Quoting Jayjay Ferro ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > He's got 32 RAM, Probably will use it for the desktop > as well as a little development work, also. Mostly > he's just curious about Linux.
Then: Any chance he's willing to at least double the RAM? It should be really, really inexpensive, and would make a substantial difference in performance. The thing is that many of the applications (and "desktop" environments -- especially KDE and GNOME's default setups) touted as "novice-friendly" are vastly more RAM-hungry than the perfectly OK applications that were our bread and butter circa 1995. If your friend were able to stay _away_ from those applications and RAM-consuming system infrastructure, he would be OK (but not great) with 32 MB RAM. He could (like me) run Window Maker or a similarly non-bloated window manager, run Gnumeric as a spreadsheet, Galeon as a Web browser, mutt as a mail client, bitchx for irc, tin for Usenet netnews, Abiword as a graphical word processor, vim or xemacs/emacs for plain text editing and markup. He would get to know his system very well in the classic Unix fashion, using his text editor to edit system configuration files and personal dotfiles and monitoring the state of running processes using top, ps, and job-control utilities. Instead of using "IDEs" for development, he'd learn to love gcc/gcb, autconf, automake, and so on. But, even at that, 32MB in the year 2002 is _still_ marginal for any kind of desktop system. Moreover, convincing newly arrived, casual users to completely eschew fashionable bloatware on both the application and desktop-environment levels is very difficult. > So what was the distro you used on the 486 before? Early Yggdrasil and SLS. Slackware 2.0, 2.1. Red Hat 2.1, 3.0, 3.0.3, 3.1, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2. That was about when I wrote http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/tips-for-redhat-4.2-sysadmins.txt , and then finally got thoroughly disenchanted with Red Hat soon afterwards. (I'd modify some of the advice in that file, now, having learned a few things.) But, to quote Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, "The moving finger having writ moves on. Nor all thy piety, nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it." It's not 1995, any more. ;-> -- Cheers, There are only 10 types of people in this world -- Rick Moen those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't. [EMAIL PROTECTED] _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
