[LINK] Thanks .. and two new email client releases.

[Craig Sanders]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 01:38:31PM +0000, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> First, thanks to the *many* folk who replied, both on-list and off-list, 
> regarding many quite disgraceful issues experienced with the new laptop.
> (and yes, you are quite right Roger, I should /. the matter poste haste)  
> 
> So far, Lenovo have sent three emails, from different manager-type people,
> who certainly do appear to be treating these issues as important. As the

as an experiment, download the latest Ubuntu Live CD and see how that
runs on your laptop (no need to install it on the hard disk, it runs
off the CD). that should help tell you whether it's a hardware problem
or software. if you still get the weird screen blanking under linux,
then it's not the video driver or operating system.  OTOH, if it works
fine and especially if Ubuntu running off CD boots and runs faster than
Vista from the hard disk, then it's most likely driver problems (lack of
decent drivers for all sorts of things is a known issue with vista).


> machine, for business reasons, must run MYOB & Excell (so I can
> continue to pay employees, and maintain their tax and super records)
> and also run Windows to log the till/cash-drawer system) to avoid
> problems (haha) one needs to stay with Windows if possible. Otherwise
> I'd be running unix in a second. (The Lilo dual-boot (Win/Linux)
> from 1998 still never misses a beat). However, I will keep the lists
> informed regarding Lenovo progress.

there are several alternatives to Excel, including Open Office's
Spreadsheet and Gnumeric. unless your Excel spreadsheets make use of
Visual Basic macros, they will work perfectly under either of those...if
your spreadsheets make only light use of VB, the macros can be rewritten
to suit (it's not worth the effort if the ssheet makes heavy use of VB
macros)

MYOB should run under Wine[1], and definitely runs under Crossover
Office[2] (a commercial Windows emulator for linux, costs about $40 US,
free 30-day trial download available). alternatively, you could run
windows & MYOB under linux with vmware or xen or parallels or similar
virtualising environment.  there was a discussion about running MYOB under
linux on Whirlpool last October[3]

(BTW, apparently even the ATO's etax software runs under Wine if you
have the msttcorefonts package installed. i didn't know that until
today).

there are also several accounting applications, both commercial and
free software, for linux[4], including Ledger SMB[5]. you can read a
review[6] of SQL Ledger (which is what Ledger SMB was forked from).


if you want to escape windows entirely, i'd recommend trialing some
of these programs on a secondary machine running linux for at least a
few weeks or months - keep your accounts in both systems until you are
certain the new software can do what you need.






[1] http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=6921

[2] http://www.codeweavers.com/products/

[3] http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/385300.html

[4] http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Financial/Accounting/

[5] http://www.ledgersmb.org/

[6] http://specialreports.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/11/06/2129253



craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

"Don't take our word for it. Read the Bible itself. Read the
 statements of preachers. And you will understand that God is the
 most desperate character, the worst villain in all fiction."
           [E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]