Free Linux and OpenOffice - even if your email address doesn't

tonym wrote: Actually, the fun began after someone took exception to being told that there are free operating systems, and free office suites out there and kept bringing up all sorts of unrelated stuff such as how his company is a multi-billion dollar company and so forth, moving away from the topic of educational use, then going forth into how he wouldn't provide it for his wife and kids and how unless someone else was willing to provide him support for free... ... To clarify a few things here, I'm far from being an OS bigot, back in the day, I had my MCSE, and even went as far as getting an MCT - that's right a trainer certificate. If you really want to, I can scan'em in and post'em somewhere. And mind you, this was before the MCSE certs were worth less than toilet paper.... The days that guys who were flipping burgers started taking the classes and saying "So I hear this windows stuff can make me $80K a year" but couldn't figure out how to type is the day I dropped teaching those courses. Don't get me wrong, in the beginning, I too was impressed and lured by MSFT. I loved learning NT and w2k, as it was so much better than Netware - (yeah, had a CNE too) there were enjoyable things about them, hell, I even ran them on Alpha AXP hardware, which was the coolest thing since sliced bread. But as enjoyable as eating a T-Bone steak is, when the vendor insists on putting Ketchup on it when you'd rather have A1, then later switches from Ketchup to shit, you give up on it quickly. (The analogy is to bugs and limitations for those that don't get it.) So I'm far more qualified to say "Windows sucks" than most since I've done more than just use it, I've delved into its guts and had many years of windows sysadmining under my belt, and saw firsthand all of the fun of self-replicating programs spitting out "I Love you" emails to everyone in their address book, had lots of fun with failing RAID drives under windows, not due to hardware failure, but due to problems in the operating system, had lots of fun rebuilding failed systems that wouldn't boot by taking their registry files and moving them to another machine and so forth. At every step, as a sysadmin, I can testify that it is much easier to do things in any Unix than it is in windows. At least for someone that knows both OS's well. Yes, I can completely understand that a guy with just an MCSE is gonna be lost in the woods on a Unix machine if they've never seen it before, and the same is true of a Unix admin. However, give the same guys the same years of experience in both environments on equivalent areas, and they'll invariably gravitate to Unix every time. As the line goes "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." That and when people figured out you could telnet to port 138 (or whatever it happened to be) and send it a bunch of garbage it would cause the NT domain controller to crash, well, made my windows sysadmining go away very quickly. Mind you, there are a lot of good things in windows. NTFS was a very good file system, extfs3 still sucks in a lot of ways. But you know what, ZFS is much, much better though, although it's far more than a file system. Domains are much easier to use than NIS+ or NIS. That is until the domain database gets corrupted and gods all mighty, their corruption gets replicated to the BDC's. You're SOL then. Sure, you can restore a spare, powered off BDC which we turned on every so often so it could sync, but be kept off the network most of the time so it wouldn't get corrupted. Active Directory, perhaps even better than Domains, but it turns out to be not much more than LDAP married to Kerberos (of course entirely in a proprietary way.) Printing, especially Printer Pools is very well done, but so what, CUPS is very good these days. Beyond that, the rest is crap, and it's been getting worse, not better. Who the hell needs all that Activation BS? Who needs to reboot every other month? Who the hell needs layers and layers and layers of DRM? (see http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/ ) With almost every other OS out there, I can take the hard drive out, stick it in a similar machine and have it immediately just work when the hardware dies and not have to wait for a replacement to come back from IBM or whomever. With almost any other OS out there, I can boot off a live cd (no, not just Linux, but FreeBSD and Solaris have live CD's) and fix my problem and continue. You just can't do that with windows -- well, you could but you have to build an unsanctioned, and therefore license breaking Windows PE CD. Hell, even the Solaris install CD is bootable - I can do boot -s cdrom and be at a shell, mount my hard drive, run fsck or whatever I need to do and boot back up. Can't do that with windows. Yeah, there's that "Recovery console" thing when it works. Good luck when it doesn't though. But you know what else is really really cool, I can boot off a Live Linux CD, mount the windows disk and fix whatever is wrong with it. And yes, it recognizes NTFS drives just fine. That's right, I can use Linux to fix Windows. Can you use Windows to fix Linux? Never mind why would you want to, but can you? But, can you? Oh and gee, what if someone malicious locks out their Administrator account, whatever will you do then? Or worse if it's on a Domain? You could restore from backup - well if you had admin rights, darn, you'll just have to reinstall... oh wait, you don't have to. Boot up this: http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ live Linux CD, mount the drive and replace the administrator's password in C:\Windows\system32\SAM Oh, and to change the topic for a moment, back when I worked on a trade floor and the traders had their macro/VBA bloated Excel spreadsheets die on them because they got too huge and Excel refused to open them, guess how they were fixed when paid Microsoft support couldn't help (yes, this was for a multi-billion dollar company, and yes we had full support!) - why I opened the spreadsheet in OpenOffice, and resaved it, and that fixed the problem. I did this repeatedly for many different spreadsheets, and sometimes even "unrecoverable" Word documents. Wanna know why Office 2007 documents aren't compatible with Office 2000? Not because it can't be done, not because of new features (who the hell uses more than Office 95 had anyway?) but because MSFT wants your upgrade bucks to stay in business, oh that and it's afraid that since OpenOffice and AbiWord and KDE Office and the like can open the old formats, it'll take business away from them. Not technically, but the following line of text sure comes close: You would have gotten a hell of a lot less flames had you not said that, and provided all the high falutin whiny "multi-billion dollar company" and "REAL business world" condescension. What, you think no one else works for a multi-billion dollar company here, or that their companies can't afford to pay for support or pay to train their own guys to provide internal support? You think that people who run Linux and other Unix OS's all do it for shits & grins? That's why you got flamed. Many things have changed since then. Most current hardware in the range of the last 5 years "just works" on Linux. Yes, if you dig hard enough, you'll find the oddball unsupported piece of hardware - but if anything, those will have poor support for Windows. Your bad experiences of the past shouldn't cloud your judgment of it today. The fallacy that Linux isn't ready for the desktop expired years ago. The only thing that should prevent anyone from switching to Linux is that they absolutely must run a very specific piece of software which only runs on Windows. But we have fixes for that too. WINE, CrossOver Office, VMWare, VirtualBox, and many others. Stop drinking Microsoft's Kool-Aid and look around you. Your words would be far more believable were you upto date on your FreeBSD/Linux knowledge. Go give it another look. Calling us zealots and bigots without knowing how much we actually happen to know about windows is not going to win you any friends either. Hey, if you're gonna be hanging out a forum where geeks hang out, learn the proper geek social skills. Linux wasn't just the "in thing" years ago, it's still the "in thing" today. In fact, Unix has been the "in thing" for the last 30 years and runs on everything from small embedded tiny devices such as cell phones all the way to large super computers. If you look around, other than Windows, most large OS companies all sell some form of Unix or other. Yes, there's eCommStation (aka OS/2), but since it's no longer IBM's product, it's no longer provided by a large company. Yes, I know, there are still OpenVMS strongholds and I do respect it (I do have the hobbyist license for it for my Alpha Station 200.) But now that both Novell and Apple have gone to Unix, MSFT is the only one left behind. I'll resist the urge to add anything to the above line, no matter how hard it is. :-)