I would recommend you check out Xandros - http://www.xandros.com/ I have not used any recent versions but the ease of use with an older version that I have used was phenominal. It was very slick and simple. It was and presumably still is debian based which means apt for install/update (they had/have their own GUI). It is a very windows friendly distro and they have a free downloadable version via bittorrent. Anyways I use Gentoo personally but I would not recommend it for you in this case unless you really feel like learning linux and the linux way of doing things. On Monday 27 March 2006 06:06 pm, Steve wrote: > Need Help, > The "Little Brothers, Friends of the Elderly" organization in the Twin > Cities area helps older people live an interesting life, especially > those whose spouses/significant others are deceased. It is primarily a > non-profit supported by contributions of money and time by volunteer > helpers/workers. You may or maynot be familiar; sorry for verbage if > you are. > > O.K. they replaced all the office computers recently and now have a > dozen or so which they would like to place in elder/client homes for > their use. I have volunteered to erase all office data on hard drive > and install email and word processing software. > > Now we are getting to the problem; the computers have MS Windows 2000 > Pro as OS and most have only 15 gig hard drives (a couple only have 2 > gig drives - those probably won't be used). The boxes are password > protected and the pw's are not always available. So my thinking is to > reformat & install Linux (my experience is quite limited). > > I have downloaded Ubuntu 5.10 at home, wrote to a CD and installed on a > box. It works great but required considerably more than 15 gigs. > > Is the a Linux distro plus email and word processor which can be put > into approx 10 or 12 gig drive space?? > > BTW - if you happen to be available during business hours Mon - Fri, you > are welcome to help with project. > > Thanks, > Steve