1. Resolution and color depth
Two of the boxes were set at 640x480. Midnight Commander has severe
problems at those settings. The F9-Pulldwn and F10-Quit legends at the
bottom of the MC window are missing at less than full screen and possibly
missing at full screen width. The problem resolves at 800x600 res.
Worse, some accelerated video cards do not produce the standard colors MC
requires when set to 8-bit color. Small and large areas of the MC ncurses
windows black out and are unusable. Setting X to 16-bit color and VESA
corrected the problem.
2. Too little memory
One of the boxes had only 16 MB of RAM. The was a major source of error and
frustration for the student who picked this box. The box was so
non-responsive the student would impatiently click on the AbiWord desktop
icon. 4-6 instances of the program would eventually open and lock up the
system. This happened repeatedly. She gave up and went home.
3. Bad keyboard
The same student's box had a keyboard where the key cap legends were so
hard to read that her neighbor had to tell her which keys to press. For a
72-year old with trifocals this is pure frustration and embarrassment.
4. Xfe versus MC
Midnight Commander is difficult for elderly newbies to understand. I think
they will learn faster using Xfe which is graphical. However the Xfe
desktop icon is broken on some or all of our FreeBoxes.
5. Minimum FB specs
All FreeBoxes must meet the minimum spec: . 133 MHz CPU . 32 MB RAM . 800x600 res at 16-bit color . 1 GB HD . 3.5" FD . ATAPI CDROM . keyboard . mouse
