[ILUG] Linux, Arranmore Island, Co. Donegal

[Timothy Murphy]

On Tuesday 18 May 2004 01:05, Niall O Broin wrote:

> >I'm running Fedora-1 on a 300MHz PII with 128MB RAM,
> >and it works perfectly well.
>
> For a value of perfectly well which suits you. However, for a non Linux
> hobbyist user who wants to actually USE the machine for normal tasks (the
> kind of person who is NOT on this list) e.g. run Mozilla, or maybe Open
> Office then that spec. of box just does NOT cut it.

There is actually quite a good test in my house,
as my grand-daughter (7 years old) and the au pair
can either use this old machine or a nominally much faster machine,
and they invariably prefer this machine.
(I'd say it's used for 3 or 4 hours each day.)
They only use it to surf the web,
and Mozilla is always running so it doesn't make much difference
how long it takes to start up.

OpenOffice is very slow to start on all machines, in my experience.
However, I have never used it on this machine.

I should confess that the machine is running Windows-2000 today,
as I compiled linux-2.6.6 on it last night 
after reading how slow it was meant to be
and now the (serial) mouse is not working,
even under the kernel that came with Fedora-1,
I'm not sure why.

I think I said the wrong thing when that dreadful Kudzu came up.
Have you noticed that it never actually detects
when the hardware _has_ changed,
but always wants to edit or remove configuration files
when there has been no change at all.

I don't agree with the gurus on this list
who think "ordinary users" want a lightning fast machine.
My sister-in-law had a dreadful Medeon laptop (from Aldi) stolen,
and she got a much faster and better Sony in exchange from her insurer,
and she bemoans the fact that the buttons are in different places.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland