[ale] open source solutions for Win 98 on an old laptop

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 20:27 -0400, Daniel Howard wrote:
> With 80 MB RAM and only 1 GB HDD, any other suggestions of Linux 
> versions to try on it?  If I do leave it Win98, any other other open 
> source or other recommendations to protect it (e.g., shutting down any
> specific TCP/IP ports, etc.)  I think if she could go to Google for 
> gmail and eBay to sell stuff, as well as write letters for job 
> interviews, and do spreadsheets for budget minding, it'd be very
> useful.

Sounds like the type of system that I would run as a command line
system.  Actually, sounds a lot like my old 486 (AMD 5x86/100), save for
the fact that it is a bit faster, and has a little bit more disk space.

If it's going to be used on dialup, there is probably little point in
running anything to filter the services on the machine.  As long as
there is functional anti-virus and productivity software installed on
the machine, it should all be good.

If I were using such a machine, it'd have elinks, alpine or mutt, gnupg,
emacs, and xelatex.  Probably 'sc', because it's good for quick
computations, and *definitely* configured to use a framebuffer or
otherwise make the console larger than 80x25.

However, I doubt that this will help your person unless they're willing
to learn a lot.  :)

	--- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
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