"Henrik N." <henrik.hates@spam.net> wrote:
>I got myself an old Thinkpad with just 32mb of RAM. I've been looking
>around for cheap RAM upgrades but sofar hasn't been succesfull.

Way back in the dark ages, I used to manage with 32Mb of RAM on
a 586 cpu. But still I recommend looking harder for more RAM.
There are lots of places that sell RAM, even for old laptops.

The first laptop I ran Linux on was a Toshiba with a Pentium and
40Mb, which did just fine (it was faster than my desktop with
the 586!). I've also spent a lot of time using a ThinkPad 600
with 48Mb of RAM, and that was a great plenty (still, I upgraded
it to something like 96Mb).

All of the above ran X and worked with XEmacs at the same time.
It did require a couple hundred Mb of swap space to use a
scanner or look at a large image file or to edit two or three
images at once. And of course it would be slower than molasis
in January when running out of swap. Netscape wasn't exactly
snappy and I can't imagine running Opera.

But the point is that for *normal* text based activities,
running X and using /xterm/ to provide windows with bash
commandline is *far* more convenient than using /screen/ on
virtual consoles.
>
>What I really miss is a good Calendar/PIM program which is text based and
>relatively easy to use. Also, does anyone else have any suggestions about
>"must have" console based applications?

Emacs or XEmacs (which does have things like built in calendar
programs). It's the best newsreader and email program around too,
not to mention it does fine as a text editor...

--
FloydL. Davidson <http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@barrow.com