Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> 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 will eventually find time to download Abiword and try it in BL2, which I
have set up with Xvesa from Delilinux, but with all the regular X fonts.  
I can also try it without those fonts (rename the directory temporarily so
it cannot find them).  Or anyone else can just add Delilinux Xvesa (about
1M download) and instead of startx type Xvesa &rxvt -e abiword.  Xvesa
looks for fonts in a different location from where Slackware installs
them, so I made a symlink, but if you don't make the symlink, you can find
out what happens when you use Xvesa and abiword without the extra fonts.

> 
> 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).


> 
> 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.

Someone wants to put us in touch with a friend from Nigeria interested in
setting up some linux computers there for students to learn programming
on.  I will suggest this approach.  Previously we set up 9 486 computers
to be sent to Eritrea for wordprocessing and the person in charge insisted
that they all needed at least 250MB hard drive and 16MB RAM.  What would
be a reasonable minimum for the server and client approach?  (Not that we
are short of 250 MB hard drives now, or 16MB RAM).

Sindi