Re: debian on laptop w/ limited ram/speed/HD
-- Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> wrote
(on Sunday, 02 March 2003, 02:07 AM -0800):
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 10:05:05PM -0500, Matt Price wrote:
> > 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
>
> You have a fast machine with lots of memory and HDD as long as you stay
> in console. I say if you configure correctly, it is OK with X and
> compact applications.
No need to stay in console. As I noted in a previous message to the
thread, I operate a desktop machine with similar capabilities on a daily
basis. I've used GNOME 1.4 with sawfish on it with little problem; I
*prefer* blackbox with ROX-Filer.
I also had a P-II 333MHz *laptop* with 32MB RAM and a 3GB hard drive at
one point, and it ran xfce wonderfully, and I was even able to utilize
Netscape 4 (a notorious memory hog) quite well in X.
> > I'd like to take the machine on a month-long trip, where I'd use it
> > mostly for writing and checking email. My *preference* would be to
> > run:
> > -a minimal GUI
>
> If you insist on X, use blackbox or flashbox. They are small and fast
> WM.
that would be 'fluxbox' -- it's a blackbox spinoff. The *box WMs are all
very fast and small.
> > and...
> > -openoffice.
>
> That is big software. As long as you keep other staff small, it may be
> usable on X. Do not use too much color or virtual screen which eat
> memory. Keep daemon minimum.
I agree with this -- OO.o is very large. However, once loaded, it's
quite fast. Don't have much else going at the same time.
> > 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.
>
> Just a thoughts. New Word can save document in XML or HTML. If you are
> reorganizing few contents, you may be able to get-by by saving document
> into these format and complete editing documents in text file.
But he doesn't *want* to edit it as text... Although there are a good
many good text editors out there, editing XML or HTML is not entirely
fun.
If you can export to RTF format, I *believe* AbiWord is capable of
reading this, and that might be another good solution. Test it first --
I've had problems importing RTF on occasion if the MS markup was too
MS-centric.
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
matthew@weierophinney.net
http://matthew.weierophinney.net
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