Full Linux Conversion (was Re: Progress)

["Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com>]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 droege@snapmail.us wrote:

> It will be wonderful to banish Windoz from my home.  Sigh! Not quite yet.
> We will still use it to get out the Rolls newsletter, but I have Jennifer
> converted over to linux and Firefox for e-mail and other stuff.

Tom,

You should seriously consider installing OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org).
You can download it (~200MB) or get a CD-Rom from various net suppliers
(e.g. http://rokland.com/ for < $10).

OpenOffice should give you *most* of the functionality of Microsoft Office.

Second, you should consider installing Wine (http://www.winehq.org) which is
an open source implementation of the Windows API sitting on top of X (and
most versions of Linux).  For that you need anywhere from ~50 to 250 MB
(depending on whether you want binary or sources to compile).

Wine supports the Windows Application Interface (API) and should allow
you to run almost any "standard" windows software (which isn't hardware
specific) under Linux.

So there isn't much to prevent you from switching fully to Linux if
you have reasonably fast machines and half-a-gigabyte of disk storage
available.

Robert