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Will Hatch wrote:
>
> I have BL3 running on my Dell optiplex GN+. My next step, 
> install a better word processor.  Is there one that works 
> with BL3 that is word compatible? 

There is a static version of AbiWord at the BasicLinux site.
It has no library dependencies, so it works with both BL1 
and BL2.  I tried it with BL3 a couple of months ago and
there was something about X it didn't like.  I have found
other programs that don't like the BL3 Xserver (Xvesa), 
eg xfreecell.  It's interesting that xfreecell is also 
statically compiled.  I expect that this issue could be 
eliminated by installing a standard Xerver from Slackware.  
Or perhaps it's a font issue?  Bl3 comes with only a few 
fonts.  Maybe xfreecell and AbiWord are hard-wired to a 
particular font that is missing.

I was hoping that some users would experiment with such 
things and tell us what works and what doesn't.  Since BL3 
can run from fs.img, it is possible to experiment wildly 
on BL3 without losing anything (as long as you first save 
a copy of your good fs.img).

> I am a teacher and would love to set up a small network that 
> has word processing, and a web browser, and nothing else!  

As you probably know, you can put your applications (wp and
browser) on one system (the most powerful) and serve it to
the other computers (running only the bare BL3).  This is an
excellent way of enhancing the performance of old PCs.

Many schools have old networks of low-end Pentiums that are
replaced by a roomful of new computers.  That is a very 
expensive option.  You can get a similar performance boost
by adding one new computer to the existing network and running 
the old Pentiums as clients.  

You might think that a server feeding applications to ten 
clients needs to be ten times more powerful than a stand-alone 
system, but that is not true.  Since most of the clients will
be using the same applications (wp and browser) the server only 
needs to run one instance of each application (not ten).  This
means that the RAM/HD/CPU requirements for the server are not
hugely more than the requirements for a stand-alone system 
running those same applications.

Cheers,
Steven