[NTLUG:Discuss] alternatives to MS for the end-user....

[Jack Snodgrass]

With the talk of Alternatives to MS Excel and MS-Access,
I decided to post about the Ximian Desktop stuff. In the 
past, I've pretty much been of the opinion - Linux for 
Servers and MS for the end user. I always thought that 
the end-user-desktop stuff on linux was too hard to setup. 
I've been using Linux on servers since 96. I started a 
new job and I was going to have to decide between 
MS and Linux on my office desktop. I came across a reference
to ximian and played with it a bit. I was really impressed. 
It has a calendar, email, news, openoffice, etc suite of 
tools. It has something called "Red Carpet Installer" which
is similar to windows update ( which is a windows feature 
that I do like ) 

You do a
lynx --source http://go-gnome.com | sh 
and it installs. Pretty slick. 

With the Red Carpet Installer, you 'subscribe' to 'channels'. 
There is a Ximian, Redhat 3.7, OpenOffice, etc channel. Any 
updates or security packages or new packages, etc are offered
when you run RedCarpet and you can choose to install them or
not. 

I did try and install the Gnome 2.0 beta stuff and trashed
my system, so the RedCarpet Installer isn't perfect. As 
long as you don't try and load the alpha and beta stuff, you
should be ok. 

I use the email and news stuff all of the time. I've never been
a big calendar user, so I can't comment on that much. It does
doe vcalendar stuff, but my office calendar doesn't, so it 
doesn't integrate with that well. 

Anyway... that's me speil on Ximian. I think it's pretty 
slick and I'm a hard sell. 

jack