On Tuesday 23 December 2008 11:33, Sachin Gopalakrishnan wrote: > > There can never be a replacement for the crap that is M$office. > > Even a brainless moron cant write such crap. > > > > > > There are at least two SUPERIOR alternatives Openoffice and > > Koffice. > > I use ubuntu 8.04 as my desktop at home but i need excel at my > workplace on my laptop. > I have tried using OO (not tried K Office) but the spreadsheet tool > just does not seem to work well enough especially after i have used > excel, OO seems so dated and clunky in contrast. I must admit i > have not tried the latest version though.
You are confusing your familiarity of M$ with features of OO. The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The OO ui DOES NOT MIMIC M$. so you really need to read the OO manuals and tuts. > > There is no real Autocad replacement, even if there are like > BRL-CAD, Varicad etc we do not get candidates for them. you need a trainer in house, who will train your staff. Offcourse staff churn is a problem, but afaik linux does not redress HRM flaws. > We tried Virtualbox. did not work very well, > especially cumbersome > when it came to sharing files on a network using Samba. ???. Samba /CIFS works better than M$ network share. However you really dont need samba if u are using linux. NFS works very well. For a corner case like yours, you really need to hire someone for a year. > I know there are other linux options for virtualization available > like parallels and vmware but we are not > in a position to experiment as of now especially after virtualbox. There is no magic wand. But believe me the result down the road gets better and better. As a personal example: We were using a some doze based ecad tools - the last proprietory bit. There are many FOSS alternatives with mostly far superior features, but required learning new UIs and creating different workflow than what we were used to. We finally took the plunge when the anti piracy dongle broke and the loyalty reward was a fat bill for a new dongle + XP licence + upgrade other stuff in the tool chain. A year later we are cursing ourselves for having not made the switch atleast a few years earlier. Why? because we now have several designs in the old binary formats. If we needed some design change (eg via holes) we had to load the board click this that and the other in the application to get the change done - a process which took atleast 20 minutes. In contrast, the FOSS GEDA tools saves everything as text. Use a text editor to make changes in the PCB in a few minutes and with experience and some simple scripts a few secs now. REALLY COOL. Besides getting newer and better features all the while, filing bug reports and feature requests results in even better applications. In short you have two paths 1 devote resources to make FOSS fit your business 2 change so that you fit the FOSS environment Once you start you will find a suitable middle ground. > We use an MS Access based system (third party )for excise, i > haven't come across any package in linux as a replacement though am > sure one could be built. > > > For how many users? > > about 5 in one unit .. Hmm. too small. But.... -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
