Should I be a convert?

[aschueler]

I am thinking of making one of my HD's boot into mandrake or the like.

The biggest reason I consider this is to take advantage of the office-type applications that are available. It pisses me off a bit how expensive MS office programs are, and with each new version of windows it can cost more for the stupid program updates than making your own computer system. In other words, I have ME still on my old HDD which has outlook, word, etc with tons of important info for me on it, and I do NOT want to spend close to a thousand bucks for upgrades I do not need to put the same info on my NEW hard drive that I usually boot to, for programs that I already own IMOP.

SO.

If I change to mandrake (and keep one HDD or partition with XP for gaming until Linux catches up), are the office programs for mandrake worth the effort to change over all the data from outlook? Can it be configured to hotsync with my Palm 515? Should I scrap it and continue to curse the Monopoly?

Thanks for listening and letting me vent.

Let me know what you all think.

 

[silverpig]

Using mandrake and openoffice is very very easy and definitely worth the $0 you will have to spend on it

If you know how to use windows and MS office, then you know how to use mandrake with Openoffice; they're that similar. It's definitely worth saving the $$$.

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

 

[Flinx]

with the size of todays hard disks u don't need to use the whole thing.

10GB is <b>WAY </b> enough.

Linux can share ur windows FAT32 and NTFS file systems (Non OS)

The loving are the daring!

 

[Dev]

Like always I recommend Knoppix in your situation. Just write your office files to a floppy and/or a flash storage device of some kind and you have a portable linux system and all your files. Alternatively you could install Mandrake or another distro and I recommend that as well. However, I am seriously biased towards *nix.

Edit:

I forgot to mention that I do not know whether Knoppix (the K is not silent by the way) will sync with your palm. If it does you could just save your files to the palm and have them available at all times.
Also OpenOffice files are roughly 1/10 the size of a comparable word file so you can fit a lot in a small space.

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|||_____________|_____|<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Dev on 09/22/03 10:34 PM.</EM></FONT></P>