[ILUG] Minimal Desktop / Workstation Install [long by now !]

[Niall O Broin]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 09:41:26AM +0100, Breathnach, Proinnsias (Dublin) wrote:

> Thought that might be the response <g>

Well I'm glad we didn't disappoint you.

> Driving factor is a saving of over $150 per-head per-annum on Office
> licences - remember Enterprises with 54000 or so minions are in a different
> ballpark where licencing arrangements are concerned !

So you're looking at a spend of > $9M for Office licenses - that would make
me think that if you're looking at plausible alternatives, you could assign
such research projects a little more research budget than a PC that wouldn't
get 100 EUR if you put it in Buy and Sell.

> A reasonable Windows install with office can be fit onto a 250MB hard-drive
> if needs be, on the other hand, OO.org requires that for itself !

I don't know that it does. I know it's what they specify but the Linux
install on my notebook takes slightly less than 200MB. But again, you're
being unrealistic. A 250MB hard disk is so old  that it must be in an old
POS machine which is not realistically going to run OO - leave it running
'doze and Office 95 which it's going to do just as well as ever it did. Of
course OO is designed for networked installation so if you really want to
use it on machines with limited disk capacity, you could install it on a
networked drive and just do a workstation install which only takes a few MB
per user.

> Am I making any sense here ?

You're making plenty of sense in terms of it being a good idea for ML to
look at OO. You're making no sense whatsoever in terms of doing that
evaluation on a completely unreasonable hardware platform.

> Essentially - Hardware is not the issue ... we'd *like* to use the older
> machines if / where possible but considering there are many dual PIII's
> that'll be considered obselete by the time XP gets here ... I'd say we're in
> with a fighting chance of getting reasonable hardware ... the question is
> more "What utils would be considered _necessary_ for a user workstation -
> before you get to the OO.org / Evolution etc stage ?"

All that's NECESSARY to have OO.org / Evolution is a working X installation
though presumably for Evolution you need the necessary Gnome libraries
installed also. It's completely up to you / ML to decide what of the myriad
other bits and bobs of a Linux installation you need to have on people's
machines.



Niall