[ILUG] koffice

[Niall O Broin]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 04:29:50PM +0000, joe golden wrote:

> I am looking for a smaller (than star office) stable word processor and 
> graphing spreadsheet for use in our samll school linux network of 10 486 
> computers.
> 
> star office is painfully large and I would rather not use it if i have 
> another option.

Star Office IS a big program, there is no doubt about it. Bu even koffice
will be under pressure on a 486. A little while ago somebody asked here on
ILUG about using a bunch of machines (P-200 MMX) effectively running as X
terminals. If you have any money at all, I would suggest that this is the way
to go.

The money is needed to upgrade one of the machines to act as a compute
server with a fast processor with lots of RAM. For instance, Scan's Today
Only page today offered a motherboard, a 1GHz Athlon, and 128M of RAM for
£149 excl. VAT - about £30 for another 256M of RAM at current prices, and
you've a machine which will easily run 10 instances of Star Office (I had
four instances running on a P-III 700 with 192M of RAM - each new instance
took only a few seconds to start, and consumed only an additional 16M of
memory or less on the server). In this situation, all that the 486 PCs
are doing is running X and you don't need to run either KDE or Gnome on them
- SO does its own thing (I could well be wrong there, and perhaps SO uses
some of the QT or GTK libs. but I don't think so)

The server is doing all the compute work, but a lot of the time it will be
idle - ten students typing in a word processor or spreadsheet is just not
that much of a load on a decent box.



Regards,



Niall  O Broin