new member, two weeks of one distro, should I try debian?

[urbandryad]

I've been sort of skipping from one Linux forum to the other to figure out how to handle my situation. Installed Ubuntu Linux on my labtop recently with varying degrees of sucess, but I have a few troubles, and have been told Debian might solve some of them.

My system: new-world blueberry clamshell G3 iBook, with 3G hard drive, and 128 MB memory

My problems: No internet connection. No home based CD burner (would have to pay $5 to a local place to burn me a CD with the OS.

My needs: A word processor, some games like mahjong and solitaire, nothing fancy or 3D cause my computer doesn't support it. Also need MP3 support in order to use my iPod at home (once I get an extender adapter so iPod will fit in my USB port)

On 3 gigs of space, I discovered that Open Office crawled along at an intolerable rate, even for an uber fast typer for myself, seeing text appear after 5-8 seconds had passed does not exactly paint a happy picture. I'm an author, my word processor has to work, so a bulky suite that takes time to load and has too many options is not what I want. I tried to install abiword from a .package with no success, (no depency download capabilities) and being a linux newb, compiling from source and resolving dependencies by hand seems like a rather daunting task for just one application.

So will debian work for me? Can I install it, remove what I don't need, and still have ample room for my own files, without my labtop slowing down too much? Can I choose to install either KDE or Gnome? (Tried Gnome so far, want to try KDE and give both a shot.)

I have basically folder of text files related to my writing, and a folder of images I like to use as backgrounds backed up to my flash USB and streamload. I need, however, for my iBook to get set up without anymore multiple installs/reinstalls.

I've had a ton of problems with admin requirements in ubuntu, cause whenever I install, my user account never is set up under 'sudo' so I have to use the X gui under ROOT in order to install or run any admin stuff. ^^ And having no internet I can't use synaptic to install from online, only from CD's.

So maybe debian would be better for me? :3 Does it sound like an all right fit?

Thanks everyone!

[startx]

So will debian work for me? Can I install it, remove what I don't need

one of the great advantages is that you can customize almost everything in debian, on the other hand it needs some time to learn and gettings things allright sometimes.

you should easily run debian with X and a smaller window manager (like fluxbox, windowmaker, maybe even XF4ce, dunno) on that G3 maschine.
however to say it straight: openoffice is kind of slow, yes.

do you really need the whole office suite? maybe abiword will do for textprocessing, and gnumeric for calculation.

(i used to run debian woody with X and abiword, firefox etc on a 233Mhz until 2 years ago and i was fine with that.)

of course you never have enough RAM.
3G shuld be fine as long you dont have to store massive data.

if you want a slim system, install debian without X first (just base system), and then step by step add X and windowmanager and apps. then you can avoid the typical overload of "hey we have 24 editors and 3 word processing apps" which unfortunately comes with many distributions.

hope that helps for a start

[urbandryad]

I actually had plans to get the 'Debian Bible' which has a debian CD with it, and all the information for installation, which would help me as I NEED some sort of offline guide to do anything technical. I don't know if its worth the money or not, so I'll be doing research.

Yeah, Open Office is really slow. I'm miffed cause I can't resize the confirguration box when I want to edit what buttons show up in my toolbars, and all the 'save revert' tabs are cut off. >o< Abiword would be fun if I could get it installed. :3

Thanks! ^_^

[startx]

Abiword would be fun if I could get it installed.

whats the problem?