Linux Maniac wrote: >Hi All! > >My girlfriend is starting to write her thesis, and I don't want her to >loose any data because of winblows. > >Her machine is a 166MHz pentium with 32 MB RAM. > >I want to install Mandrake 9.0 with blackbox or icewm, but I also need a >good word processor. My personal favorite is OpenOffice.org, but I don't >know if that would be alright for that configuration. > >Please share with me experiences of such machines + Mandrake, and tell >me which word processor shoul I us (it has to be able to export in >word97 format.) > Unfortunately, OpenOffice won't work with that hardware - processor speed isn't such a problem, but OO gobbles RAM (64MB is an absolute minimum, and it's still slow to load on 128MB). Abiword might do the job - maybe they've finally got round to supporting tables ;-)
For a thesis, though, LyX is ideal, since it's essentailly a front-end to LaTeX, which was designed with academic writing in mind (I first used it just after finishing my MA dissertation, and my first thought was "God, I wish I'd had that earlier!"). It's a bit weird at first, but you start to appreciate its eccentricities after a while, and for a thesis, the citation facilities are a godsend (use BibTeX with a frontend like Pybliographic). It produces beautiful PostScript or PDF output, or if her school are the sort of morons who insist on having a copy in Word format as well as the printed version, you can always export as HTML then read it through OpenOffice or Word (funnily enough, a lot of schools/publishers who ask for Word documents then convert them into PDF anyway). Sir Robin
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