I just got back from the University Lutheran Center after showing one of the students how SuSE 9.2 works. I now have 5 computers with *NIX installed. Initially the folks there were very enthusiastic about getting Linux then they had second thoughts. As they started to use the Linux boxes, their apprehensions were allayed. One person wanted one of the machines to stay a Windows box but I was asked by others to install SuSE over it. It was Windows 98 and heavily infected with spyware. So much so that it's registry was messed up (or so I was told). Here are my observations so far:
1) SuSE 9.2 has a very good implementaion of both KDE 3.3.0 and Gnome 2.6.2. SuSE is very stable. 2) OpenOffice 1.1.3, in SuSE works quite well and does a good job on importing mundane MS docs. Imported Word *.docs that have lots of OLE objects are a problem as are *.docs that have watermarks or other background images. 3) SuSE 9.2 runs very slowly on these old machines but still some of the students were glad it had replaced Windows. It was impossible to print anything from the Microsoft Windows setup because of the spyware infestations. Pop ups sprang up every time you clicked on something. 4) NetBSD 1.6.2 runs great on the older equipment. I have Xfce 4.0.6 and IceWm on some of them. Xfce use either the ROX file manager ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop ) or Nautilus ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_file_manager ). Xfce is FreeDesktop.org compliant ( http://freedesktop.org/ ) so it works well with either Kde or Gnome apps. I tried to install Gnome 2.8.0 but I could not overcome the compilation errors. I trust that 2.8.1 will install cleanly. 5) Epiphany 1.2.x is in SuSE but it was not the default browser. Epiphany is very fast and a delight to use. 6) The SuSE YOU (YaST Online Update) worked really well. 7) Both NetBSD and SuSE have Gnumeric 1.2.13, which is an excellent spreadsheet. Gnumeric opens MS *.xls that have graphs. Once these graph containing spreadsheets are saved as *.gnumeric they work just fine. I can't praise Gnumeric enough; It's what Excel should have been. 8) Both SuSE and NetBSD come with scientific software that Windows does not have. This is a big plus (I think) for university students. 9) I showed some of the students the Xmms player and how it could stream Ogg Vorbis from Virgin Radio (Rock) or CBC News. _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list http://www.cwelug.org/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.firepipe.net/listinfo/cwe-lug
