[wellylug] A little project.... : Idealists approach

Lorraine Offord & Tony Wills ajwills at paradise.net.nz
Mon Jul 15 22:07:55 NZST 2002



I think if the UG wants to take this on that we need to get a group
together who are willing to provide on going and even on-site support - you
won't be able to give them the systems and walk away, they won't have the
internal expertise, and probably can't afford (let alone find) commercial
linux expertise.

I am personally very very interested in this project, I often do work for
non-profit groups (sometimes paid, sometimes not).  Most just need a
wordprocessor (with mailing list) and email.  Some need a database, desktop
publishing, accounting/spreadsheets.  Most small groups have only a single
machine used by a part time person in a minute office. Most larger groups
can frankly find the funds or get grants.  I would love to show them the
light, lead them into the new land, (and other evangelical stuff) and
release them from M$s clutches. 

I've mucked about with Linux on 486s and low end Pentiums.
I've played with Caldera, Turbo, Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, ESmith, Free BSD,
Coyote.
The fastest machine I've used these on is 233MHz.
Obviously it really depends on which release you use, but my experience was
that Caldera and Free BSD were the best for low end machines.  Free BSD
being the most solid and stable of any Linux/Unix distros that I've played
with on this type of machine.

I am disappointed to say I've never found anything that I could supply
these groups with that would be doing them a favour (in terms of
performance and usefulness they'd probably prefer using Win 3.1!).
And as others have said KDE and Staroffice are too large and slow, and for
most setups a seperate server isn't practical (might be the solution for
groups needing a large number of machines for some reason).

Given 2020s large number of machines, I think it would be worth custom
compiling a distro to suit the requirements of their machines.  I expect
that if all the machines are from one organisation they're from a fairly
limited number of vendors, and models (eg all compaqs or something) - and
we could produce a trimmed down system to suit their machines (save on disk
space and memory requirements).

--- Tony


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