[OS:N:] newbie

[Bill Kendrick]

On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 12:53:19PM -0400, Will Hatch wrote:
> Thanks for your reply.  My students use the computers for wordprocessing,

OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord or others will probably be suitable.
I typically prefer and suggest OpenOffice.org, since it runs on a variety of
platforms (kid doesn't have OOo at home? give him/her a copy for their Windows
box!  it's free), seems to have reasonable support for import/export of
MSOffice formats, and can export to PDF (great for publishing stuff to the
web, emailing assignments, etc.)


> browsing the web for research purposes (we do not have a library),

Mozilla, FireFox or Konqueror are my favorites.  Mozilla and kin are
nice because they also run on a variety of platforms.

Good website for research is WikiPedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org/ )
It's published under an 'Open Source' style license. (Creative Commons,
if I recall correctly)


> and thats about it.  Gaming is not necessary, although chess or something
> simple such as chess would be ok.

Xboard.  You can play on the Internet, too (like with FICS or ICC servers).
Also lots of neat scientific and other educational stuff (again, see
what's installed on Knoppix for Kids ;^) ).  KStars is great, for example!


> They really do not have to be supersonic.  My main goals are that
> each work station is identical, that there is nothing on the computers
> that is not educational, and that I can save money by having computers
> that do not need constant upgrading of microsoft products.

I highly recommend Debian as a distro, since package management is a breeze.
Others may suggest other distros.  I've heard a lot of good things
(and some bad ;^) ) about Gentoo for example.


-bill!