Advantages/Disadvantages

[MysticMike]

I have an old Mitsubishi laptop, no great spec P133, 48mb ram, 1.5Gb HD.
its nice cos its real small, one of those palmtop things, but doesn't have
a CD drive. I want it for a portable device, literally just to write
emails, a few word docs, have outlook on it -thats pretty much it.

Its currently got a real flaky install of Win98 on. I'm debating on whether to format the hard disk and load Win95 on it, as I have Win95 on floppy (it has a
removable floppy drive), keep the operating system as basic and small as
possible etc, or loading Linux.

Is it worth loading Linux to make it run faster?? Advantages/disadvantages?
I would also network it to Windows machines.

What Email and document editing programs are available?

Thanks for the advice
:)

[sans-hubris]

Email is inherent in Linux. I'll let you look for it on your own.

As far as document editing, I recommend AbiWord (http://www.abiword.org). It is my favorite for under Linux. There are tons of others, but this is probably the best in terms of features, size, and import/export filters for MS Word documents. I would recommend StarOffice (http://www.sun.com/staroffice/) since it is a complete office suite with quite possibly the best import/export filters, but that might be a little unbearable on a computer like yours (i.e. it is rather bloated.) You could try KOffice (http://www.koffice.org) which is also a complete office suite and I think its very good, but its import/export filters leave something to be desired.

[Derango]

Originally posted by Muad Dib --formerly ndogg:
<STRONG>Email is inherent in Linux. I'll let you look for it on your own.

As far as document editing, I recommend AbiWord (http://www.abiword.org). It is my favorite for under Linux. There are tons of others, but this is probably the best in terms of features, size, and import/export filters for MS Word documents. I would recommend StarOffice (http://www.sun.com/staroffice/) since it is a complete office suite with quite possibly the best import/export filters, but that might be a little unbearable on a computer like yours (i.e. it is rather bloated.) You could try KOffice (http://www.koffice.org) which is also a complete office suite and I think its very good, but its import/export filters leave something to be desired.</STRONG>

Star office?? On a p133 with 48MB of ram??? That thing runs slow on my 866mhz with 256mb of ram. I wouldent reccoment it.