debian on a laptop?

[marbux]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 12:19 AM, Karen Lewellen
<klewellen at shellworld.net> wrote:
> As for my goals,  two, perhaps three.  I have in a sealed box the edition of
> wordperfect created for Linux / UNIX.   unless I am sure this can be run, I
> am not going to do word processing, leaving only two.

What version of WordPerfect? If it's 8 or 8.1 (or earlier), it should
work although you may need to run an older version of the Linux kernel
for it. If it's WordPerfect Office 2000, it's an initial port of WP
Office for Windows to WINE and is full of show-stopper bugs; no
updates were ever issued. Despite considerable involvement in the
WordPerfect user community, I know of no one who thinks of it as
usable.

> browsers.  if that means ebrowse then terrific, or firefox if it works in
> debian.  Ray keeps speaking of ice Wiesel, but I have not heard enough to
> know if this is the best alternative option.

Ice Weasel *is* Firefox with the Firefox branding removed because of
trademark claims by the Mozilla Foundation making the branded version
incompatible with GPL licensing and ineligible for inclusion in Linux
distributions whose developers who refuse to ship software that is
incompatible with the GPL. Negotiations continue to resolve the
trademark issue and if successful will likely result in Ice Weasel
becoming a thing of the past.

Personally, I almost never use Firefox anymore, only when I need a
particular Firefox extension. Google Chrome is a much superior
browser, in no small part because each open web page is launched in a
separate process. The practical result is that if a given page has
problems or is very slow in loading, you can continue to use the
browser for other pages, without having to kill the browser's process
to recover.

Chrome is based on the WebKit page rendering engine, which is also way
better than the Mozilla Gecko engine used in Firefox. WebKit is an
emerging de facto standard for web browsers and client-side apps that
run in a browser. WebKit began its life as the KHTML page rendering
engine used by KDE apps. It was picked up and improved by Apple for
its Safari browser, then by Google and now again by KDE. Opera is also
migrating to WebKit.

If you have objections to proprietary software, you might check out
Chromium, the open source browser project's code that Google Chrome is
based on. <http://www.chromium.org/Home>. But there are far fewer
extensions available for it.

Best regards,

Paul