Open Office and System Admin very slow

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Tue, 14 Aug 2007, Shishir Jha wrote:

> If u have a PIV Machine and 256 MBof RAM, and your computer runs slow, then
> I could recommend you use the Alternate version of Ubuntu/Edubuntu. 

If you mean the alternate desktop CD as mentioned, here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

I'm afraid that probably won't help.  The live installer cd doesn't work
well on machines with limited RAM, so the alternate is provided.  However,
once the installation is completed, both routes should (as I understand it)
produce exactly the same installation.

> I am not sure whether Canonical ships it or not, you will have to check
> that, but it does help a lot when it comes to Computers with Low RAM, as
> it is designed for computers with RAM lower than 256 MB. 

It will help with installation, but not really after that.

Jim's suggestions of trying one or all of gnumeric, abiword and Xubuntu
should all free up some RAM, though if your budget allows the best solution
is almost certainly to add some more RAM.  There are also those who have
suggested that using Kubuntu with purely KDE/qt applications (KDE,
konqueror browser, koffice) may be a pretty RAM-economic setup.

	http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

Ubuntu and Kubuntu seem to be more used than Xubuntu and are perhaps likely
to be better tested.  Edubuntu mostly focusses on GNOME so that's probably
the best tested.

My own laptop is a 700MHz P3 with 192MB RAM and runs plain ubuntu/gnome
reasonably well, although I almost never use OpenOffice.

Gavin