It has been almost a year since I left the linux on the desktop world and moved back to windows. Prior to that I had run linux exclusively (not even a dual boot) on my laptop for about 6 months with Debian Sarge. I had it all workable, but it wasn't great. I am contemplating moving back to the linux on the desktop world and was wondering if any people on the list had been following, or perhaps even better, using linux on the desktop extensively. Some points in specific I was wondering about: 1) Email. I use outlook, used outlook, and I liked Evolution. Problem was that microsoft packages the email in a pst file. I had to go through quite the ordeal to get the email from the pst file to a form that Evolution could handle. It involved installing Mozilla client and getting it all into mail folders and then loading that into evolution. Quite the process. I was wondering if that process has been shortened, or if anyone has their personal recommendations about mail clients. One more note about email, it upset me a bit when I loaded the email back into outlook to find that a lot of the characters in my emails were changed to various ascii symbols. Every so often an e would be an = and so on. 2) OpenOffice. Maybe it was the print drivers, but I am pretty sure it was OOo way of formatting "word" documents. Well...I didn't like that it formatted them different from the "world's" standard of Microsoft Word. I handed in a paper and the professor made a comment about it. I didn't lose any points, but it was one of those judgemental comments that underneath said "So, you couldn't write a whole paper so you made your font bigger and your margins wider?" Not an experience I appreciated and if OOo has gotten better, I would be more than happy to remove ms office. Also, if there's a way to make OOo save it's documents "defaultly" as .doc or .xls, etc. It would be swell. 3) Wireless. I liked Ubuntu's utility for wireless configuration and was very impressed it worked so quickly. I didn't like how it couldn't autosense which network you were on, and instead it would try the current network and time-out until you specified which network to connect to. Also, if someone knows whether or not they have gotten far enough in development to have the little "switches" on laptops that turn the wireless card off actually be recognized by the wireless in linux so that it wouldn't also spend it's bootup time looking for a wireless signal that it won't find...leave your comment here. So...discussion anyone? Brian -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/
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