Leeenux

well well well......

Ive ran openBSD and freeBSD on several gateways over the many years, but never really gotten an interest in linux.

Take this question into a lower level, seeing as how I have never used an open source GUI before......but Iam wondering if I ran linux (slackware/ubuntu), is open office and other compatabilities far enough along to support microsoft word documents and other such simple programs for school?

That is the only thing holding me back so far, I dont play games. Just simple compatible issues that might hinder my homework

 

If you don't need a lot of the "advanced" capabilities of MS Office like version tracking or notations, or embedding say, an Excel document in a Word document, then it's great. OpenOffice.org is about 90% compatible with Microsoft Office.

You can also run OpenOffice.org under Windows alongside Microsoft Office, and make sure that the types of documents you want to convert do so. It's what I do on my machine.

 

I've been using only OpenOffice.org instead of MS office for the last four years of school. I actually prefer OO to MS office. You should be fine!

 

Unless you have a specific need, OpenOffice is a better product in my experience.

 

PitaBred is right on.

Download OpenOffice for Windows, install it and try opening your old Word/Excel documents with it. See if they look OK. Also make sure to re-save them as .doc in OO and try to open them in Word to make other people will be able to read them properly.

Also, if that doesn't work out you still have an option to purchase CrossOver and run MS Office on Linux. Looks like it runs about $40.

 

You don't necessarily even need CrossOver. Wine is great any more... if it can run StarCraft seamlessly on my machine, I figure it can't have too many problems with Office

 

Oh, really? Honestly, I haven't tried to use Wine in the last year or two. That's exciting, maybe I'll go dig my Starcraft CD out of the closet...

 

Oh damn. I thought this was going to be about EEE PC running Linux.

I actually prefer Open Office over MWord. It's much nicer. And it's free. It also has a better feel to it. It's not too plain, but not too fancy. It's casually professional.


And you can save in many different formats. So yeah, it'll be able to switch over to MWord very easily.

 

Wine probably does okay with mainstream applications. No luck getting it to run CBETA 2007 however. *grumble*

I use LaTeX for all my paper and I use OpenOffice for other stuff (fluff, some class notes and Chinese because #$%#@%#$%@ emacs won't handle Chinese encoded in Unicode properly). I use OpenOffice enough to see how somebody who's been using Word to max capacity would balk at using OOWriter. While I don't agree with the opinion that "oowriter is crap because it is different than word", I do think reasonable the notion that "because oowriter is different enough than word and does not cover all the functionality that word provides, the cost of switching would be too great for me." (Keep in mind that "cost" is not necessarily just the cost of the software. In academia, if you blow deadlines because you've switched to a new system, that may cost you your reputation, grants, job proposals, etc.)

 

MediaMonkey would be another that doesn't work with Wine. It'd be nice to be able to sync my iTod.

 

Zaz: the KDE application Amarok syncs with iPods. I don't own an iPod, but take a look.

 

Thanks for the tip.