Re: [Sheflug] Re: Newbie - H/W recommendations please

[Craig Andrews <nospam [at] fishbot.org.uk>]

> Depends wot you want to do and why you want to do it.  Any old scrap
> will do but it might be that you might need Star Office.  Most people
> who haven't got a Phd in computing science need to use it or a
> similar office suite.  Other than Abiword it's difficult to find a
> Micro$sloth compatible office suite.  Koffice is very nice but it
> only saves in HTML or .txt format.

I have run StarOffice 5.0 on a 486-DX133 w/ 32Mb RAM with KDE 0.91,
thanks. Works OK, just a bit slow. Watch the hard disk, thats the killer.
Even a K6-2/500 (50MHz faster than mine) can be brought to its knees by a
slow HDD.

KOffice also saves in .kwd format. Pretty poo. AbiWord is marvellous,
though. Almost everything works now, and certainly everything with an MS
Word work-a-like works perfectly. No complaints from me. Also loads and
saves EpocWord format and Palm databases. Nice for us PDA users!

> You might need to use Nutscrape Composter ?  That doesn't like
> sloooOoow machines.  Neither does Star Office.

What on earth for? Theres lots of other stuff now, which will work on a
slower machine. Try BrowseX. It's a small, light, functional browser. I
don't know, but the mail part may even work now. It even has a personal
password storer (for those who don't mind passwords being stored on their
machines for instant retrieval) which puts that in IE5.5 to shame.

> So, do you need a cracking good office suite or do you need to use vi
> or emacs to produce web pages ?  Do you want to spend three light
> years learning how to write it out in long hand when you can point
> and click and do it in a few seconds ?  As I do in fact.

If you use something like AbiWord, I see no reason why it should be slow.
I have it on a 32Mb p233, which is somewhat faster than is being
discussed, but still loads in less than 10 seconds. Which is liveable.

On the other hand, do what the machine can do. No one can honestly say MS
Office is a joy to use on less than a 133 anyway, so no problem there.
Emacs may be a big, erm, large, but there are many ways to get stuff out
of your head and into the machine. Learn them all, I did!

Cheers,

Craig

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word 
 "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.