[Inschool] Best settings for LINUX on students oldies

[Ralph M. Deal]

In response to my request for advice in setting up LINUX on old 75MHz
machines
with about 500M harddisk space and 16M RAM for a school district, I
received some good advice from 
several, including:

Bruce Smith wrote:

> > Now the questions are:
> > 1. Should I upgrade to 7.2?
> 
> I would NOT recommend it on a 16MB machine, as the newer kernel
> requires a lot more memory.
> 
> I would highly recommend that you make sure you download and
> install all the latest errata for 6.2.

I am nearing the completion date for this task and am sticking to RH6.2
as Bruce advises.  This does lead to some difficulties such as my not
being
able to use recent versions of some software such as icewm for which I
get 
an error message about rpm(VersionedDistribution) being wrong.
Bruce and others had suggested icewm earlier to me in responding to a
similar
request and I find it just right on my RH7.2 machine.  However, I'm
going to
use XFce since the submenus will give me considerable flexibility in
creating
button-push options for tasks such as mounting floppies and XFce is
fairly fast
on an older machine.
 
> > 2. Since most of these machines will have no CDROM drive, I'll want some
> > kind of boot diskette in case of problems.  What type of disk?  a
> > rescue, a boot.img disk?
> 
> "Tom's Root Boot" is a nice little distro that runs from diskette.

Haven't tried that yet but  did have a boot disk created from the last
installation
and shall distribute that.

> > OR should I have them use gnumeric and abiword, with instructions on how
> > to save them onto a floppy so they can be read on the school's MSwindows
> > networked machines?
> 
> I dout you'll have enough memory for Star, and have no idea about
> the others.  I'm not even sure how well windows will run.

I find that gnumeric and abiword work fine and have save options that
allow
easy transfer to other platforms.

> > 5. I plan on running a Saturday workshop for the students/parents who
> > put out the $25 necessary for a working system.  Should I try to teach
> > them command line UNIX methods?
> 
> That would be a good machine for command line.  That would
> run much better than X-windows.

I'm close to X-windows only at this point but will instruct the new
users 
on the use of the command line interface, from a terminal window in
Xwindows rather 
than from the non-gui interface, although as I act a trouble-shooter for
these
new LINUX users, I may have them work outside Xwindows.

Wish me luck,   Ralph