0500):
> 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
The specs on my day-to-day machine were precisely this until recently
except that I have a Celeron 366MHz processor (I now have 256MB RAM).
Runs fine. I also have debian running fine on an old P-120MHz machine
with 16MB RAM and a 600MB HD -- WITH X and blackbox.
> 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
I highly recommend blackbox.
> -mutt, plus something to fetch my mail from a remote location
Great choice! ;-)
> and...
> -openoffice.
As I noted above, I have openoffice running on this setup. It's slow to
start, but it works, and once running doesn't slow down the system.
> 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.
>
> 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;
> -if necessary, alternatives to / modifications of OpenOffice that
> don't require quite so much room to work as the standard OO
> installation needs?
Up until recently, I was using ApplixOffice for my office needs. It
isn't as full-featured as OpenOffice, but it *IS* incredibly lightweight
(uses the GTK+ toolkit). If you're only needing the word processor, I
believe they sell that separately for around $50 or less; the full
office suite is, last I checked, around $100.
> Would it perhaps be useful to compile stuff from scratch, rather than
> use generic debian packages?
No.
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
matthew@weierophinney.net
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