Sam MacDonald wrote: > I've seen several people looking for Open Source Projects to > participate in so I'm posing this to both groups. > > Lets say I have a laptop (toshiba, compaq, what ever) configured as > follows. > Pentium 166mhz, 1.5 - 2 gig hard disk, 32 mb ram, 12 in display, 10 > mbit nic, external mouse & trackpoint or touch pad, _no_ CDROM (well > maybe a CDROM). > > I want to put Linux on it with X Windows, OpenOffice and MySQL (maybe > PHP?). I want to have enough disk space for storing the database and > documents. Remember this is for business. > > What distribution should I use, I want it to be easy, "free", and stable? > I have an HP Omnibook 800CT that I had running RH 8.0 with a 2GB drive. It did a lot of thrashing running gnome so I switch to one of the small windowing packages, blackbox I think, and that helped some but its still mostly for e-mail when I'm traveling (the 800CT is a small sub-notebook). You might want to look at something with a smaller footprint - at one point I had considered Gentoo or Peanut Linux. > Yes this has to do with the computer disposal business I'm getting > started. I don't want to start with M$ because, well, I'm broke > :-[ and then I would have to file chapter 13 after I bought it :-D > > I've only been a Cobol programmer (2 years), I've done a little (very > little) PHP out of the book, a bunch of HTML, and a touch of > JavaScript. I was trained as a structured (top down) programmer. > This new fangled action-reaction stuff drives me a little buggy. > > The database would have very few tables and fields, I'm no dba so... > Tables > customers > business names, contact names, addresses, phone numbers, other > such information > customer inventory > CPU serial number, Display serial number, HD serial number, > Asset Tag number. > (not sure what else) > I use postgres for most stuff, but you'll probably want something a bit smaller like mysql or pheonix. If its going to be a small database you could always use a flat file database, or dBase, or even something like shsql. But, to keep life simple you'll probably want something that is supported by ODBC and/or Perl DBI , php PEAR, etc. > 1. Can I use the spread sheet within OpenOffice to create a data input > and reporting system? I would also like to use Writer for > certificates that get data from the database as well. > OO will work against databases that are supported by ODBC, which for linux means looking at the unixODBC project. I've played with the ODBC connection using OO under XP so I can't vouch for the unix version, although my impression is that getting unixODBC up and running under Linux is the hard part. Newsforge had a piece today about theKompany releasing a version of Rekall which provides a lot of the forms and reporting capabilities that you get with Access. --rick _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list