[NBLUG/talk] Linux for refurbished computers (was: Re: Distributing OpenOffice...)

[Lincoln Peters]

>From: E Frank Ball <frankb at efball.com>
>Reply-To: talk at nblug.org
>To: talk at nblug.org
>Subject: Re: [NBLUG/talk] Linux for refurbished computers (was: Re: 
>Distributing OpenOffice...)
>Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 13:57:18 -0700
>
>OpenOffice is a pig of an application.  It may do good stuff, but it's
>not for slow hardware.  That's why abiword + gnumeric might be a better
>choice for slow hardware.

I downloaded and built AbiWord 1.0.6 from source, and I can see that it is 
missing a few features that I consider important:

1. No support for footnotes.  Just TRY writing a high-school or 
college-level paper without footnotes!
2. Limited support for columns.  It does not appear to be possible to apply 
columns to one part of a document without applying them to the entire 
document.
3. No support for multi-level numbering or bullets.  It can be useful in 
technical or scientific literature to break one step in a procedure down 
into smaller steps, but this cannot be done with AbiWord.

AbiWord might be adequate for some, but given the choice, I'd probably stick 
with OpenOffice.

As for Gnumeric (I have version 1.0.13), it looks promising, although after 
experimenting with it for about 2 minutes, I find that it has a steeper 
learning curve than the OpenOffice Spreadsheet application.  Although it 
might just seem that way to me because I had a strong background with MS 
Office prior to switching to Linux.  I didn't see a difference in 
capabilities, but I haven't had the oppourtunity to *really* explore either 
program.

>
>Mozilla is a pig too.  Galeon is a little lighter because email,
>newsgroups, etc are stripped out, but I wouldn't call it lean and mean -
>it's sluggish but useable on my 180MHz K6 box with 128MB of RAM.
>Mozilla does not need to be loaded too (at least in Debian).

That might be a problem, considering the hardware I've seen at CRC.  I'll 
still give it a try, though.

>
>An old version (4.78) of Netscape Navigator is much faster, but many
>webpages won't display properly (or at all), and there are no more
>security updates.

Netscape 4?!? NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
I vividly remember Netscape 4 as a program that was riddled with bugs, used 
a ton of system resources, and had so many memory leaks that within a matter 
of hours, it would run out of memory and crash.  I'd prefer slow rather than 
unstable, if that was the choice (and hopefully it won't be).

>
>
>} I still can't get the Gnumeric website to load on my computer.  Is anyone
>} else having problems with the Gnumeric website?
>
>Most distributions come with a galeon package these days.

I said Gnumeric, not Galeon.  I didn't have any difficulty with the Galeon 
website.

>
>} >Last time I tried Konqueror it was pathetic, it seemed to be missing
>} >capability necessary for displaying many web pages.
>}
>} It works fine for me.  How long ago did you use it?  I'm using version 
>3.1.3
>
>It was at least a year ago.

Yup, it probably has had countless bugs fixed since then.  I don't know how 
its speed, memory requirements, etc. compares to Galeon, but I'll look into 
it.

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