Recommend Applications

[Quark Soup]

I'm going to be helping an organization set up older pentiums for use in the community. Because of licensing issues (among many others) I've recommended using Linux with these boxes. They will need to have the following:

Office Suite (mostly for word processing):
Accounting Application:
Email clinet: Netscape?
Browser: Netscape?

Also, we need cheap printers that are dependable and Linux friendly.

(NOTE: We will be using older external modems, so winmodems will not be an issue.)

Also, any free Linux ISPs around, or are they all gone now?

[Gaccm]

older pentiums? ouch. Linux can easily run on one but not X. if its 'for the community' user friendly is critical. kde seems the best right now, but running on a pentium... so sllooooowww. I would actually suddgest using win95 (win95 seems to be faster than linux + X on old stuff) also then you could use IE (netscape would take forever to load). If you still going with linux...
kde (soo slow, but best) Staroffice (if 1min of loading is ok), otherwise i'd suggest Abiword (only word processing). koffice, i have never used it at all and know very little, so check out its webpage.
Email client? no clue, too mant to choose from
browser? i would suggest mozilla .8 it runs faster than netscape and most sites look fine in it (thats 1 prob with Opera, sites only think of ie and netscape, nothing else)
try looking in www.freshmeat.net (http://www.freshmeat.net) and www.sourceforge.net (http://www.sourceforge.net) for more software

[qb-758]

I don't think old pentiums are too slow to run linux (I know this, since I ran linux with x server on my old 486/33/16mb).

Originally posted by Quark Soup:

Office Suite (mostly for word processing):
Accounting Application:
Email clinet: Netscape?
Browser: Netscape?

Also, we need cheap printers that are dependable and Linux friendly.



Any postscript-compatible printer (bw or color) works well and is easy to set up.

For word processing I use abiword. Other alternative is staroffice, but it takes quite a lot of memory. E-mail... perhaps pine, so that users will be able to use ssh from the other side of the world from a portable device or some public computer, and start pine session. (pine also displays html messages)

An old version of netscape would be a good browser. Netscape6 has bad problems in printing, and it is also very slow on old pentiums.

[Shadoglare]

Originally posted by Quark Soup:
[B]Office Suite (mostly for word processing):
Accounting Application:
Email clinet: Netscape?
Browser: Netscape?

Also, we need cheap printers that are dependable and Linux friendly.
B]

Office Suite: Sun Staroffice, if you want the whole suite. If word processing is *all* you care about, then AbiWord is a much smaller option that works real well.

Accounting: No idea. You can probably find something decent at softseek.com tho.

Mail: Not a lot of great options out there. Most people aren't going to like using Netscape mail though, they want a seperate program. This GMail for gnome looks pretty good:

http://images.zdnet.com/softseek/_images/46500_46999/46684_F.JPG

And just FYI (it still has bugs so I won't recommend it for business yet) there's a program called Evolution that Ximian is working on that almost a complete clone of Outlook:
http://www.ximian.com/apps/evolution.php3

Browser: Netscape is really the only semi-stable choice right now. Just disable Java support unless you really need it.

As far as cheap, reliable printers (almost a contradiction it seems, to be honest) I'd probably suggest a low-end HP laserjet.

[Webby]

for a finance program (i assume you mean one like micro$oft money) there's a commercial program called money dance i think. it came with my caldera 2.4 distro. there is another one but im not at home at the moment to check its name. it is written in perl and gt i think but hasn't as many features as the one above. can't for the life of me remember the name.

sorry that's not much help

Alex

[Big_daddy]

StarOffice is WAY too slow to use on anything but a Cray. KOffice is good as is Abiword. KDE is awfully slow and memory intensive. I would look at one of the smaller desktops.

I'm using IceWM and it seems much faster than KDE

[ 11 March 2001: Message edited by: Big_daddy ]

[Shadoglare]

Originally posted by Big_daddy:
KDE is awfully slow and memory intensive. I would look at one of the smaller desktops.
I'm using IceWM and it seems much faster than KDE

Yeah but from what I can tell this is going to be for a group of people that aren't computer gurus - Thus either KDE or Gnome or going to have to be a complete necessity. :rolleyes:

[Livia]

I'm finding xfce4 quite friendly at the moment. I used to have kde/gnome with RedHat 9, but I got rid of it because I was impatient with how slow that is on a pentium 11. The only thing is you lose redhat_config_... so any problems would need some sort of support.