On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Rudi Borth wrote: > Q1: Would this make sense for a single user who is not a programmer?
You do not have to be a programmer to use Linux. > My system has been made Y2K compliant with HOLMFIX, shows the date > correctly, and includes: CPU 80486, 25 MHz, RAM 8 MB, SuperVGA It will be a little difficult to make Linux run efficiently with 8MB of RAM and 160MB of disk space. You can run fine with 8MB of RAM if you don't mind X being slow (X-windows will be slow if you have less than 16MB of RAM) but 160MB will constrain what you can do - especially since you'll need to allocate 20MB or so of it to swap space. In 1995 I stuffed Slackware installs into 100MB, but I don't know if this would do very well with a modern Linux system. Most Linux distributions fall into either the category of extremely small minimal systems, or full featured systems. A fully featured system can be pared down to fit into 100MB, but only by an advanced user, really. It's hard to say how I would think you should proceed. If you can find one on CD, an old Linux distribution from 1994 or 1995 - the era your computer dates from - would probably be the easiest to get running. Such a system would be filled with security holes. But it would work, and fit in your disk space requirements. Unfortunately some modern software will probably not run on such an old system. A better option, if you can spend a little money, is to buy an old 500MB or so disk drive. This will be enough to hold a minimalist, but still modern, system. If you are willing to live without X, you can do fine with your current system. But this will make you unable to use Netscape or Opera. (You can still use Lynx, of course). > CD-Rom readers What is this? Do you mean software to access the CD-ROM? This is built-in to Linux. > XTreeGold v3.0 XTree is a disk utility, right? Midnight Commander is probably the closest equivalent. However if you gain a little experience with the command shell you will find that it is quite powerful especially compared to DOS, and you don't really need such utilities. > Word processor SemWare Editor Junior I am not familiar with this product. However Linux has emacs, which is a text editor more powerful than most older word processors, and joe, which is a clone of Wordstar. There is also StarOffice, which closely resembles modern MS Office, but which will exceed the capabilities of your system. > Basic, C, C++, Forth The default Linux compiler GCC can easily handle C and C++ code. There are BASIC interpreters, but I am not familiar with them. I've seen Forth utilities also but have absolutely no knowledge of them. > Chess, FreeCell I don't know if there is a FreeCell equivalent or not. There are plenty of other simple addictive games if there is not :} There are definitely chess programs available, but the only one I know of, XBoard, requires X Windows. > Internet software: Trumpet WinSock v3.0 Rev C, Opera v3.62, > Eudora Light v1.5.4, WinTel v4.3.5, Telix for DOS v3.22, > AtomClock, Integrity Master v4.21a The equivalent of WinSock is built in. Opera is available for Linux. Eudora is not, but Pine and Mutt are more capable. I don't know what WinTel is but if it is a simple Internet tool, an equivalent is probably available for Linux. There is no Telix, but Minicom is almost an identical clone of it. I don't know what AtomClock or Integrity Master are, but there are lots of clock utilities available - but you'll find that Linux does not lose time like DOS does, so you probably don't have to worry about it so much. > HTMLed, RoPS, Acroread, MSWordViewer, WinJPG29 HTML editors are kind of scarce for Linux, actually. Emacs has an HTML mode but it is by no means WYSIWYG. I don't really do HTML so I can't help with that. I do not know what RoPS is. Acroread is available, along with Ghostview which can view PostScript files. Both of these require X Windows. MS Word Viewer is not available. I know StarOffice can read Word files but it will be too much for your system. There might be a converter to change Word documents into text files so you could view them easily. There are a variety of image programs available - XV can handle most image viewing and conversion requirements, if you need an editor the Gimp is available which is a photoshop clone. Your system can handle XV but probably can't run Gimp. The good news is that every program I have mentioned is available at no cost and most of them come with source code. It's the Linux way :}
