I have Suse 8.2 (used to be RedHat 7.3) installed on an older NEC Reday 330t laptop (266, 4 gb drive, 64mg ram, 10/100 pcmcia nic, cdrom, touchpad). Both installs took a couple of hours to complete, but have worked very well. I use KDE for the desktop and the KOffice applications (Kword, KSpread and KPresenter). I quickly found that OpenOffice very, very slow to use on the older hardware and removed it from the system. For the database I used MySQL. Slack would also work well on your older hardware. I had Slack 8.1 running on a 200 mhz desktop with 64 megs of ram for school last year. I can't say anything about Debian or Gentoo, I haven't used those yet. > I've seen several people looking for Open Source Projects to participate > in so I'm posing this to both groups. > > Lets say I have a laptop (toshiba, compaq, what ever) configured as > follows. Pentium 166mhz, 1.5 - 2 gig hard disk, 32 mb ram, 12 in > display, 10 mbit nic, external mouse & trackpoint or touch pad, _no_ > CDROM (well maybe a CDROM). > > I want to put Linux on it with X Windows, OpenOffice and MySQL (maybe > PHP?). I want to have enough disk space for storing the database and > documents. Remember this is for business. > > What distribution should I use, I want it to be easy, "free", and > stable? > > Yes this has to do with the computer disposal business I'm getting > started. I don't want to start with M$ because, well, I'm broke :-[ > and then I would have to file chapter 13 after I bought it :-D > > I've only been a Cobol programmer (2 years), I've done a little (very > little) PHP out of the book, a bunch of HTML, and a touch of > JavaScript. I was trained as a structured (top down) programmer. This > new fangled action-reaction stuff drives me a little buggy. > > The database would have very few tables and fields, I'm no dba so... > Tables > customers > business names, contact names, addresses, phone numbers, other > such information > customer inventory > CPU serial number, Display serial number, HD serial number, > Asset Tag number. > (not sure what else) > > 1. Can I use the spread sheet within OpenOffice to create a data input > and reporting system? > I would also like to use Writer for certificates that get > data from the database as well. > > 2. Should I ask for help building a data input system that's open source > and available on my website or your website "free"? > (I like this idea but someone else is going to have to > manage the project.) > > This would be something "small" businesses could use to inventory their > computer stuff. It would be easy to install and maintain and would > interface with OpenOffice without a hitch. It would be able to function > on the M$ platform if needed without tweaking it. > > Anyone have any ideas or want to take this one on? > > Sam. > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list