Ok, My Gran bought a Laptop at a car boot sale for £10 its has: - 35 Mhz processor - 12 Mb of ram - floppy drive (no cd drive) Slightly embarasing spec! All she wants to be able to do is word processing, im looking for a version of linux that will run on this machine (ie run well) and will open office run on this machine?
As far as i know, no linux will run on that old hardware, unless the X windows system is disabled, which leaves you with a DOS like interface. As for OpenOffice, definately wont run!
You can run Linux on it with a light Window manager like TWM or WM, but I don't know of any modern word processor on any operating system that will run in 12mb RAM. Sorry.
List of distros to run on your specs: Come to think of it, she could use a distro like GreyCat on a system like that. It won't be very modern, and I probably couldn't help you out with the installation... but there it is. There are actually quite a few out there that will run on your laptop: muLinux Xdenu 2diskXwin NucLinux SmallLinux LoopLinux Pocket Linux
Come to think of it, I'm not really seeing much of an advantage over a plain old word processing machine (I only saw one once, my friend had one).
I didnt think to ask the size of the hard disc, but MB is a good guess My gran only wants for word processing as thats all she does on the computer (shes 60 years old, do u reall think she wants to play games?!?!) Anyone got any suggestions on a word processor, al it really needs is to be able to open/save .doc files (MS word) as thats the format she currently using.
I would suggest OpenOffice.org or ABIword, but both of those programs, although their requirements are much less than MS Office, are *much* too heavy for a system with 12mb RAM. Unless you are an advanced Linux user, which I suspect you are not, that laptop is pretty worthless to you and to your grandma. Sorry. If it had a bit more RAM you could use a more modern distro with a more modern installer and UI, but 12 MB of RAM isn't even enough for most firewall distros.
