On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Samuel W. Heywood wrote: > In the Linux world, are there any full-fledged word processor > applications having wysiwyg screen editors suitable for use by > dummies? I am speaking here of something that might be comparable > to M$-Word or WordPerfect for Windows.
Star Office is a clone of Office. It's also every bit as bloated as Office, but the word processing supposedly works identically to Word. I have it installed but only fire it up when my wife needs to look at power point slides. Word Perfect for Linux is much smaller and faster. I've never seen WP 8 on Windows, so I can't comment on how "exact" to the Windows version it is. It will render most word documents as intended, though when people get "fancy" and insert "double-height" fonts and unusual stuff like that, the layout goes beserk on you. A fast'n'small wysiwyg word processor is AbiWord. It can't output in Windows or WP formats though, being limited to its own format, text, rtf, and a couple other common ones (html?). It's been a while since I checked it out. > If so, can anyone recommend any particular such applications and > let me know how much they cost? I rarely use word processors, preferring text editors, but the applications in question don't cost anything more than the time it takes to download them. > It was a Pentium 100 with a 1.6 MB hard drive and a 48x CD-ROM drive > and 32MB memory. Forget Star Office then. You'd be able to make the pot of coffee, wait for it to brew, serve it up, and still be waiting for SO to load. Word Perfect will be perfectly functional if a bit slow, i.e., go pour a cup of black coffee, (you won't have time to put in cream and sugar) but AbiWord will still fly. AbiWord, last I checked, still didn't have the capability of reading Word-generated docs though, so while it's a great little word processor, it's not going to let you read any Word emails you might get. > Does anyone think that this machine might be a good candidate for a > Linux box? It will be fine as long as you're not trying to use Gnome/KDE on a 1024x768 - 32 bit screen. Desktop Environments eat a lot of resources, for nothing that I can see in return. Set it up with just a Window Manager... say the fvwm-95 which gives a look and feel somewhat like Windows, have it start in runlevel 5 (iow, boot to graphical mode), and even a seasoned Windows user will be able to figure out how to navigate around the menus... though said user might be initially frustrated as he tries to double-click things only requiring single clicks. > Would it be just as easy for a total novice to computers > to learn to work with Linux as it is to learn how to use Window$ 95? Absolutely. There are 3-year-olds running Linux programs... mostly games and educational stuff rather than word processors though. ;-) The kids actaully prefer Linux to Win'9x. > If anyone thinks I should try to install some version of Linux on > this machine for this person, please give me some advice on how to > start. I have never installed Linux before. The newer distributions are becoming more and more user friendly to install... but also more bloated. > IMHO, Linux will never become a very formidable threat to M$ until > computer newbies start talking about how easy it is to learn to use. Linux is every bit as easy to USE as Windows. What's complicated sometimes is the administration of it. Even that is becoming less of an issue with utilities such as anacron. > I certainly will appreciate any advice I can get on this matter. The three that most often seem to be recommended for ease of installation are, in order, Mandrake, Red Hat & SuSE. I would recommend Red Hat 6.2. It's new enough to have most of the modern amenities, yet a basic install, even with X, will fit in ~300 MB. (compare to RH 7.1, which even without X, needs 400MB+) Mandrake is supposedly the most user-friendly, but requires a minumum of 1 GB, and assumes you want Gnome and/or KDE. I haven't tried SuSE for a couple years, but most of the comments on the newsgroups seem to be positive. My wife has a P-166 laptop. She knows nothing of Linux, and practically nothing of Windows. What I did on her machine was to replace her shell with an ASCII menu (I always liked them on my DOS machines). In order to play xjewel for instance, all she does is hit 'a'<enter> and the game comes up under X without any of the bloat of window manager or desktop. Same with Word Perfect and a few other very often used programs. One of the menu items is Gnome, but guess what? She NEVER uses it. Another menu item is 'h' which does 'halt -p' so when she wants to shut down, all she does is hit 'h'<enter>, and the OS shuts itself down, and the machine powers itself off. She doesn't like messing with the command line, nor does she care for a lot of extra mouse clicks. She likes to get up and running as quickly as possible, do what she needs to do, and then get off as quickly as possible. I don't see how you can do it any better than an ASCII menu. - Steve
