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I hear ya! My distro of choice is Novell openSUSE 10.2, which is very easy to set up and use, though I had to remove zmd to get efficient updates with opensuse-updater (the upcoming 10.3 doesn't install zmd by default). IMHO, Novell openSUSE 10.2 is an order of magnitude easier to set up and use than Ubuntu, though the /. community in general has taken an anti-Novell stance due to its patent cross licensing agreement with Microsoft (which is funny, considering how /. loves Apple despite Apple's numerous patent and technology cross licensing agreements with Microsoft, but I digress).

I've been able to "convert" two people at work from Windows XP to openSUSE 10.2 based on its merits and ease of use. Ubuntu will hopefully get to a similar position from a technical perspective, but IMHO at this time, Novell openSUSE 10.2 is already there, and Novell has committed themselves to making SUSE Linux a world-class desktop operating system.

From your post, here is what openSUSE 10.2 and likely other distros can offer:

- Browser: Firefox, Konqueror, Mozilla Seamonkey, Opera, and IEs4Linux (I use IEs4Linux to access Outlook Web Access's calendar at work, since I use Thunderbird for my email. I'm looking forward to an Exchange plug-in for Mozilla Lighning)

- Email: Thunderbird (yay! I'm also writing a Salesforce.com extension for it called Thunderforce), Evolution (I actually despise it, though I also don't like Outlook's interface. To each, their own.. Don't bother with the Exchange connector; it's slow and crashes often), KMail, and others

- Quicken 2008 might be tricky. Quicken 2007 appears to work to an extent, but it might have issues, which is probably not good for an accounting package

- GnuCash is a possible replacement for Quicken, though it's more like QuickBooks than Quicken. For a personal finance look and feel, KMyMoney might be the better way to go, though some time might need to be invested in the conversion process. Converting from Quicken Mac 2004 to KMyMoney was not seamless for me, but I haven't gone back and fixed the errors in the import configuration that I used and tried again. If you do the GnuCash approach, then you can use my GnuCashToQIF program to export back to Quicken in case if you want to go back to it or if you need to export your data to an accountant, either as QIF or IIF. I have an old Mac at home that I'm moving away from, though I'm still using Quicken and iTunes on it

- Novell's version of OpenOffice includes extensive support for Excel macros, so it's worth trying out. It might address all of your Excel needs. As a nice bonus, OpenOffice uses a single-document interface (SDI) instead of a multiple-document interface (MDI), permitting you to have two or more separate top-level spreadsheet windows side-by-side or on different monitors. Excel is MDI, though it does create a top-level start menu button for each open document, essentially faking SDI, but it's really MDI. You could enlarge Excel to span multiple monitors and have your MDI windows not maximized, but that breaks down if you have one monitor portrait and the other one landscape. If you really, really need Excel, then it appears to be well supported by CrossOver Office

- Visual Studio 2005 is a tough one because MonoDevelop might not include all the features that you may be accustomed to. It does implement a lot, but it's probably not a drop-in replacement yet.

... grinding that anti-MS axe.

Hey, that's not fair. I stand up for Microsoft now and then. Were those posts not helpful?

The Fine Article is about HP selling consumer desktop PCs with Linux, though. I don't what your post has to do with that but you anonymous cowards aren't getting astroturf points off of me today. Instead I'll provide informative topical discussion and foil your evil plot.

The original source for this story is apcmag. From that article:

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC manufacturer, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs from $AU600 in Australia.

I can only hope this is a pilot, with PCs for the US market to follow. Like many of the people leaving comments on that story, I would like to buy some Linux laptops from HP here in the US. I would also like to see a choice of processors. This is a nice start though.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop also comes with OpenOffice preinstalled, Firefox for web browsing and Evolution for email.

That sounds like a full featured environment for the average user. Much better than Microsoft Works, a non-removable trial copy of Office and the usual collection of junkware that comes with a Windows PC. With compatible software vendors like this impressive list finding commercial software for your HP/Red Hat system should be no trouble. Dag has a whole bunch of free stuff available for it too. I imagine Windows users will have a hard time understanding that yes, you can just click on one of thousands of great free programs and it will install but it won't turn your PC into a spam zombie. It shouldn't take them long to get fond of it though. That's a significant change for people used to dealing with a software vendor that's proud that three quarters of a million of their customers were infested with root kits.

Windows gamers will be relieved to hear that for a measly $5/mo they can join Transgaming and play Windows games. If they have Windows programs they don't want to throw away like one of these, Wine will be a nice free addition to their Red Hat desktop. If they prefer a professionally maintained compatibility engine they might like Codeweavers' Crossover Linux which supports these programs and only costs $40.

The list of hardware known to be compatible with RHEL 5 is impressive, as is the list of systems that are certified and supported.

Disclosure - I also don't work for anybody mentioned here or sell their stuff. My opinions belong to me and I'm not getting paid to have them. YMMV, yadda yadda.

The choice of Red Hat as a partner in this venture shows just how GNU/Linux

... grinding that anti-MS axe.

Hey, that's not fair. I stand up for Microsoft now and then. Were those posts not helpful?

The Fine Article is about HP selling consumer desktop PCs with Linux, though. I don't what your post has to do with that but you anonymous cowards aren't getting astroturf points off of me today. Instead I'll provide informative topical discussion and foil your evil plot.

The original source for this story is apcmag. From that article:

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC manufacturer, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs from $AU600 in Australia.

I can only hope this is a pilot, with PCs for the US market to follow. Like many of the people leaving comments on that story, I would like to buy some Linux laptops from HP here in the US. I would also like to see a choice of processors. This is a nice start though.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop also comes with OpenOffice preinstalled, Firefox for web browsing and Evolution for email.

That sounds like a full featured environment for the average user. Much better than Microsoft Works, a non-removable trial copy of Office and the usual collection of junkware that comes with a Windows PC. With compatible software vendors like this impressive list finding commercial software for your HP/Red Hat system should be no trouble. Dag has a whole bunch of free stuff available for it too. I imagine Windows users will have a hard time understanding that yes, you can just click on one of thousands of great free programs and it will install but it won't turn your PC into a spam zombie. It shouldn't take them long to get fond of it though. That's a significant change for people used to dealing with a software vendor that's proud that three quarters of a million of their customers were infested with root kits.

Windows gamers will be relieved to hear that for a measly $5/mo they can join Transgaming and play Windows games. If they have Windows programs they don't want to throw away like one of these, Wine will be a nice free addition to their Red Hat desktop. If they prefer a professionally maintained compatibility engine they might like Codeweavers' Crossover Linux which supports these programs and only costs $40.

The list of hardware known to be compatible with RHEL 5 is impressive, as is the list of systems that are certified and supported.

Disclosure - I also don't work for anybody mentioned here or sell their stuff. My opinions belong to me and I'm not getting paid to have them. YMMV, yadda yadda.

The choice of Red Hat as a partner in this venture shows just how GNU/Linux

... grinding that anti-MS axe.

Hey, that's not fair. I stand up for Microsoft now and then. Were those posts not helpful?

The Fine Article is about HP selling consumer desktop PCs with Linux, though. I don't what your post has to do with that but you anonymous cowards aren't getting astroturf points off of me today. Instead I'll provide informative topical discussion and foil your evil plot.

The original source for this story is apcmag. From that article:

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC manufacturer, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs from $AU600 in Australia.

I can only hope this is a pilot, with PCs for the US market to follow. Like many of the people leaving comments on that story, I would like to buy some Linux laptops from HP here in the US. I would also like to see a choice of processors. This is a nice start though.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop also comes with OpenOffice preinstalled, Firefox for web browsing and Evolution for email.

That sounds like a full featured environment for the average user. Much better than Microsoft Works, a non-removable trial copy of Office and the usual collection of junkware that comes with a Windows PC. With compatible software vendors like this impressive list finding commercial software for your HP/Red Hat system should be no trouble. Dag has a whole bunch of free stuff available for it too. I imagine Windows users will have a hard time understanding that yes, you can just click on one of thousands of great free programs and it will install but it won't turn your PC into a spam zombie. It shouldn't take them long to get fond of it though. That's a significant change for people used to dealing with a software vendor that's proud that three quarters of a million of their customers were infested with root kits.

Windows gamers will be relieved to hear that for a measly $5/mo they can join Transgaming and play Windows games. If they have Windows programs they don't want to throw away like one of these, Wine will be a nice free addition to their Red Hat desktop. If they prefer a professionally maintained compatibility engine they might like Codeweavers' Crossover Linux which supports these programs and only costs $40.

The list of hardware known to be compatible with RHEL 5 is impressive, as is the list of systems that are certified and supported.

Disclosure - I also don't work for anybody mentioned here or sell their stuff. My opinions belong to me and I'm not getting paid to have them. YMMV, yadda yadda.

The choice of Red Hat as a partner in this venture shows just how GNU/Linux

It's not about repeating the "party line" (to be honest, I don't think there is one), I'm not really a Wine developer either (although I've had 2 small patches committed), I'm just presenting the situation the way I see it.

Currently I can't say: function x, it gets executed by Acrobat Reader 2.1, Firefox, fuzzycalc and Darly's Printshop. So the person who implements it can test it with these applications that make use of it.

Strictly speaking, you're right, but that data is fairly easily accessable. For example, here's a tiny script that'll give you said information (just feed it a +relay trace), I just wrote it in the span of a few minutes. It could be useful to integrate such data with the AppDB.

I understand that a function does not need to be 100% implemented. But think about a sponsor who says: I want to sponsor dll x. Or: My program WAccounting uses these 5 API calls, I want this program to run perfect under Wine, what does it cost me?

In general, people don't seem to care about how much of a DLL is implemented, they care about if their programs foo, baz and bar work. Most of the major investments into Wine have been to make a particular program (or set of programs) work, such as Google with Picasa (list of patches), or Corel with Wordperfect and CorelDRAW (until Microsoft threw a large chunk of money at them).

In a similar vein, Codeweavers offers porting services for Wine, ie, they'll make a particular application work, and they can give you an estimate of how much it'll cost, on a case by case basis.

What also motivates people is to see a kind of progress bar. I mean a automated script that indicates how much stubs and so on are in there.

I agree that people like progress bars (so do I), but they can be deceptive. For example, the Wine status pages have an automated script that guesses the completion status of all DLLs based on the contents of the .spec file for each DLL, but this isn't always accurate. For example, the .spec files don't seem to contain all functions for a given DLL, (I'd guess any COM functions aren't in there, as they're special, AFAIK), and while the automated tool thinks that d3d8 and d3d9 are 40% and 20% completed, respectively, the actual case is closer to 95% in both cases, based upon developer inspection.

I also would like to get informed how to debug an application with Wine. The documentation is heavily outdated and imcomplete here. WINEDEBUG=+relay is intresting, I tried it out. But the documentation is not very informative here.

Here's the complete list of WINEDEBUG channels, as well as some useful registry keys, and a debugging tutorial. Generally when you're debugging something, WINEDEBUG can be very useful with the right channels selected.

My perception is that we will get
- almost perfect DirectX games support
- very good installer and crypto support.
because here it really does scale but wine development did not scale that much over the past years.

Actually, as I menti

It's not about repeating the "party line" (to be honest, I don't think there is one), I'm not really a Wine developer either (although I've had 2 small patches committed), I'm just presenting the situation the way I see it.

Currently I can't say: function x, it gets executed by Acrobat Reader 2.1, Firefox, fuzzycalc and Darly's Printshop. So the person who implements it can test it with these applications that make use of it.

Strictly speaking, you're right, but that data is fairly easily accessable. For example, here's a tiny script that'll give you said information (just feed it a +relay trace), I just wrote it in the span of a few minutes. It could be useful to integrate such data with the AppDB.

I understand that a function does not need to be 100% implemented. But think about a sponsor who says: I want to sponsor dll x. Or: My program WAccounting uses these 5 API calls, I want this program to run perfect under Wine, what does it cost me?

In general, people don't seem to care about how much of a DLL is implemented, they care about if their programs foo, baz and bar work. Most of the major investments into Wine have been to make a particular program (or set of programs) work, such as Google with Picasa (list of patches), or Corel with Wordperfect and CorelDRAW (until Microsoft threw a large chunk of money at them).

In a similar vein, Codeweavers offers porting services for Wine, ie, they'll make a particular application work, and they can give you an estimate of how much it'll cost, on a case by case basis.

What also motivates people is to see a kind of progress bar. I mean a automated script that indicates how much stubs and so on are in there.

I agree that people like progress bars (so do I), but they can be deceptive. For example, the Wine status pages have an automated script that guesses the completion status of all DLLs based on the contents of the .spec file for each DLL, but this isn't always accurate. For example, the .spec files don't seem to contain all functions for a given DLL, (I'd guess any COM functions aren't in there, as they're special, AFAIK), and while the automated tool thinks that d3d8 and d3d9 are 40% and 20% completed, respectively, the actual case is closer to 95% in both cases, based upon developer inspection.

I also would like to get informed how to debug an application with Wine. The documentation is heavily outdated and imcomplete here. WINEDEBUG=+relay is intresting, I tried it out. But the documentation is not very informative here.

Here's the complete list of WINEDEBUG channels, as well as some useful registry keys, and a debugging tutorial. Generally when you're debugging something, WINEDEBUG can be very useful with the right channels selected.

My perception is that we will get
- almost perfect DirectX games support
- very good installer and crypto support.
because here it really does scale but wine development did not scale that much over the past years.

Actually, as I menti

Am I the only person who believes that WINE has their priorities screwed up??? You can't run any recent version of M$-Office

See, it's like this. The WINE project is made up of a bunch of volunteers who work on the things they want to work on. Some of those guys want to work on the 3D stuff.

You wish that they would prioritize Office. Well, that makes sense to me, but I can't tell all those volunteers what to do, and I'm not going to volunteer myself to work on it.

So, meantime, you can pay for Crossover, which runs Office. Office 97 and Office 2000 are both "gold", and Office XP is "silver". "gold" is the hightest level Crossover uses. (I predict that the next release of Crossover will probably run Office 2007, but the current one doesn't.)

Some day WINE will get around to Office so you could use the free version of WINE.

I bought Crossover a few times. It did work, but I was frustrated by performance issues (CPU would go to 100% more often than I liked).

My next Linux desktop computer is going to be stuffed full of RAM and is going to run Windows XP under VirtualBox. That way I can run my few remaining Windows apps without the pain of rebooting. VirtualBox is free.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/
http://www.virtualbox.org/

But who would buy it? The same reasons not to buy and run Windows (whatever they are) also apply to Office

The same people who buy CrossOver from CodeWeavers which allows people to run MS Office on both Linux and Mac OSX, or use WINE for the same purpose. Being a commercial port of WINE it runs a bunch of Windows software. It's not needed for Macs but I may get it to run Photoshop on Linux. First I'll tryout FOOS apps like Inkscape, Cinepaint, and others.

Or think Crossover: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/

At the level you present it, this is not generally true. Office works fine... If the most recent version of office you wish to run is Office 2000. According to the codeweavers website, Word 2003 has "bronze" status, which means: bronze applications generally have enough bugs that we recommend that our customers not depend on their functionality. This isn't good enough for people who use more recent versions of office regularly.

For Visio, you could try running it with the commercial version of Wine, Codeweavers' CrossoverOffice. Visio 2000 has silver status, Visio 2002 and 2003 have bronze status.

Look at the first image you posted. See the CrossOver menu item? http://www.codeweavers.com/products/

The commercial flavor of WINE is being developed for OS X. It's called CrossOver, and it's developed by CodeWeavers, the same company which produces the commercial variant of WINE for Linux.

The commercial flavor of WINE is being developed for OS X. It's called CrossOver, and it's developed by CodeWeavers, the same company which produces the commercial variant of WINE for Linux.

Some versions of the Windows client works with Crossover Office. To see which: http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/gr oup/?app_parent=2317;

Yes, customers could purchase and install the Codeweavers Crossover Linux version of Wine for $39.95. I have used it for about 5 years now under various versions of Linux including Ubuntu. It was originally called CrossOver Office, but was recently renamed Crossover Linux. At different times I have used it to run either Microsoft Office 97 or Office 2000 and a couple of other Windows programs. However, despite having Microsoft Office insalled, I have a various times, mostly used the free Linux versions of Open Office, Koffice, Abiword and Gnumeric instead.

I haven't yet tried it on Ubuntu or Kubuntu 7.04 yet, but presumably it would be easy to install and use. Of course not all Windows software will run under Wine (or Crossover Linux) so perhaps it would be best for Dell to not to include it with their computers. Otherwise, perhaps they would get too many technical support calls from new Linux users trying to run their favorite, but not compatible, Windows programs. Of course customers could still install that on their own, but hopefully, having selected and installed it themselves, they will know enough to realize the limitations to the selection of Windows programs that Wine (or Crossover Linux) can and can't run.

For the majority of their software they should go ahead and make the switch to using Linux substitutes for their favorite programs. Fortunately with Ubuntu, there is an amazing alternate universe of hundreds of free software programs written for Linux, just waiting to be downloaded and installed, using the Synaptic package manager.

Crossover Linux

Wine as a Windows replacement is hard to set up, largely incompatible and the wrong solution for more than one or two applications.

where credit is due? Namely, CodeWeavers? I agree that the TransGaming/Cedega crew has acted objectionably and their product is questionable. CodeWeavers are a much better example of OSS stewardship with a product that I think is actually worthwhile *and* worth supporting.

I'm all for railing as much as anyone else, but if you're going to slam a company and there is another doing exactly what you feel the first should be doing, giving that other company credit is always a nice thing to do. :)

Crossover supports Windows IE very well, under both Linux and OS X.

Wine http://www.winehq.com/ should do it ok for free, used it in crossover from codeweavers, http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/ca t?cat_id=33 that works ok, if you like you can download a linux VM ware image http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/ and vmware player http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ for windows to test it out without having to play around with the live cd or have to restart.

If you want to test crossover theres always the *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* ways of getting it for free.

Have you tried Turbo Tax with WINE ( http://www.winehq.org/ ) or CrossOver Office ( http://www.codeweavers.com/ ) which is based on WINE? Also you could use Parallels ( http://www.parallels.com/ ), VMware ( http://www.vmware.com/ ), or QEMU (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) to run windows as a guest system so you could have Turbo Tax. Also if you use Quicken you could run it in one of those as well, or move to a software like Moneydance ( http://www.moneydance.com/ ). I moved from Quicken to Moneydance and it transfered all my data quite nicely and works on Win/Lin/OSX natively.

Just some Ideas,

> Nobody wants to run Office under Linux because we've been there and it sucked.

It worked fine for me when I tried it. That was a number of years ago, but I doubt there have been any major regressions and http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/gr oup/?app_id=17 suggests there haven't been. Making WINE config files by hand is error-prone, and standard WINE eschews short-term hacks to make programs work for long-term codebase maintainability, so if you were using WINE and found it wanting, CrossOver Office would probably have been a better choice.

Seriously, man, Office on Linux has been a solved problem for many years now.

> These people know *exactly* what they're doing. We have Nobel Prize winners here.

Well, since there's no Nobel Prize for computer science, that doesn't mean much as far as computer competence goes. And even Turing Award winners don't necessarily know what they're doing if they're from the theory side :)

> [cut patronizing crap]

And so should you. Nowhere did I suggest you viewed Linux as an end in itself.

I'd highly recommend you have a look at Crossover which is a nice wrapper to Wine that makes running and installing Windows prorgams much easier, however you're still bound by Wine's compatability.

Outside of that, maybe you should check out Ubuntu. I've tried both, and I can easily attest to the fact that Samba under Ubuntu is a breeze (just select the folders you want to share, and you're good to go!).

If you don't mind paying a lot of the things you ask for will run under crossover.

Here is some help for your software needs

Kind of makes me want to move overseas so I can work with a good stable OS

If you can't figure out how to use wine, I would suggest crossover http://www.codeweavers.com/products/.

Seems to work in Wine for me; I tested with wine-0.9.29+.

Note that you should install the Windows version
of either IE or Firefox before installing PureEdge Viewer,
since it's mostly a browser plugin.

The PureEdge Viewer installer requires but does not
bundle an msvc runtime library, MSVCP60.dll. To work
around this, download VC6RedistSetup_enu.exe from
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/259403 and run it. This
creates the file vcredist.exe, an installer for msvcp60.dll.
But you probably have to run winecfg and pick "win98"
before running vcredist.exe, else it will think you don't
need that file.

I didn't install Firefox first, and learned about the
plugin by reading the PureEdge Viewer readme in
~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/PureEdge/Viewer\ 6.0/Readme/readme_en_US.txt
so I ran and installed Windows Firefox 1.5.0.8 in Wine, then did
cp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/PureEdge/Viewer\ 6.0/Plugin/npmfv.dll
      ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/plugins/
and restarted Firefox, and verified that the new plugin
showed up in about:plugins. It seemed to work fine, i.e.
when I downloaded an application from grants.gov using
Windows Firefox in Wine, Firefox offered to display
it using the PureEdge plugin, and it seemed to let me
edit the right fields.
But I've never used it before, and I only just barely
tested it, so there are probably problems lurking.

For completeness, Wine's page about PureEdge Viewer is at
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=2073
Crossover's page about it is at
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/na me?app_id=2179
- Dan Kegel

I went ahead and tried installing the Loki installer version of CrossOverLinux 6.0.0.1 just now and have been getting an error message. On my AMD-64 computer I have the AMD-64 versions of both Ubuntu and Kubintu installed (the packages for both). The Codeweavers webpage claims the the Loki installer version will work under any version of Linux. That is the how I always installed it in the the past. I verified the md5sum of what I had downloaded and then tried to run the installation shell script. Below is what I typed in to run their usual installation shell script along with the messages that I got afterwards:

I am not sure if it is really going to work on the AMD-64 version of Ubuntu or not. I got the impression from their web page that it would work, although they don't seem to specifically say the AMD-64 version of Ubuntu or Kubuntu. I am not sure what the 32bit compatability libraries are.

Not that it's chock full of details, there's the "Choosing the right Wine-based solution" section of this page:

    http://www.codeweavers.com/products/differences/

"What sort of works:
iTunes 4 will install and run, but you are prohibited by Apple from using it with the iTunes store, which severely constrains its usefulness. We hope to support a newer version of iTunes in a future release of CrossOver."

Several version of QuickBooks are listed as 'bronze', meaning they will at least install and run. If you look under 'known issues,' do you know what you see? Nothing.

If you want to run QuickBooks under Crossover, try it. If it has a problem, then tell them about it.

now I think they're doomed to fail due to bad direction from their management.

Somehow I suspect you're just trolling. If you knew anything about Codeweavers, or had even tried the software, you should know that they determine which applications to support based on customer demand. Granted, some apps are probably too difficult to be worth the effort, which would be a judgment call, but by and large their 'direction' comes from the bottom up rather than dictated by a pointy-hair type.

That's not really true - Cedega discloses their source code for some parts (e.g. their direct3D code), but the license used is not at all an Open Source (or Free Software) license. But ignoring that, some essential parts (like the copy protection implementation) are not provided except in binary form. To be fair, their agreement with the copy protection software company probably doesn't allow source disclosure of those parts.

Crossover Office does have provide the code used in their version of Wine: have a look at http://www.codeweavers.com/products/source/

Codeweavers sells a product which called CrossOver Linux which makes it possible to run Windows Media Player 6.4 under Linux. Codeweavers only gives Windows Media Player 6.4 a silver rating for how it runs under Linux. The European Union's Frequently Asked Questions page says that we need to use Microsoft Media Player version 6.4 or higher, so version 6.4 should be good enough. It doesn't even sound like they will let a Linux user try to use a possible solution like that. They are not correct in their assertion that there is no legal way for a Linux user to play the content.

My knowledge of law is limited, but my understanding is that the legality of some of this may not have been fully challenged or explored in the courts. It may also depend on which country the computer user happens to be in. No company has offered to sell any Linux software for viewing their proprietary codecs, so many Linux users find their only choice to be to downloaded use the possibly illegal codecs. In this case the Linux users are trying to view public documents, it is not like they are trying to steal copyrighted material. Why should the EU even care?

The EU's web page has public information that should be available to all voters. Because these are important public records, they should offer users a choice of formats. They should allow users to choose between using the closed-source proprietary Microsoft format and an open-standards format such as Ogg.

Codeweavers sells a product which called CrossOver Linux which makes it possible to run Windows Media Player 6.4 under Linux. Codeweavers only gives Windows Media Player 6.4 a silver rating for how it runs under Linux. The European Union's Frequently Asked Questions page says that we need to use Microsoft Media Player version 6.4 or higher, so version 6.4 should be good enough. It doesn't even sound like they will let a Linux user try to use a possible solution like that. They are not correct in their assertion that there is no legal way for a Linux user to play the content.

My knowledge of law is limited, but my understanding is that the legality of some of this may not have been fully challenged or explored in the courts. It may also depend on which country the computer user happens to be in. No company has offered to sell any Linux software for viewing their proprietary codecs, so many Linux users find their only choice to be to downloaded use the possibly illegal codecs. In this case the Linux users are trying to view public documents, it is not like they are trying to steal copyrighted material. Why should the EU even care?

The EU's web page has public information that should be available to all voters. Because these are important public records, they should offer users a choice of formats. They should allow users to choose between using the closed-source proprietary Microsoft format and an open-standards format such as Ogg.

A couple of years ago TurboLinux 10F was being sold for $69.00 in the U.S. and came with the Cyberlink's PowerDVD software for Linux with support for most Windows Media codecs up to version 9. According to this review, it does it does so in way that was legal and completely licensed.

TurboLinux 10F Review

Codeweavers sells a slightly enhanced version of WINE called Crossover Linux which, among other things, allows Linux users to run various Windows plugins. It allows Linux users to run Windows Media Player 6.4, although I am not sure just how well it does that. If a Linux user is using Windows Media Player 6.4 under Crossover Linux, they should be allowed to view the EU's streaming service.

To be equally fair to all voters, they should also offer their streaming audios or videos in an alternative format such as Ogg Theora. Here is an example of a web page that offers the choice of viewing some videos in either Flash or Ogg. I am using Linux and when I clicked on one of the Ogg links the video began to play perfectly. On most Linux computers the Flash version would also probably work, although the 64-bit version of Macromedia Flash for Linux has not yet been released. I am using the AMD-64 version of Kubunutu Linux without Flash, so I watched the Ogg video instead. If the EU included an Ogg version of their videos, they would then definitely be able to support Linux in a legal way. In a democracy, all voters should be given equal access to public government information. To achieve equal access for all voters, they should make the slight extra effort to include a version of their streaming audios or videos in some other format such as something like Ogg.

I'd settle for crossover support rather than supporting the game on OSX natively. Less code to manage too.

I'd rather see Windows software natively running on Macs in OSX than in a vm running Windows or in Crossover Mac. Get rid of the extra overhead. I am switching from Windows to Macs specifically because I don't want to have to deal with Activation and WGA in Windows. Let me run Windows apps in Mac without a vm. Crossover Mac allows you to do this however not all Windows software is supported or works.

20 or so years of MS Office dominance has created an enormous legacy of files. Nothing will be ever accepted as a competitor in business unless there is a 100% backwards compatability with ms docs

That can't happen because of vba (visual basic for applications - the cut down version of VB6 that essentially turns Ms Office into a development environment in the hands of people like me).

You may be able to read and write compatable excel docs - but can you open the attached compiled vba, complete with api function calls and active x components and make it do something sensible on a mac?)

This is Especially true now that Ms have announced discontinuation of vba emulation in future OSX versions

Most Linux distros don't even have the relevant codecs, and while you can get them, how many people *want* to spend their time that way?

Besides, the multimedia applications themselves are simply not of the same quality.

And this is an evolving area: even Microsoft has trouble keeping up with iTunes (Windows Media Player, for example, has no RSS/podcast support)

and the Linux stuff is nowhere near.

And, of course, iTunes won't run on Linux while it will run on XP.

You think, these days, people want a system that can't play MP3s or DVDs out of the box

a system that can't sync with a portable MP3 player easily?

You think they want to mooch over to YouTube and find they can't watch the vids, because they have't got Flash. (And some geek telling them to install Wine so they can use Flash just won't walk.)

But non-enthusiast home users? No way. Maybe the odd person who only does web and email, but that's not the norm now.

Another useful Linux program that I forgot to mention is "CrossOver Linux." It is not free, but is a more user friendly version of WINE that is optimized to allow certain Windows office software programs to be run under Linux. It doesn't work with all versions of all Windows software, but in the past, I have used it to run Microsoft Office 97 and Office 2000 under Linux. I was using an old version of Red Hat Linux at the time, but it should also work with Ubuntu.

Cedega is another non-free version of WINE. It is designed to allow some Windows games to run under Linux. I am not a gamer and have not tried it, so I don't know much about it. I have heard that both products as well as the normal free version of WINE can all be installed at once without interfering with each other. If you know how to use old DOS commands and have some old DOS games that you want to play, you could download the Linux version of the free DOSBox program and run your old DOS games inside that.

One program that a desktop Linux user won't need is a virus scanner. There have never been any actively circulating Linux viruses, that is a Windows only problem. There are actually a few free and a few commercial virus scanners for Linux. If someone is running a Linux based mail server it might be useful to use one of those to protect your more vulnerable Windows clients from infected email attachments.

you are not allowed, for instance, to install CodeWeavers http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/ [codeweavers.com] for them to see MS Office inside Linux, or Transgaming's Cedega http://www.transgaming.com/index.php?module=Conten tExpress&file=index&func=display&ceid=29 .... That he will save money, by not having to pay for the expensive MS OS ...

Oh boy, are linuxers naive...

Let me paint you this very real picture (someone I know): you own a computer store. You do have Linux on some machines. Customers come in, they look at it. They're curious. Oh, so this is "Linux" (notice? they've heard of it; they might even know it's open source - the term free software, in English, I'm not so sure is a good one - it sounds unprofessional.). They want to know if they can still have MS Office. Can their kids play games? Windows games?

But here's where things start to go wrong: you are not allowed, for instance, to install CodeWeavers http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/ for them to see MS Office inside Linux, or Transgaming's Cedega http://www.transgaming.com/index.php?module=Conten tExpress&file=index&func=display&ceid=29 so their kids can play games. You are not allowed to do that, because Microsoft has you under a draconian contract. You do that, you're dead meat.

There's no way you can prove to Joe Dad that he doesn't need Windows, but that he can still have the Windows software he needs. That he will save money, by not having to pay for the expensive MS OS, and that he will gain in security, and save in antivirus software. In fact, your deal with Microsoft may even specify that if you even suggest that, you'll be in breach of contract.

To make matters worse, Microsoft (and Intel, BTW), will shove you a lot of money to promote your store (as long as you flash their brand names), even give you money for advertising.

So, you see, this is not such a simple world where "the best technology wins" or "as long as we have standards." This is much more than that, it's a marketing game. Linux, PC-BSD, etc, will have to start with the corporate desktop, where money matters. Unfortunately, Windows users are in a deadlock, because the FLOSS community has not been able to come up with competitive Office solutions (please, do not say OpenOffice.org is that solution - people who say that have no idea what they're talking about), including integration with the said hypothetical suite.

Several years ago, I used the Textmaker wordprocessor and the Planmaker spreadsheet on my old 266 MHz Pentium II. They are both now part of SoftMaker Office. The computer could dual-boot between Windows and Linux, so I used a version of Textmaker and Planmaker in each OS. Textmaker and Planmaker would start up in about a second or two, while OpenOffice would take about 40 seconds. Other Linux wordprocessors such as Abiword, Gnumeric and KOffice also opened up quickly on that computer. I also used the Codeweavers CrossoverOffice (now known as Crossover Wine) to run Office 97 under Linux. Office 97 was fast too. Only OpenOffice seemed to be so bloated, although it performed well and was nice once it finally eventually finished loading.

On the computer that I use now, I have a 2.2 GHz AMD 64 3800+ processor and OpenOffice opens up in about 9 seconds which is OK, I guess. Abiword or Gnumeric opens up in about 2 seconds. I am not sure if I will bother trying Softmaker Office on this computer or not.

Several years ago I got stuck with the unpaid job of doing a monthly newsletter for a small singles club. It was several pages long in multi-column format with clipart and photos. At one time or another I had used Microsoft Word 97, Microsoft Publisher, OpenOffice and Textmaker to do the newsletter. Of those choices, I found Word 97 to be the hardest to use. For one thing it was the only one that did not have frames. Without frames pictures and everything kept moving around whenever I edited anything. Sometimes I would backspace or delete a line and then the size of text in a nearby paragraph would also unexpectedly change. At times, the spacing would change slightly when I had created the newsletter on one computer and then later tried to print it out on another computer with a different version of Word, different printer and different printer driver. I never did like doing the newsletter with Word, but was quite happy doing it at various times with Microsoft Publisher, OpenOffice Writer and Textmaker. I never did reach a final decision about which of those other choices was best. I finally gave my unpaid job of doing the newsletter to someone else.

Unfortunately, SoftMaker is only a Word and Excel replacement, and for many users, the level of Word and Excel support in OpenOffice, Abiword, or Gnumeric is probably more than they need. Sure, SoftMaker may have better support for the really complicated Word and Excel formats (see their comparison page for some examples), but how many people really come across 3-d graphics in everyday life?

The bigger problem for most people is PowerPoint slide decks, especially the ones generated by marketing departments that have sound and animation. This is where the shortcomings of OpenOffice hit me the hardest --- and unfortunately, SoftMaker doesn't have a solution. So is it worth it to pay USD $70 for a Word and Excel replacement which is more complete than what is currently available in the OSS world? Not for me. I'd much rather spend $40 for a copy of Crossover Office from Codeweavers and then get an old copy of Office 97 or Office 2000 that I have lying around (or which you can no doubt buy on Ebay for a relatively small change).

Bootcamp? Good grief! Go download the Crossover Mac beta, and install IE 6 from inside. Crossover does all the work to download and install IE, and even simulates a reboot when finished. Now, just run IE from your desktop.

People WANT TO BUY Photoshop.

They do not want to learn GIMP.

People want to buy nvidia and ATI video cards.

They do not care about binary blobs.

And they do not want to be educated about how evil closed source is.

They will never look at the source. If they did they would never understand it.

OS/X gives people the choice to buy the stuff they want instead of hoping that someone will write it.

Just what percentage of people compile FireFox for Windows?

What is the ratio of source to binary downloads?

CrossOver Office is basically a pre-configured Wine plus some installers and tech support, done by people whose priorities include making it properly handle specific high-profile apps like Office. Nothing against it -- I've been a satisfied customer since somewhere around version 2, and CodeWeavers are major backers of the Wine project -- just pointing out it's the same technology that the GP already tried.

If Wine won't run Office at all on his machine, CrossOver won't help. If it's a configuration issue, though, it'll probably work.

Also useful is their compatibility database. Office 2000 and Office 97 are rated gold, Office XP is rated silver, and Office 2003 is rated bronze.

This is something I've really wanted to look into. However, I'd be curious if someone could get a sort of benchmark comparison of VS .NET 2003 development environment in a)Boot Camp b)Crossover Mac or c) Parallels

What is the trade-off on speed/functionality with virtualization/WINE-based?

One of the articles said the typical attachment is "a Microsoft Office file that exploits a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability." A Linux user who receives a Microsoft Word file would open it with something like Open Office Writer, AbiWord, KOffice or TextMaker. In rare cases he or she might use some version of Microsoft Word that is running under the Codeweaver's Crossover Office version of Wine. I wonder how the use of an alternative office application running under the alternative operating system would affect the chances of sucess? My guess is that the chances of a sucessful exploit would be much lower.

In a targeted attack there is always the possibility that the user could be convinced to do something stupid that would work. But even so, it would be significantly more difficult than with Windows, not that most businesses are going to switch to Linux or Mac OS X on the desktop anytime soon anyway.

Yes, Crossover Office also has an application database, although it's called a "Compatibility Center".