[seul-edu] Best wm for tiny slow computers?

["Ralph M. Deal" <deal@kzoo.edu>]

Greetings, seulers,

I am currently working with a school district which is making large
numbers of antique desktops available to students/parents at very low
prices, without operating systems of course.

I have volunteered to work on installing LINUX on these boxes and giving
workshops for the users.  This presents several dilemmas, the most
important of which is that I want the users to like LINUX and put some pressure on the school
system to use it more widely.  The users will be most happy with a gui
like the MSwindows they are accustomed to.  However, thes are small (16M
RAM, ca 500M hard disk, no CDROM drives) slow (75MHz is fast in this
bunch) in which gnome will be sluggish and much to large.

What, in your experience in similar situations, is the best compromise
in a window manager to be reasonably fast and small but look familiar to
students?  Right now I'm using xfce which I use myself but it would be
nice to have icons representing files and have double clicks thereon to
open the appropriate program with that file.

I am using RH 6.2 to keep the size down and trying to minimize the rpms
included.  I have included the games from 6.2.  I'm planning to use
abiword and gnumeric as the word processor and spreadsheet but will have
to ensure that students wanting to turn in diskettes with homework, etc.
will present files that can be read by the M$ office tools.

Most of the monitors in this batch are labelled with names not in the RH
LINUX list of recognized monitors so that will be time-consuming. Any
suggestions there?

I'm currently expecting to build a system on a 500M hard drive that I
can ghost to the others but can only do so for systems with the same
boards, mice, monitor.

	Thanks,  Ralph M. Deal,   retired P.Chemistry prof.
		deal@kzoo.edu

PS How do I get onto the schoolforge mailing list?