Re: Is 64MB enough?
On May 21 2005, Johan Kullstam wrote:
> "John Moore" <john7919@hotmail.com> writes:
>
> > Thanks but the old clunker's motherboard is not expandable to 256M
> > :-(
>
> Star/Open-Office is not going to be pleasant. TeX, on the other hand,
> will run like a treat.
Indeed. Let alone the typographical quality that you get with (La)TeX and
that you don't get with other systems (if LaTeX is properly used, of
course).
And using Emacs for editing both text (with help from AUCTeX, RefTeX and
preview-latex), you'd have a superb environment for typing texts. Emacs is
also quite suitable for editing programs, especially if you install some
add-ons.
For a spreadsheet (if it is necessary), I'd recommend gnumeric. It seems to
work quite well for me.
I also don't use a desktop environment---I prefer to use a single window
manager instead, and the solution that I found closer to my needs is
fluxbox. I "saw the light" after experimenting with many window managers
(like windowmaker, blackbox, oroboros etc) and some desktop environments
(Gnome and KDE, mostly -- both inappropriate for a low resources machine).
Fluxbox is small, functional, configurable, mostly useable with the
keyboard (if you configure it correctly) and *fast*. Highly recommended.
> Apache will probably be fine on its own. I am not sure how heavy
> tomcat/java is. C, perl, python are viable.
Java is quite heavy, especially if you're intending on using the "real"
java implementations from Sun/IBM. Well, the whole concept of a machine
inside a machine is "expensive".
In my country, machines with the abundance of horsepower like those that
seem to be available in the US are not common. For instance, the fastest
machine to which I have access right now is a Duron 600MHz with 256MB of
PC133 SDRAM.
Unfortunately, I can't afford anything better right now (and, it seems, for
the near future). This means that I have to keep an eye on
resource-intensive applications.
> From: Paolo Alexis Falcone <pfalcone@gmail.com>
> > in that case you'd need more memory. 256MB is cheap these days.
>
> As you know, It's not as cheap if you need 72-pin EDO SIMMs memory.
Indeed. Not only not cheap, but possibly not available through some
standard sellers. :-( For instance, I have inherited an old PowerMac 9500
from my uncle (it has about a decade) and it uses 168-pin 5V EDO DIMM
memory.
Even if I had the money (which I don't), sites like crucial don't carry
such memory anymore. :-( Of course, I would gladly accept any "throw away
memory" (perhaps from an old, unused system) that you may have lying around
in your old computers.
Hope this helps, Rogério.
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@ime.usp.br : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito
Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de
Homepage on freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/
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