On Sat, 2004-10-16 at 19:29 -0500, Jim Isbell wrote:
I can't do that. There are programs I need and I
cannot just take a
chance that "maybe it will work" My main concerns are Adobe PDF
creator, Adobe Photo Shop, Netscape, and particularly Easy Office 2001
which contains all my data in Easy Spreadsheet files that are not
compatible with Excel (even though they are supposed to be).
Have a look at:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php
I've just started using Wine recently for running Paint Shop Pro under
(it was the only thing left for which there wasn't a viable Linux
alternative) and I'm *really* impressed. It was easy to get going and
the speed feels about 90% of native Windows, which isn't half bad.
I believe Photoshop runs happily; I'm not sure about the others
(Netscape you can just run under Linux surely, or use a different
browser?)
I can network the old and new computers ( I already
have the LAN in
operation with two MS OS computers on it) then I could download all my
files and programs into the new computer....IF I COULD BE SURE that they
would work with the Lindows OS. Spending $49 to try what might be a
failure is NOT an option.
Why pay money for something you can download (legally! :-) for free?
Then either install to your second machine, or install to a seperate
hard disk in your main machine to try it out (as you're a new Linux
user, just take your disk with Windows on it out just to make sure you
don't accidentally overwrite anything)
Red Hat (Fedora) is reckoned to be pretty good for people new to Linux.
Most distributions support installing over the web if you don't fancy
downloading a local copy.
Do some reading from
http://www.tldp.org/ for useful 'how to use Linux'
info.
Also
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major compares some of
the major distributions.
Note that Wine will run on any Linux distribution (I use Slackware here,
but I wouldn't recommend it for someone used to Windows as nearly all of
the configuration is command line)
cheers
Jules