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Bill, Thanks for the great write-up! You might want to organize that into a magazine article and submit it to LJ, I'm sure many other people out there would be interested in hearing of your success! I also have leaped a small hurdle with Windows interoperability recently, though no where near as complicated as your story :) My current employer seems to think that using Exchange and Outlook is a good thing. I suppose in a large company (19,000 people) where the majority of them are non-technically savy or middle management, it sort of makes sense, since Outlook seems to have all the features someone of that description could ever want. However, I've lived with the power of exmh/procmail and the flexibility of UNIX for far too long to consider this silly little toy as a real e-mail environment. My first day on the job was spent suffering with Windows 2000. Well, actually, the suffering lasted maybe 30 minutes. Then I decided I would play with cygwin. I quickly realized that I was at that point, essentially re-creating Linux within Windows. The second day was spent re-partitioning my drive and installing Linux, and getting all comfy :) Day 3, I bought the Codeweavers Crossover Office and Crossover Plugin for Linux ($65 for both, as opposed to the $65 for *just* Ximian's Evolution Connector for Exchange 2000). So far Codeweaver's works great. There are some minor flaws and bugs. There seems to be a minor problem with the cursor on dialog box pop-ups where the cursor disappears when you enter the box, but if you're slow and careful, when you click, you end up clicking the correct button. Another bug I've found is that Outlook crashes when you try and do a print-preview. So I don't do that any more :) The one bug I've seemed to stumble into that is really annoying me has to do with 'Rules' which seems to be Outlooks sorry excuse for a mail-sorting filter wizard thingy. First, they make up rules in natural language. Probably okay for people who think in a natural language fashion. I think I've been around computers too long, since 'if...then' clauses and regular expressions make more sense to me than those rules do :) The bug appears to be that they (Codeweavers) have not implemented a mechanism for dealing with rules yet, specifically the 'Redirect' rules, which is what you need to have mail sent to another e-mail address upon arrival. So, until I figure out how to get all my outlook mail forwarded to a Unix box, I run with 2 mail clients on my desktop, Outlook and exmh. So far it's working out pretty good. The Crossover Office suite allows you to install the native MS Office suite onto a Linux box and run those apps. There's no emulation or anything going on, and you don't need to install Wine. All the office apps work, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. I'm only using Outlook because that's all I need here. I have OpenOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric, and LyX installed for anything else I'll ever need to do, and I'll never mail someone here, or anywhere, a Word attachment, it will always be either PS or PDF. So, for anyone out there who wants to save money and not pay that Windows OS tax, there is a way you can use MS apps under Linux. The old complaint that "Word doesn't run on Linux" is NO LONGER VALID! Oh, as for the Crossover Plugin package? I now have Windows Media Player and Quicktime plugins running under Galeon on Linux! So, I now have the multimedia capabilities of Windows and the power of Linux. How sweet is that!? - -- Seeya, Paul -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Exmh version 2.2 06/23/2000 (debian 2.2-1) iD8DBQE8vClfuweSOVPxKO4RAthnAKDSsRqI06XVGGKJUATcY9T9+ODYRgCglHVU Ib0Kus6PeCkyxLN2zlifM9Q= =AH3P -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
