newb questions

MikeD · #1 November 28th, 2005, 07:34 PM

I have a older computer that I am putting together for work..I need a word type program, and a excel type program for this system..something to play tunes would not be that bad either. I figured I would go with a Linux based system, as it would allow me to install just what I needed..thus keeeping cost down..as they are not going to install the Windows versions on my desktop any time soon..

As a newb to linux, what can you tell me that would work best and most efficiently...tried the test and it showed "Mandriva"..all help would be greatly appreciated....like the idea of the Live CD, as then the system would be useless with out the disc to run it, as a security feature...

MikeD

renegade600 · #2 November 28th, 2005, 08:09 PM

check out openoffice. It is free and has an excel type program that will run excel files.
Also should check out suse linux 9.2 live where you can also boot from the cd and run linux without installing on your drive. Open Office comes with it.

The purpose of a live cd is to see if the hardware on your system will work with it. Linux is a good operating system but there are some things thats a pain to setup and some things that just will not work properly. If you like the way things work, then in most cases you can download the full linux version.

JoeC0180 · #3 November 28th, 2005, 11:34 PM

In addition to what renegade600 said, you might also give Mepis a try. It comes with openoffice and functions both as a live cd and an installation cd. Mepis has excellent hardware support. If everything works the installation is painless and you can have a funcitional linux system in under 20 minutes

MikeD · #4 November 29th, 2005, 03:48 AM

Okay, will give both of those a try....what wouuld be a good music player for Linux systems, I heard about one on "Call for Help", but am unable to find or remember what it was called, then name was kind of goofy..

Once again thanks....MikeD

**kage** · #5 November 29th, 2005, 04:20 AM

Xmms, kplayer, and amarok are all good music players. Xmms is similar to winamp in appearance, and has many plugins available (various audio codecs, alarms, etc).

MikeD · #6 December 1st, 2005, 04:15 PM

Okay the system that it going into is a old AST machine with a Amd k5-pr166, with 16 megs of ram.....built in 97 or98 i think, it has, or had Win95 on it...would this be a good candidate for this test and which Linux distro would work best on it? Was thinking that a older one would be best, I have Xandros, simplyMepis and DSL 3.0 in my reach...or should I go looking for something else?
Mike D

JoeC0180 · #7 December 2nd, 2005, 12:07 AM

MikeD, you are going to run into problems trying to put Xandros or simply mepis on that machine as the default desktop environment is KDE and that requires at least around 194 megs of ram to function proberly. You might give DSL a try. Also you are probably going to want to go with a lightweight word processor such as abiword.

**kage** · #8 December 2nd, 2005, 12:59 AM

DSL would be good, you might also want to look into SLAX (live-slackware) .