[Preston] Hello

[Matthew T. Atkinson]

Andrew said:

> Got an ISA 56k one in the end - it's been fine.

That sounds like my dealings with www.novatech.co.uk, lol.  To everyone -
please avoid these 'people' at all cost.  Glad you got it sorted in the end.
However I have no ISA slots and limited funds so I suppose I'm stuck for a
whlie :).

> I've made do with Abiword/OO/KWord/vi and a canon BJC-4200 and survived,
> but admittedly get away without having to use office software that often
> - mostly just for CV's and when management need something in writing.
> Hoping to get away with TeX when I get back to uni, but things might
> have changed by then anyway. I can see how it could be a hard time
> persuading someone who uses Office 2000 a lot to switch to any of the
> other open source alternatives - there's no way it's going to happen
> here in the next couple of years at least.

I think I'll just have to wait and see when Gnopernicus is released how
useful it actually is...
I have Office 97 Pro here and have been very happy with it.  Office 2k is
bloated beyond belief (600MB+ for a full install as opposed to about 150-200
for 97) and XP, again, does little more than 97 and has the terrible new
interface/patronising nature about it.

I really must learn vi after my exams...

> Started off on Red Hat, then switched to Debian last year. I think that
> Red Hat and Mandrake (and SuSe no doubt - haven't tried it) are great
> for helping people get into Linux, and if you really can't be bothered
> to spend hours setting everything up for a particular machine, and so
> still suggest to ppl getting started to go for one of them - but
> Debian's great for the apt-get system (especially with broadband). Just
> installed Debian on a nice scsi 1GB UK-Online rackmount system we've
> been given today.

I have been very interested in Debian but sadly they are so behind the times
with libraries (for good reason, I know) that its not really practical for
me at the moment (as the software I need to even start properly with Linux
is so bleeding edge you can only get it from painful CVS at the moment,
lol).  May try slackware 9 when it comoes out.  But SuSE has a reputation
for being interested in the software I need (was the first distro that could
be installed in Braille) and I belive RH have said they'd include
Gnopernicus when it comes out.  I'd like to avoid RH though if I can as I
don't like the idea of one big dominant company in any market and that is
exactly what I wanted to get away from when I went to Linux.

> At school, for one thing, I've been keeping tables of all our IT stuff
> (in HTML, stupidly). It's now at 268 workstations, printers, laptops,
> etc, and it'd be useful to be able to find out straight away what's in a
> certain department, what a particular staff member has signed out, etc
> tc. Reckon that's worth having a go at implementing as an SQL database?

 I hear that Perl is very good for sysadmin / monitoring / anything to do
with text or list processing, etc.  Maybe you don't need a fully-fledged
database.  But if you do then StarOffice 6 is reputed to have a good
Access-like DB (but it is not GPL, of course).  Maybe PHP and PostreSQL
would work ok but I imagine it would take *a lot* of setting up.

bye just now,


matthew