Re: Recommendations for Low Resource System

On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 12:59:32PM -0400, Hal Vaughan wrote:
I have an old Mitsubishi Amity, which is smaller than a laptop, but not
as small as a palm top. It's old and built to run Windows 95, but I
know people have gotten Debian to do well on this computer. It has 48
MB of memory and a 1.4 GB hard drive, which means it does not have many
resources and, by today's standards -- well, let's not even talk about
speed.

I will be using this because I can put it in my backpack with my books
and papers and easily take it along without a case, a laptop cooler,
and a lot of other toys (just the power supply). My main goal is to be
able to write on it, save, and import into OpenOffice later. (OO
requires too much RAM to work on this). I may, later, end up using it
to do some troubleshooting by hooking it up to my clients' LANs, but
most of what I need for that is ssh, ping, traceroute, and similar
utilities that are all command line based.

While I use vi quite often and have used emacs, I prefer a GUI based
word processor when I'm in "writing mode." It just matches the way I
think when I'm writing instead of programming.

Can anyone recommend or tell me about what window managers they use on
low resource systems with good results and what word processors they
use in that situation? I know AbiWord only requires 16 MB, and that
makes it a good candidate. I thought about GEdit, but a little more
formatting would be nice, since I am often writing film scripts, and
margins are needed for those. That doesn't make it unusable, but just
makes it less desirable than AbiWord (which I have heard can be
programmed with macros to do easy margin changes quickly).

Any other comments on programs, desktops, windows mangers, and such that
people are using on older/smaller systems would be appreciated. I'm
planning on sticking with Sarge, so I don't want to use programs in
Sid. Etch is a possibility, but I'd rather wait and stick with Stable.

Thanks!
Hal

Doesn't sound much less powerful that the machine I am typing this on:
BSDI BSD/OS 3.1 Kernel #37: Tue May 10 17:40:33 GMT/BST 2005
digbyt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:/usr/src/sys/compile/LOCAL
cpu = 80486 (about 50 MHz) model 3, stepping 5, type 0, features 3
delay multiplier 848
real mem = 50331648 (48.00 MB)
avail mem = 47624192 (45.42 MB)
buffer cache = 4870144 (4.64 MB)

It isn't one of my Debian systems, but I would hope that Linux is not
significantly less efficient than BSD.

The only thing I would find restrictive is the hard disk size. If you
can't upgrade it, then you will probably just have to be a bit selective
of what you install.

If been using xdm/fvwm on this system without a hickup for years - since
this hardware was considered respectable - and there is no reason for
it to need more resources now.

Don't have any suggestions on GUI word processing. I am happy
with vi and TeX, which runs like a charm.

Generally it is only when trying to use something like KDE/Gnome or
Open Office that I feel the need for ridiculously powerful hardware...

Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com


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