[Sunhelp] Ressurecting Vintage LX. Solaris/Linux questions

[Nick Bailey]

I hope this is the right list on which to discuss this sort
of thing: apologies if not.

I have been bunged an old Sun LX which my department has
thrown out.  It has a 400MB disk 24MB of RAM, and a rather
beautiful monitor.  I'm planning to give it to my old
retired father who has taken on editing the church magazine
again after a break of 40 years.  He needs email/word
processing of some sort (the ability to read MS docs or RTF
would be nice) and a PPP dialup link to his ISP.

Not having any experience of administering these machines,
it occurs to me that there is probably going to be a problem
running a monster suite on it like Star Office.  I have it
on the opinions of a Sun guru ex-colleage that even putting
Solaris 2 on the machine would probably cripple it with only
24MB RAM.  The alternative is to run Linux on it.

I am confident at Linux admin on IA32 architecture (it's the
only OS on my machines both at home or at work), so I assume
I'd have an easy time setting up a Linux/sparc box to behave
like my home machine.  The trouble with Linux/Sparc is that
there's no word processors in the normal sense (Applix don't
have a version and Sun don't ship Sparc versions of SO for
anything except solaras AFAIK).  I thought of building
something like LyX, and just putting up with the ensuing
training overload, but am wondering if I'm worrying
unnecessarily about running Solaris on it instead.

I'd much appreciate any comments from people of experience.

Many thanks,

Nick/


--
Dr N J Bailey,                                    mailto:N.J.Bailey at leeds.ac.uk
Deputy Director, Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music
Lecturer in Applied Computing, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
University of Leeds.                        http://www.ee.leeds.ac.uk/homes/NJB