On Saturday 25 October 2003 07:37 am, adam wrote: > On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 18:16:35 +0100 (BST) > My suggestion is that we push forward a text editor for > the basic editing functions and then move the children > on to OpenOffice.org for presentation. If they are > already using Linux for desktop, chances are they will > already have a version of it installed. > > As an aside, including it within the distribution for > children will act as method of advocacy, with children > telling their peers about OO.o. I doubt if they will be > advocating about text editors.
I've heard people advocate OpenOffice.org a lot, but every time I've ever tried to use it, the sheer bloat of the thing has made it impossible. Yes, it will run. Yes, I can load a document or two with it occasionally. But every time I've ever tried to make a real document (as opposed to a trivial test case), the program has crashed and locked up my computer (or at least my login session). When I moved up to 512 MB RAM and 1.5+ GHz machines, I thought "Great, now I can finally see what people are talking about". But no. It *still* crashes left and right. This is pretty much the Hacker Lexicon's definition of "Flakey" in the US sense -- it works just well enough to tempt you into using it, and then it crashes on you. ;-) What am I missing here? Does anyone who advocates this program actually USE it? If so, what kind of hardware are you running?! Not a rhetorical question -- I've loaded this program up to evaluate it several times, with gradually increasing hardware caps, but each time I get the same results. I'm starting to get a complex about it. ;-) I expect a program like a word processor to pretty much work without special effort on a Debian system, once you run "apt-get install" on it. I'm running Debian Woody, but that shouldn't make any difference anyway, should it? I think this is particularly relevant to Debian Jr, since typically, kids will be using hand-me-down computers, not the latest bleeding edge stuff. Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com
