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

[Cameron Miller <cdmiller@adams.edu>]

Ralph M. Deal wrote:

> 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.


I agree with the previous window manager choices, and you might be able 
to add Afterstep to the list.

Abiword is nice and small, for M$ compatability you may want to look at 
the Ted editor, which uses RTF for it's format and can produce PS files 
suitable for ps2pdf.

For the spreadsheet you may also want to consider SIAG, the last time I 
looked at it it was pretty small, and can save to at least the Lotus-123 
  format to preserve formula's with M$.


- cameron

-- 
- cameron miller
- UNIX Systems Administrator
- cdmiller@adams.edu