On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 07:43:37AM +0200, Alex wrote: > Dear all, > > One student who makes her diplom about "Comparing LyX to another Word > processors", asked me about the minimum HW required fo LyX. > You'd be hard pressed to come up with a machine capable of running LyX in a bad way.
First, the machine have to be able to run a graphichal user interface (i.e. X11) without getting sluggish. If it does that, chances are high that it runs LyX decently enough too, as long a syou're writing text. Handling images in the document will of course need enough memory for the images as well. Printing or producing pdf can take a long time on slow old machines, but that is usually not much of a problem. I remember running LyX 1.2 on a 300 MHz pentium with 32MB. I tried editing the LyX user guide - it was nice and snappy. Of course there was no KDE in those days, but you can run without KDE these days too. (A machine that runs KDE well will definitely run LyX fine too!) Now, printing the userguide was a different story, it took many minutes. But you don't sit around waiting for a printout, do other work while latex slowly lays out the pages on your slow pc. > I run (I tried it on [EMAIL PROTECTED] without success) LyX on slow > computer, but it was hard to get use it (1.3.3 with linux). > > As far, I can remember LyX can run where an X server and KDE can run. > Is the Ok? > Is that means that a 200-300MHz P1 or P2 with 16-32MB ram will be enough > to run LyX? 32MB might be fine - but no KDE then! Stick to simple windowmanagers like icewm/twm/blackbox on machines with that little memory. Editing with LyX should be fine, but printing or handling big images could be cumbersome. Turn off previewing of formulas & external insets on such a machine. You may want to run the xforms version of LyX instead of the qt version on such slow machines. The xforms user interface is faster, but you won't get antialiased fonts and the menus are a bit clunky to use. > On this machine the LaTeX will also run I am sure. > There should be no problem running latex, but it will take a long time compared to modern PCs. Helge Hafting
