# Laptop 150mmx...  I need your suggestions !!!

## dimebag_bog

Hi, I got a laptop 150mmx, 48MB ram and 2.1GB HD.

It's my girlfriend's laptop...  she only needs it for office tools (word, excel, ect...), browse on internet (opera) and for playing MP3s.

She had Windows 98 on it...  and guess what??  not stable!!!   So I suggest to install linux with openoffice instead....    :Very Happy: 

I installed Red Hat 7.3..   But it's way too slow!!!  (they put so many junk in their distro).  So I decided to install Gentoo (I know it's really fast so..)

Right now, it's still compiling at stage1.  

Here's my questions : 

I want the fastest combination of softwares to be able to run openoffice smoothly.  So I won't even touch KDE (eats too much ressources).  Gnome might be an idea, but I'm not sure if it's gonna be fast enough.

Other options are Enlightenment, Windowmaker, ICE

So which Window Manager should I install ???

And which browser and MP3 player ???

By the way, she's a total newbie at linux.... It's the first time she will use it...   so please don't suggest anything complicated to use   :Smile: 

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## Abzstrak

I'd suggest fluxbox, waimea, or blackbox for a gui... they'd all be reasonably fast on that system.

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## JWU42

A vote for fluxbox.  Uses 2 MB of memory.

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## Luder99

I'll plug blackbox.

Not sure if you'll have trouble or not, but check to see if XFree 4.2.1 is going to work on your laptop.  I've got an old Pentium 120 laptop and the video is not supported under XFree 4.2.1 (Cirrus gd7543 chipset possibly?).  Well, it was working in VGA compatibility mode, but that's not accelerated.

I needed to put XFREE 3.3.6 on it instead.  waimea don't work under 3.3.6.  I can confirm that blackbox works great, and it's fast as well.

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## helmers

I know this is a gentoo forum, but I have tried gentoo on my laptop in the past, and I don't like to compile on it. I would recommend slackware, which have improved a lot since I tried it last time.

It's about as fast, and very stripped of junk. And that doesn't mean I don't like gentoo, I just think of that poor laptop's swap partition, and tears come to my face...   :Crying or Very sad: 

--

Regards,

Helmers

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## jondkent

Again, Fluxbox is nice and light, Blackbox slightly more so.  Enlightenment way too heavily for that bit of kit.

Dillo is a good and very light browser, very small footprint.  Galeon is OK, but you still need Mozilla, so its a disk space killa.  Phoneix sounds interesting, but never used it.

XMMS doesn't seem to hog too much, but you might be better off with a command line mp3 player

Be interesting to see how fast OpenOffice is on it, its pretty big   :Exclamation: 

Anyway, have fun

Jon

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## duff

 *jondkent wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Be interesting to see how fast OpenOffice is on it, its pretty big  
> 
> 

 

Agreed...theach that girl how to use LaTex   :Wink: 

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## jondkent

Thinking about it, if you have any problems with OO, Abiword is a very good word processor, and the other Gnome office apps aren't too bad either.  Anyway, Abiword has a supprisingly small footprint for what it does.

Just a suggestion   :Laughing: 

Jon

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## gsfgf

i'd go w/ flux, opera, xmms, and oo.

build oo from source, though.  It'll take a few days, but it runs better and faster.  Abiword is good, but it hasn't worked too well for me.  Unless its been fixed in the pas month, i'd avoid it for now.  And helmers, gentoo runs fine on pos laptops, just compile overnight. all set.

I have a compaq k6-333/32mb laptop running gentoo twm and opera as a web com and its fine.  I ahve anotherone, but w/ 64mb ram runnin gentoo (still 1.2 i need to upgrade it), flux, opera, oo, the works.  runs pretty nice.  especially for a compaq.

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