Tom gave you a great list for finance programs. We run Ubuntu at home and when it was time to do taxes we just went with the all online web-based turbotax.com. It's a much easier option than trying to get a windows app to work with wine and it'll run on what ever platform you want.
-Scott On 4/24/07, Steven H. McCown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
All, I've tried most of the major Linux versions since 1997/8 and have always been frustrated by its complexity (as compared to Windows). I always figured it out, but never wanted to spend my time debugging that which I wanted to 'just work'. A couple of months ago, I started playing around with Ubuntu's beta (Feisty) and saw a huge improvement. There are enough ads (I mean articles) for this, so I won't dwell. I still use Windows, but Linux is now my friend. I need a graphic of a penguin waving a Windows flag, I guess. Anyway, here's what happened. My wife's usb drive 'went bad' with a lot of important info on it. I figured that a power failure or unplugging it before the safe removal process completed was the culprit. I checked all the windows utils and found many that for $59.99 claimed to solve my problem. This is an extremely rare occurrence, so I didn't want to pay real dollars if there was a free option. Next, I started looking for Linux apps and came up with several options. The options ranged from requiring a pretty intense understanding of how to calculating byte offsets in the partition table and writing missing values. The 1st rule of computer forensics is not to mess with the failing device, so I continued looking. Then, I came across a Linux command that allowed me to sector copy the usb drive to a single file on the computers hard disk. I tried to mount the file as a drive, but couldn't because the partition table was corrupted. Finally, I found a free utility called "test disk" that allows recovery by analyzing the disk (image file) contents even when the partition table is bad. It worked like a charm and I was able to recover every one of the 205 word docs and text files. Obviously, the names were not the originals, but every byte of the files' contents was recovered. This was an amazing thing (for a diehard Windows user) is that 1) it all actually worked, and 2) that it was completely free. I did have to spend 45 min or so to figure all this out, but I'm a CS guy and that's what we do for fun, anyway.... At work, I haven't taken the time to setup the traditional dual boot. However, I found that VMWare Server is now being given away for free. You have to register and get a license, but the price seems right. My work computer is an Alienware 3.8 GHz laptop with 2 GB of ram, so I don't really notice any lag time. That makes it really easy to try things out. I do have a question. Is there a good Quicken-type replacement for Linux? Has tax software made it there, yet? Just wanted to preach to the choir for a bit... Steve _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
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