[ILUG] Office migrations to Linux

[Glen Gray]

On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 09:42, Aidan Delaney wrote:
> Kinda, I've done it (with Debian) in a school.  The major difference is
> that I could use Abiword instead of OpenOffce.org.
> 

I don't think that Abiword and Gnumeric would be good enough. They might
be though.

> I'm assuming that they're all networked.  My thinking on this would be
> to install Fedora on all client machines.  Run Evolution and Firefox
> (definatly FF, not Epiphany or Konqueror) locally but run OpenOffice.org
> on a beefed up server.
> 
They are all networked yes, workgroup style, no server. 

> They'll only need more RAM if they're running OO.o, however TAS Books
> will be a pain in the ass.  They don't seem to support Linux and I know
> this problem has come up before.  I suggest approaching them and telling
> them that your company will have to consider other options if there is
> no Linux version of Tas.
> 

They'll need at least 128MB of ram to have a usable graphical desktop
with todays crop of DE's i.e. Gnome or KDE. The more RAM the better as
far as Linux is concerned.

I'm talking about running TAS Books 2 under Wine of some description.
They currently don't have an up to date support contract anyway, but I
wouldn't expect there to be a linux native version of TAS books for a
long time, Linux on the business desktop area needs a lot more seats for
that to happen. I'm going to try it out here on my desktop first to see
how far I can get.

> Go with a distro with a track record.  Ubuntu is nice, but so was Gentoo
> when it first started (I hate Gentoo now and can't get rid of it due to
> a broken CD-ROM).  SuSE Personal is free, if all your stuff is available
> with personal, try it.  Do not compile from source or make major changes
> to the configuration of the distribution.  This only leads to problems
> with maintenance.  I personally would try Fedora, SuSE and Mandrake in
> that order.  If none of them suited I'd try Cobind (www.cobind.com) as
> it's Fedora based.  Whilst I love Debian on my servers, I've found that
> Debian (and Debian based products) suck on the desktop, for a variety of
> reasons.

I'll be supporting it so I'll need to be happy with the distro. I know
Fedora/RedHat extremely well and I know Debian quite well. I know Gentoo
too but wouldn't consider it for this, thats a hobbiest distro.

-- 
Glen Gray <glen at lincor.com>                             17 Dame Court
Senior Software Engineer                            Dublin 2, Ireland
Lincor Solutions Ltd.                          Ph: +353 (0) 1 6746413