Re: [school-discuss] Which is the fastest Desktop distro forschools?

[Lincoln Peters <sampln@sbcglobal.net>]

On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 02:04, Arjun Asthana wrote:
> > Two really important questions:
> > 1. What kind of specs do the computers have?  CPU, memory, et al.?
> 
> In India the normal conf is 800-900Mhz, 256Mb ram, 16-32 mb video card, 15" 
> monitor.

Those specs are far better than ANYTHING that I worked with when I was
helping my local high school with their computers!

> 
> > 2. What do students and teachers want to do on the computer?  Any
> > specific proprietary applications you need to replace?
> 
> Well, yes. But there is wine.

What specific applications do you need?  There may be open-source
equivalents that you don't know about.

> > * For top speed, avoid GNOME and KDE.  Try a lightweight window manager
> > like FVWM.  You can still use GNOME and KDE applications while running a
> > different window manager.
> 
> We are thinking of using IceWM. I currently use on my machine and it is fast 
> and can look like the stupid's OS as well (you guessed it: windows)

I mentioned FVWM because it's the only light-weight window manager I'm
at all familiar with.  If IceWM gives you the same benefits as FVWM, go
ahead and use IceWM.

> 
> > * Productivity applications are tricky; OpenOffice is notoriously large
> > (and thus rather slow), but no other programs are as complete.  You
> > might be able to get away with AbiWord and Gnumeric for basic
> > word-processing and spreadsheets, but I'd keep OpenOffice available in
> > case they fall short.
> 
> We are including both siag, OO.o as well as the specific apps like abiword, 
> magic pt, etc.

That should work, although I'm not at all familiar with Siag.

You should make sure that users are aware of the general differences
between the different applications, so that they can figure out which
one best suits what they will try to do.  For example, AbiWord is
probably OK for routine work in most classes, but I'd greatly prefer
OpenOffice if I had to write a term paper.

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln@sbcglobal.net>

The Almighty in His infinite wisdom did not see fit to create Frenchmen
in the image of Englishmen.
		-- Winston Churchill, 1942