I provide independently-contracted end-user support for a variety of users, from home users to commercial installations. When the use cases suggest an easy transition (usage as a web and word processing terminal, no need for Windows-only software), I have been migrating users to a customized Ubuntu Linux derivative distribution. In some cases, rather than repairing Windows 98 or (especially) ME systems, it is useful to suggest such a migration, as the benefits (a like-new system performance, virus and spyware-proofing, nearly user-proof:D) outweigh the advantages of repairing the old system (familiarity - which is mostly lost when a system is seriously in need of repair anyway). I think there is definitely a market for non-zealot-based installations of Linux where dissatisfied or mis-served users of Win 98 or ME fit specific use cases, and I've found success with this strategy.
HughesNet (formerly DirecPC) and WildBlue both offer two-way, self-hosted (their satellite modem just has a standard ethernet jack to connect to) systems. In my experience with it, latency is high (around dialup levels or sometimes a little bit slower even), but bandwidth can vary from so-so (on an unknown HughesNet contract) to pretty good but below advertised (for the WildBlue system that was supposed to be 1.5 mbits down)
Probably not the only one, but it's fairly easy to see if you make sure you are actually looking at Sugar screenshot (hint: it's all tabbed) instead of the picture of the prototype (which ran Fedora and GNOME last time I looked).
Nevermind RTF is universally-readable and designed to be so (rather than just a modification of a single application's internal format), documented, and already used for interchange between word processors by many people... (It's even just marked up plaintext so you could say it's safe for archival...) It's just not the glamourous thing right now, possibly because it was Microsoft's idea in the first place many years ago.
Ahh well, AbiWord supports both, on Windows, Linux, and Mac. For those who just use word-processing and like both speed and functionality, the requirement for office has already been removed.:) www.abisource.com
Well, I'm not sure about the other features (though they can be written, probably most easily as plugins), but AbiWord definitely has mathematical equation editing that works - it's MathML and LaTeX based, and basically surpasses all other word processors in this account for those with experience in math markup (no new language to learn!).
Check it out at www.abisource.com (and stop back in a few months for our real-time collaborative editing plugin, debuting with version 2.6.0 )
Closer to comparable (actually a fully-featured word processor with a collaboration feature in development and already useable if you like compiling) is AbiWord - cross-platform and all. But it doesn't run in a web browser, but natively on Mac, Linux, and Windows. It's my personal preference for word processors, which is why I got involved with it (several years ago already).
The RSS feed seems interesting, but perhaps a bit gimmicky... and AbiWord runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (all the places those compatible web-browsers run, plus Nokia 770 and OLPC), and will very soon (as in, it's almost done) have a real-time online collaboration feature as well...:D
And soon (as in next major stable release), AbiWord will not only be free, but will have a real-time online collaboration feature on top of a fully-featured, cross platform word processor, not just an AJAX word processor created for the sake of a collaboration feature.:D
AbiWord's collaboration-enabled 2.6 release will be out before OO.o and Word can catch up, almost certainly. And we have a secret project that will make it even more attractive...:)
Well, actually, they already don't do the UNIX philosophy - one monolithic suite, and several API's. Just because it runs on Unix doesn't mean that it's made like the rest of it.
Actually, since scripting isn't supported in AbiWord documents (writing plugins is the recommended way to do anything crazy that you can't script externally, as far as I know), the same isn't true for AbiWord.
AbiWord strips out macros and ignores them - a plus for security!:)
I use NSCopy for any decently-sized Windows File Sharing file transfer - it can copy a whole directory tree and throttle the speed down or up (to maximum "plaid") Just google for it, it's free.
If you want more speed, I'd say get FireZilla (an FTP client) and FireZilla Server (an easy to use FTP server), both open source and free. Set up the server on the "source" computer, and download as fast as you can! It will use the bandwidth much better.
One of the other suggestions about moving the hard drive would work too, but these are within your original constraint of improving network transfer performance. If you move the hard drive, use a text-mode (like xcopy) utility to copy from the command prompt - far faster than using Explorer.
OFX is no great leap forward - it's just a hacked up, somewhat non-compliant XML-alike. The standard "Quicken" format which hasn't really changed much since 97 (just went from 2 digit -> 4 digit dates) can carry most of that data, as far as I know.
(Yes, I've looked into this - I've contributed to www.divifund.com - an open-source budgeting tool for (at least) Linux and Windows)
Well, as far as I can tell, it actually loads your results in an iframe or something similar, since any aggressive web site will still do damage. Easy test - search for screensavers (a notably dangerous search) and see that it takes over your browser.
I've worked with a point to point link with 802.11b kit (now could probably use g), and compared to a leased line from the telephone company (we're talking spanning a village here), the speed was a great improvement. We had the added advantage of a skilled wireless technician who had done this before and knew the tricks - antennae relaying the signal on high public structures, talking with local radio stations to put another two dishes on their tower, so interference wasn't a problem, etc. We used Enterasys Roamabout systems and some standard enterprise routers - it's secure, just turn on security, mac filtering, and put the wireless link routers on their own subnet. (Add a VPN over the wireless for bonus points) However, since a high-power antenna like the ones we used will restrict the signal beam to literally a "point", unless someone managed to find their way between two of our dishes, we were just fine.
Good luck! This project worked well for us and was a lot cheaper and faster than a leased line.
Who says they've been rooted? Most of the problems that people have are basically the same ones over and over - TopRebates, MyWebSearch, that sort of thing. Every now and then a Nail, sometimes some old, well-detected CoolWebSearch. These aren't servers, or mission-critical systems, they're computers teenage girls use to IM. Do they need to work, yes. Do they have the most obscure variants of rootkit-powered viruses or spyware? Not usually.
And it's not hard to put something in $WINNT\system32. Yes, you should watch it if you're a server. If you're not, though, usually just a ADS scan then a manual look through the directory (sorted by date) should do the trick.
And that's not computing 101 - computing 101 is "Use Mozilla Firefox, don't download and install anything, if your siteadvisor button turns yellow or red get out, if you have questions please call me."
Computing 101 should not be paranoia. If a user's data and settings is so worthless that a wipe and re-install is a "first resort" or nearly so, then alternate methods of storage, or maybe an entirely different operating system is warranted. (Yes, I also do residential desktop Linux installation for some users)
I have heard that ODF spreadsheet specifications are very poor - they are based mostly on the ODF "writer" documents, and contain little to no information about the specification of formulas, standardized expected results, etc, and so are relatively worthless as an interchange format. Try Gnumeric ( http://www.gnumeric.org/ ) - open-source spreadsheet software that supports XLS, CSV, and so many other formats I've never even heard of.
Actually, in almost all cases, the system can be fully cleaned without a re-install, at least/especially if it's a Windows XP/2000 machine. There is just no automated tool to clean it out for you, so unless that's what you do day in and day out (like me) it can be tough to know what to do.
Give the recently-released Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) a shot - I was really pleasantly surprised compared to my past (think RH7) linux experiences - limited user accounts are "in" and logging in as root is not found - everything admin is done with a graphical "sudo" equivalent. Really slick.
No, don't do that! The "Ubuntu Way" is to use the upgrade manager, it will take care of upgrading you safely from 5.10 to 6.06, with all the little hitches taken care of automatically.
There (as of my last testing - flight 5 on Dell Inspiron 6000) have been a few issues with the X server and trackpads. If you search Launchpad.net (the Ubuntu bug tracker and other stuff) you should be able to find the bug report with a workaround - it was not terribly tough when I fixed it personally.
Slashdot Mirror
I like both Gnome (and Ubuntu) and Slackware. How? Specialization. Ubuntu on desktops, Slackware on servers. Each has their place.
I provide independently-contracted end-user support for a variety of users, from home users to commercial installations. When the use cases suggest an easy transition (usage as a web and word processing terminal, no need for Windows-only software), I have been migrating users to a customized Ubuntu Linux derivative distribution. In some cases, rather than repairing Windows 98 or (especially) ME systems, it is useful to suggest such a migration, as the benefits (a like-new system performance, virus and spyware-proofing, nearly user-proof :D) outweigh the advantages of repairing the old system (familiarity - which is mostly lost when a system is seriously in need of repair anyway). I think there is definitely a market for non-zealot-based installations of Linux where dissatisfied or mis-served users of Win 98 or ME fit specific use cases, and I've found success with this strategy.
HughesNet (formerly DirecPC) and WildBlue both offer two-way, self-hosted (their satellite modem just has a standard ethernet jack to connect to) systems. In my experience with it, latency is high (around dialup levels or sometimes a little bit slower even), but bandwidth can vary from so-so (on an unknown HughesNet contract) to pretty good but below advertised (for the WildBlue system that was supposed to be 1.5 mbits down)
Probably not the only one, but it's fairly easy to see if you make sure you are actually looking at Sugar screenshot (hint: it's all tabbed) instead of the picture of the prototype (which ran Fedora and GNOME last time I looked).
Nevermind RTF is universally-readable and designed to be so (rather than just a modification of a single application's internal format), documented, and already used for interchange between word processors by many people... (It's even just marked up plaintext so you could say it's safe for archival...) It's just not the glamourous thing right now, possibly because it was Microsoft's idea in the first place many years ago.
:) www.abisource.com
Ahh well, AbiWord supports both, on Windows, Linux, and Mac. For those who just use word-processing and like both speed and functionality, the requirement for office has already been removed.
--Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
Well, I'm not sure about the other features (though they can be written, probably most easily as plugins), but AbiWord definitely has mathematical equation editing that works - it's MathML and LaTeX based, and basically surpasses all other word processors in this account for those with experience in math markup (no new language to learn!).
Check it out at www.abisource.com (and stop back in a few months for our real-time collaborative editing plugin, debuting with version 2.6.0 )
--Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
Closer to comparable (actually a fully-featured word processor with a collaboration feature in development and already useable if you like compiling) is AbiWord - cross-platform and all. But it doesn't run in a web browser, but natively on Mac, Linux, and Windows. It's my personal preference for word processors, which is why I got involved with it (several years ago already).
--Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
The RSS feed seems interesting, but perhaps a bit gimmicky... and AbiWord runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (all the places those compatible web-browsers run, plus Nokia 770 and OLPC), and will very soon (as in, it's almost done) have a real-time online collaboration feature as well... :D
--Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
And soon (as in next major stable release), AbiWord will not only be free, but will have a real-time online collaboration feature on top of a fully-featured, cross platform word processor, not just an AJAX word processor created for the sake of a collaboration feature. :D
--Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
AbiWord's collaboration-enabled 2.6 release will be out before OO.o and Word can catch up, almost certainly. And we have a secret project that will make it even more attractive... :)
--Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
Well, actually, they already don't do the UNIX philosophy - one monolithic suite, and several API's. Just because it runs on Unix doesn't mean that it's made like the rest of it.
Actually, since scripting isn't supported in AbiWord documents (writing plugins is the recommended way to do anything crazy that you can't script externally, as far as I know), the same isn't true for AbiWord.
:)
AbiWord strips out macros and ignores them - a plus for security!
--Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
Actually Linux, a custom interface known as Sugar, and AbiWord - www.abisource.com - a specially-customized OLPC version is being worked on right now.
I use NSCopy for any decently-sized Windows File Sharing file transfer - it can copy a whole directory tree and throttle the speed down or up (to maximum "plaid") Just google for it, it's free.
If you want more speed, I'd say get FireZilla (an FTP client) and FireZilla Server (an easy to use FTP server), both open source and free. Set up the server on the "source" computer, and download as fast as you can! It will use the bandwidth much better.
One of the other suggestions about moving the hard drive would work too, but these are within your original constraint of improving network transfer performance. If you move the hard drive, use a text-mode (like xcopy) utility to copy from the command prompt - far faster than using Explorer.
Good luck!
OFX is no great leap forward - it's just a hacked up, somewhat non-compliant XML-alike. The standard "Quicken" format which hasn't really changed much since 97 (just went from 2 digit -> 4 digit dates) can carry most of that data, as far as I know.
(Yes, I've looked into this - I've contributed to www.divifund.com - an open-source budgeting tool for (at least) Linux and Windows)
Well, as far as I can tell, it actually loads your results in an iframe or something similar, since any aggressive web site will still do damage. Easy test - search for screensavers (a notably dangerous search) and see that it takes over your browser.
Oops, not so safe after all!
I've worked with a point to point link with 802.11b kit (now could probably use g), and compared to a leased line from the telephone company (we're talking spanning a village here), the speed was a great improvement. We had the added advantage of a skilled wireless technician who had done this before and knew the tricks - antennae relaying the signal on high public structures, talking with local radio stations to put another two dishes on their tower, so interference wasn't a problem, etc. We used Enterasys Roamabout systems and some standard enterprise routers - it's secure, just turn on security, mac filtering, and put the wireless link routers on their own subnet. (Add a VPN over the wireless for bonus points) However, since a high-power antenna like the ones we used will restrict the signal beam to literally a "point", unless someone managed to find their way between two of our dishes, we were just fine.
Good luck! This project worked well for us and was a lot cheaper and faster than a leased line.
Who says they've been rooted? Most of the problems that people have are basically the same ones over and over - TopRebates, MyWebSearch, that sort of thing. Every now and then a Nail, sometimes some old, well-detected CoolWebSearch. These aren't servers, or mission-critical systems, they're computers teenage girls use to IM. Do they need to work, yes. Do they have the most obscure variants of rootkit-powered viruses or spyware? Not usually.
And it's not hard to put something in $WINNT\system32. Yes, you should watch it if you're a server. If you're not, though, usually just a ADS scan then a manual look through the directory (sorted by date) should do the trick.
And that's not computing 101 - computing 101 is "Use Mozilla Firefox, don't download and install anything, if your siteadvisor button turns yellow or red get out, if you have questions please call me."
Computing 101 should not be paranoia. If a user's data and settings is so worthless that a wipe and re-install is a "first resort" or nearly so, then alternate methods of storage, or maybe an entirely different operating system is warranted. (Yes, I also do residential desktop Linux installation for some users)
That's assuming that google doesn't filter from the results what it can't understand/process. Are you sure openoffice can't open XLS?
Gnumeric ( http://www.gnumeric.org/ ) certainly can - supports all the functions Excel does plus a few extra (and a bazillion file formats).
I have heard that ODF spreadsheet specifications are very poor - they are based mostly on the ODF "writer" documents, and contain little to no information about the specification of formulas, standardized expected results, etc, and so are relatively worthless as an interchange format. Try Gnumeric ( http://www.gnumeric.org/ ) - open-source spreadsheet software that supports XLS, CSV, and so many other formats I've never even heard of.
Actually, in almost all cases, the system can be fully cleaned without a re-install, at least/especially if it's a Windows XP/2000 machine. There is just no automated tool to clean it out for you, so unless that's what you do day in and day out (like me) it can be tough to know what to do.
Give the recently-released Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) a shot - I was really pleasantly surprised compared to my past (think RH7) linux experiences - limited user accounts are "in" and logging in as root is not found - everything admin is done with a graphical "sudo" equivalent. Really slick.
You're certainly free to use Synaptic - it is installed by default with Ubuntu (no K) and likely works just fine in Kubuntu.
No, don't do that! The "Ubuntu Way" is to use the upgrade manager, it will take care of upgrading you safely from 5.10 to 6.06, with all the little hitches taken care of automatically.
There (as of my last testing - flight 5 on Dell Inspiron 6000) have been a few issues with the X server and trackpads. If you search Launchpad.net (the Ubuntu bug tracker and other stuff) you should be able to find the bug report with a workaround - it was not terribly tough when I fixed it personally.