[Watford] Help needed to get a Linux laptop

[Sanatha Vihara]

Hello WLUG

I am a Buddhist monk, currently in the UK for a family visit and staying
with my brother in Watford. I have just arrived in the UK after several
years in Myanmar, where I had an offline notebook which ran on XP. I gave
that away to another monk who needed it, and now my family have offered
to get me a replacement.

I've been out of touch with developments, but I now find out there is a
new OS called Windows Vista, which is even more bloated than XP, needing
ten times as much disk space and much higher hardware requirements. I've
heard of bloatware, but this is gloatware - how does Microsoft get away
with this stuff?

So I have decided to make the break. I need to find a suitable laptop and
I'd like to have Linux as the OS. I don't want to pay for Vista and don't
want anything more to do with Microsoft.

Do you know of a place or person in Watford who can sell a Linux-based
system? I'm a Linux newbie, so I need a version which is not too techie
as I'm not familiar with command-line input, but I'd like a quick and
streamlined OS all the same. Having had a look through a couple of
magazines, I thought maybe Xubuntu, or Linux Mint running Xfce, or
perhaps even Zenwalk?

The catch is I'm only in the UK until 27th June, after which I will be in
Asia again. So I don't have a lot of time to a) find a laptop b) get a
Linux OS up and running c) download software packages and d)learn how to
use Linux. So I thought maybe you guys could help out?

I don't need a high-end system. I will use the laptop mostly for word
processing, reading pdfs and playing audio and video CDs. On my previous
laptop I used only freeware, and I became familiar with Open Office (I
had version 2.1), which is what I would like to continue to use as my
main application.

I may well need a DTP package in addition, but have no idea if there is
something like that available for Linux. It's likely that most of the
time the notebook will be offline, so I won't be able to have access to
online support or updates. So I need to download as much software and
help documentation as possible before I go. I will also need software
which can download websites, as I want to store a lot of Buddhism-related
stuff onto the hard drive while I am in the UK so that I can consult it
when I am in Asia.

One possible sticking point – I will need a keyboard driver which can
handle Vietnamese diacritics. There is a program available for Windows,
but I don't think it will work on Linux. It's called Vietkey, and it's
available at:

http://www.vietcourses.com/learn/mod/resource/view.php?id=211

I will also need some Vietnamese fonts, but I'm not sure how fonts work
in Linux. Do I need different versions of the fonts I used in Windows? I
also used a lot of fonts that can handle Sanskrit and Pali, and need to
have some of those available in Linux. How does that work in Linux?

Since I have to travel around a lot, I'm looking for a small notebook.
Maximum screen size 14”, but maybe even better would be a 12-inch screen,
with a hard disk in the 100-120GB range.

If you can offer any suggestions and advice on how I can sort all this
out in the next twenty days, I'd appreciate it.

Many thanks,

Bhikkhu Sanatha





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