Karsten M. Self wrote:
on Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 09:30:29AM -0500, destruss@iowatelecom.net (destruss@iowatelecom.net) wrote:
My question is what should be included on a computer that is being donated to give a new user experience and use of an old 386 or more? DeanDefine "new user experience".Pentium would be entry-level workstation candidate, but you're not going to have happy campers running KDE/GNOME, Mozilla, or StarOffice, that bloated stuck pig of an office suite. AbiWord, Gnumeric, and Sylpheed might make for good word processing, spreadsheet, and mail apps. Browsers are a bit more difficult, the new ones are *all* big. Netscape 3.0x, Konqueror, or Skipstone, in the free category. Possibly Opera in non-free. If you can sell users on console apps, options are far more open: vim, emacs, sc, mutt, w3m, links.
Iam running potato on a P133/80 MB RAM with icewm, StarOffice (for compatibility with MS Office for Mac), Opera (sometimes Konqueror) and the console. SO needs quite a long time to come up but the its works reasonably well. I do have the impression that my sytem i sat least as fast as the PPC604e (200 MHz/96 MB RAM), even lots of people say that PPC with less CPU speed is faster than a PC 9they probably have never seen one with Linux).
Note that memory makes a huge difference in apparent speed and response, and that memory for older systems is getting *more* expensive as stocks are depleted. They ain't makin' that stuff no mo'.
I am not gonne spend any more money in my machine, I'd rather safe it to get an incredible fast new one ;-)
Frank