[dundee] Linux for low spec PCs

[Matthew McNicol]

Hi Angie,

Just for info, I'm running the KDE version of Ubuntu on a 3 year old
laptop with 256 meg of RAM. Its okay. There is a delay when Open
Office starts but its acceptable. The single CD is useful to try it on
a computer before doing an install.

You're fairly likely to experience screen resolution problems
installing a linux distro on an old laptop. You wouldn't be short of
volunteers if you needed a hand. On the same note, the home users
might be interested to connect a printer which might not go smoothly,
I haven't bothered myself.

I've done a few voluntary website projects so I thought I'd share the
following, although you might already have your own ideas:

- It'd be a good idea to use a content management system on the
website for ease of maintenance. It gives a good professional'ish look
without bothering about HTML coding to much and its a sensible
approach if you were to give a colleague access in the long run.
several freely available open source versions exist. On
www.saferfife.com I used "website baker" which is fairly straight
forward. Joomla! is a more comprehensive option but the learning curve
is steeper. opensourcecms.com is a good site which lets you try them
online.

- for webhosting, the "linux value pro" account from supanames.com is
about £75 for 2 years, slightly less depending on the choice of domain
suffix, but that doesn't include a 99.9% uptime guarentee. it does
include PHP and the MySQL database which the above content management
systems utilise, and multiple email POP addresses.

- for website visitor stats I use a free account on google analytics.
statcounter.com is another free one.

I maintain the tayport.org.uk website and work at ninewells as a web
application programmer.

Cheers,

-- 
Matthew