from Sam Heywood: > 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.
Besides Word Perfect, there's abiword and LyX (free, open-source). I remember finding Word Perfect 5.0 and 5.1 for DOS user-friendly. From what I read, Star Office is a resource hog, might be hard-pressed on a Pentium 100 with 32 MB RAM. I think Word Perfect would be my first choice. > It was a Pentium 100 with a 1.6 MB hard drive and a 48x CD-ROM drive and 32MB memory. I fixed it for $2.69. It needed a new CMOS battery and the hard drive needed fdisking and reformatting. I partitioned it into two FAT 16 DOS partitions of about 800 MB each. Another thing wrong with the computer was that the ribbon connectors between the two on-board serial ports and the external connector ports were plugged into the mobo backwards. Now everything including the CD-ROM drive works and the C drive boots to DR-DOS 7.03. Where do you get CMOS battery so cheap? How much do they cost now, anyway? I think the minimum disk space occupied by one file however small would be 16384 bytes on a partition between approximately 512 and 1024 MB. DR-DOS 7.03 has a nice DOSBOOK help program. > Often it is easier for a rank novice to learn something entirely new than it is for a person who has previous experience and skills with something similar. She thinks she wants to do Window$ 95 because that is what everybody else does. Whatever she does, whether DOS, Window$, or Linux, she will be starting off as a beginner. > Does anyone think that this machine might be a good candidate for a Linux box? Would it be just as easy for a total novice to computers to learn to work with Linux as it is to learn how to use Window$ 95? Is it still possible to get Window$ 95 legally? Even if yes, all the new MS applications would be hard-pressed to run in 32 MB RAM, and some of them might not run at all on less than Window$ 98. > Went there and looked at it. It looks good. The site says that it requires Linux kernel 2.0. I don't know which distros provide kernel 2.0 and I don't know which distros having this kernel would be suitable for the machine described. Any recommendations? I don't think you can find any pre-2.0 Linux kernels any more. They're long gone. > Can you recommend a good URL for me to learn more about Slackware 3.5 and how to install it? I don't know about 3.5, but Slackware has their own Web site http://www.slackware.com Current version is 8.0, you could buy CDs for that direct from Slackware. They skipped over 5 and 6, went straight from 4 to 7.
