1) what is the most compact and fastest GUI for redhat 9? TVM is probably the fastest but what i want to do with my old 366 mhz laptop is to browser the internet, fetch my e-mail and do some word processing. now whenever i load up KDE or Gnome at the minum extra stuff and no flash or anything its still very sluggish. so i guess i need some way to trim the fat off the xserver and the GUI.

2) smallest and fastest loading browser, guessing mozzila firebird.

3) smallest and fastest GUI e-mail client that support LDAP, IMAP, and pop3 protcol. my college e-mail system is based off LDAP and IMAP, but i also need pop3 for off campus e-mails.

4) open office i have yet to get it to load up, i have waited up to a hour and the ah logo thing is still up so i need an small word processor that can load up fast on an laptop that 366mhz with 64 meg of ram. needs to be able to do spellchecking, some formating and few other options and i would think that's about it.


now i think i got all the qestions about general stuff for my linux installation, now for the router and few other questions.

can a laptop function as a router, my laptop is old and the battery is broken, can't find it anymore so i'm consdering converting it into an router and sticking it somewhere and accessing it with SSH whenever i need to change some settings on it. basically i need to do the following.

- Route traffice to my main desktop
- run iptable that only allow http, ftp, e-mail and few other channel out. only allow SSH from the desktop computer.
- a way to filter the incoming packadge, i'm thinking a proxy here, basically i want a way to filter stuff such as Ad's, certain website etc...
- service as an sort of e-mail server for my desktop computer. basically it will contact all of my e-mail all over the place and download and merge em all in one spot so i can just connect to the laptop and bam all of my e-mails are all there, and it would sort it depending where it got it from, such as hotmail goes into hotmail folder, IMAP e-mail goes into IMAP folder, etc... then i can just connect to the laptop with a mail reader and read all the e-mail at onice.


now what would be the best distro to do this on, i'm not sure, red hat would be easey to customize but i would like some very compact and fast distro that gives me choices about what i install.

now third question what sort of software do i need to have to do the above list on the router/server?

thanks you.

1. I would recommend fluxbox.
http://www.fluxbox.org

2. Firebird or Opera

3. If you use Opera it has a built-in email client that loads in its own tab. So, lower memory usage.

4. Abiword
http://www.abiword.org/

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Antimatter
1) what is the most compact and fastest GUI for redhat 9? TVM is probably the fastest but what i want to do with my old 366 mhz laptop is to browser the internet, fetch my e-mail and do some word processing. now whenever i load up KDE or Gnome at the minum extra stuff and no flash or anything its still very sluggish. so i guess i need some way to trim the fat off the xserver and the GUI.[/QOUTE]
WIndowMaker or Fluxbox, I guess.

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2) smallest and fastest loading browser, guessing mozzila firebird.

Firebird or Opera, probably text brower from time to time (lynx, links).

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4) open office i have yet to get it to load up, i have waited up to a hour and the ah logo thing is still up so i need an small word processor that can load up fast on an laptop that 366mhz with 64 meg of ram. needs to be able to do spellchecking, some formating and few other options and i would think that's about it.

OOo won't work well on this machine (mainly because of RAM). Kwrite, probably? Or maybe console tools?

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now i think i got all the qestions about general stuff for my linux installation, now for the router and few other questions. can a laptop function as a router, my laptop is old and the battery is broken, can't find it anymore so i'm consdering converting it into an router and sticking it somewhere and accessing it with SSH whenever i need to change some settings on it. basically i need to do the following.

It can be done, no problem. In fact, even an 386 can handle this.

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- Route traffice to my main desktop

'route' command, included

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- run iptable that only allow http, ftp, e-mail and few other channel out. only allow SSH from the desktop computer.

iptables, included

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- a way to filter the incoming packadge, i'm thinking a proxy here, basically i want a way to filter stuff such as Ad's, certain website etc...

procmail or a similar utility

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- service as an sort of e-mail server for my desktop computer. basically it will contact all of my e-mail all over the place and download and merge em all in one spot so i can just connect to the laptop and bam all of my e-mails are all there, and it would sort it depending where it got it from, such as hotmail goes into hotmail folder, IMAP e-mail goes into IMAP folder, etc... then i can just connect to the laptop with a mail reader and read all the e-mail at onice.

fetchmail

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now what would be the best distro to do this on, i'm not sure, red hat would be easey to customize but i would like some very compact and fast distro that gives me choices about what i install.

It can be RedHat. In fact, choose the distro you know best.

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now third question what sort of software do i need to have to do the above list on the router/server?

listed above

1 - Redhat 9.0 is an slow distro for older computers. Think as if you were installing windows 2000 or XP on your machine . I'd recommend Slackware 8.1 or less. All slackware distro rocks. I've 9.0 in a Intel 166 with 32 of RAM and it flies.(perhaps would work in your computer as well). As for X, stick with Icewm/blackbox/fluxbox. KDE and Gnome and Redhat 9.0 in that machine makes me quite impressed that it actually works

www.slackware.com

2 - Mozilla firebird is still too heavy. Dillo would be great. It really is fast, but won't render things very well though.

www.dillo.org

3 - Sylpheed. It's great

www.sylpheed.org

4 - That's nearly impossible with OpenOffice. You can use a command line text editor like pico. It has basic justify and spell check functions, but nothing else .

About routers/servers I dunno

Good luck!