You might not need OO. While it's an excellent package, others will meet basic needs with fewer resources.
I can vouch for KWord as an excellent word processor. It opens both Microsoft Word and Word Perfect documents among others. It can be a little flaky at times when you cram in huge pictures, but small pictures work well. I've been using it a lot lately. Check out: http://phys.lsu.edu/~willhill/classwork/medp_4352_detection_lab/lab_8_attenuation/lab_8_attenuation.pdf and some others around there. OO is slow on this 233 MHz PII with 196 MB of RAM, but I've got 10 desktops running with two fairly heavy projects going. I'm cheating for email by running KMail off another computer but the forwarding takes a few resources too =:-) . Running several sessions of gnumeric, OOcalc and kspread at the same time might not be a fair test. With nothing else going on it's usable. Gnumeric and xgrace have been doing very well for me. Gnumeric's xls import is impressive and it runs faster than OO. Check out: http://phys.lsu.edu/~willhill/classwork/medp_7537/ns_spreadsheets/mu/mutrap.xls with gnumeric for a nice show of importing. It bones up the logarithmic y scale, but does a better job of opening those graphs than OO does. I end up graphing the natural log of values instead of trying to make gnumeric do it. When I want a graph to look really good, I use xgrace. Kspread will read the numerical values, but loses all the graphs. On Monday 22 November 2004 02:12 pm, Mat Branyon wrote: > Have you seen OpenOffice on a computer like that? If I remember right, > it would run a bit slow. Abiword would probably work a bit better. > > As far as distro of linux... something debian based should be easy, so > they could use synaptic to update their system if they had to. I just > started using Ubuntu Linux ( www.ubuntulinux.org ) which is Debian > based, and it works very well. > > --mat
