[Gloucs] Getting rid of Windoze

[Guy Edwards]

Hi,

Just going to add to Steve/Thomas's explanations of things....
(snips all the way through, just bear with me where I miss them out,
it's late at night...)

On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 00:01 +0000, Thomas Adam wrote:
[snip]
> Email clients, I use mutt.  Thunderbird is heavy.  Others that exist are
> Evolution and Sylpheed.  I have used the latter many times, and it is
> very fast, and featureful, without having the 100 second startup time of
> Thunderbird.

Evolution is extremely similar in appearance to outlook, but the search
options are more intuitive than Outlook. You could probably stick most
employee/relations who have been using outlook at a simple level in
front of evolution and they wouldn't notice.

> > I use dreamweaver for webdesign ?
> 
> That's nice.  You might be interested therefore in using 'nvu' which is
> supposedly similar to it. I use [g]vim.  Others that exist are 'Amaya',
> and 'BlueFish'.

I thought your best comparison here will be Quanta, but I've not heard
of or used nvu. I'm guessing we're after the almost "frontpage" style of
web design rather than writing the actual HTML, Quanta will let you do
that if you want. I've not seen anything on Linux that I thought was a
direct comparison to Dreamweaver. If you've used "Homesite" (I think it
was originally made by Alliare?) which Macromedia bought and
incorporated, then Quanta is very very similar to that.

Macromedia were talking about releasing their suite of products for
Linux if the demand was high enough so maybe before the end of this year
they might do something.

> > I use Adobe Photoshop & Macromedia Fireworks anything similar ?
> The 'Gimp' is like photoshop.  'Dia' might be like Fireworks, I'm unsure.

I'd compare Gimp to Paint Shop Pro, with extra features above PSP like
you might find in Photoshop. 
Dia is Visio on a budget. Fireworks is different, I've not used it so
I'm not going to try and compare it to something.

[snip]
> > Is it all "user-friendly" ie. no command line stuff ?

All the things mentioned so far are "user friendly". There's no need to
use the command line for what has been mentioned BUT the Linux comamnd
line is not MS DOS, it's not something to try and avoid. as you use
Linux you'll find you increasingly use the command line, not because
there's no GUI for the same command, but because as your skills
increase, you can perform tasks usually much faster with the command
line. 

> > How do i install upgrades to firefox/thunderbird for example ?

Upgrades are typically done centrally for the entire distribution, think
"windows update" but for everything installed on your machine. 
Redhat, Mandrake, SUSE are there any distributions without a GUI front
end to the update process? I thought even Debian had one now. It's
really painless.

> > What about a good FTP client / Firewall / Antivirus / Instant
> > Messaging ?

FTP client - 2nding Steves suggestion of try Gftp, it's nice and pretty
and easy to use.
Firewall - Redhat and Suse have pretty firewall GUI configurators, as
does Mandrake, you don't need to add on an external firewall like in
Windows, Like Thomas was making out, IPtables is there on every modern
Linux system. I know the last SUSE install I did asked questions and set
it up on install.

Antivirus - err... there's no need. There are some antivirus packages
but you use them for checking Samba (windows file and print) shares or
for filtering email destined for windows workstations. You can install
rootkit detection software, thats probably the closet, but you're not
going to receive an attachment in evolution/mutt/thunderbird and find it
automatically runs and takes over the system.

Guy


-- 
Guy Edwards <guy_j_edwards at hotpop.com>









------- liniux virus attached ---------
#!/bin/bash
# please copy this to a file 
# and make it executable

echo "infected"
echo "please send me to your contacts"

----------------------------------------