On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 12:59:32PM -0400, Hal Vaughan wrote:
> I have an old Mitsubishi Amity, which is smaller than a laptop, but not
> as small as a palm top. It's old and built to run Windows 95, but I
> know people have gotten Debian to do well on this computer. It has 48
> MB of memory and a 1.4 GB hard drive, which means it does not have many
> resources and, by today's standards -- well, let's not even talk about
> speed.
>
> I will be using this because I can put it in my backpack with my books
> and papers and easily take it along without a case, a laptop cooler,
> and a lot of other toys (just the power supply). My main goal is to be
> able to write on it, save, and import into OpenOffice later. (OO
> requires too much RAM to work on this). I may, later, end up using it
> to do some troubleshooting by hooking it up to my clients' LANs, but
> most of what I need for that is ssh, ping, traceroute, and similar
> utilities that are all command line based.
>
> While I use vi quite often and have used emacs, I prefer a GUI based
> word processor when I'm in "writing mode." It just matches the way I
> think when I'm writing instead of programming.
>
> Can anyone recommend or tell me about what window managers they use on
> low resource systems with good results and what word processors they
> use in that situation? I know AbiWord only requires 16 MB, and that
> makes it a good candidate. I thought about GEdit, but a little more
> formatting would be nice, since I am often writing film scripts, and
> margins are needed for those. That doesn't make it unusable, but just
> makes it less desirable than AbiWord (which I have heard can be
> programmed with macros to do easy margin changes quickly).
>
> Any other comments on programs, desktops, windows mangers, and such that
> people are using on older/smaller systems would be appreciated. I'm
> planning on sticking with Sarge, so I don't want to use programs in
> Sid. Etch is a possibility, but I'd rather wait and stick with Stable.
>
> Thanks!
> Hal
Doesn't sound much less powerful that the machine I am typing this on:
BSDI BSD/OS 3.1 Kernel #37: Tue May 10 17:40:33 GMT/BST 2005
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/sys/compile/LOCAL
cpu = 80486 (about 50 MHz) model 3, stepping 5, type 0, features 3
delay multiplier 848
real mem = 50331648 (48.00 MB)
avail mem = 47624192 (45.42 MB)
buffer cache = 4870144 (4.64 MB)
It isn't one of my Debian systems, but I would hope that Linux is not
significantly less efficient than BSD.
The only thing I would find restrictive is the hard disk size. If you
can't upgrade it, then you will probably just have to be a bit selective
of what you install.
If been using xdm/fvwm on this system without a hickup for years - since
this hardware was considered respectable - and there is no reason for
it to need more resources now.
Don't have any suggestions on GUI word processing. I am happy
with vi and TeX, which runs like a charm.
Generally it is only when trying to use something like KDE/Gnome or
Open Office that I feel the need for ridiculously powerful hardware...
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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