LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Tim Fairchild <amosf@mrbean.net.au>
  To  : <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 00:44:29 -0400

Re: IT help for Salisbury Project

On Monday 30 July 2001 10:10, ilox wrote:
> From  Brian Astill <bastill@sa.apana.org.au>
> Date  Monday, July 30, 2001 12:30 pm
> To  ilox <ilox@telstra.com>
> Cc  linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
> Subject  RE: PCs for kids (Geelong)
>
> On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, ilox wrote:
> >I know SO is demanding of resources - so don't use it if it wants more
>
> room than you can spare.
>
> Because there are other pressures developing that I am unable to
> comment on at the present. For now take it as read that Star Office
> will be very likely to be the Office package of choice.

I played around with RH 7.1 tonight... Not sure it's the best choice for a 
small, light system, but haven't really tried on a pentium class PC yet.

I did install RH7.1 on a 830 meg partition. A basic KDE install, trimmed down 
to the minimum RH would apparently allow, was about 430meg - that included 
kmail and knetwork stuff, but no games. With Konquerer included, that gave a 
basic internet box. With netscape for browsing that would go up to maybe 
460-470 meg. With SO it gets up to 650meg - which is reasonable for a 1.2 gig 
drive allowing for swap and user files, etc. 

I use abiword and gnumeric at times rather than SO as they are quite a bit 
lighter. SO is heavy on RAM and CPU, but I've founf it okay on older distros 
with 32-48 meg RAM... THe 48 meg was a big plus at the time :-)

KDE is a little heavy too, but it does give a relatively windowing 
environment.