[Preston] Hello - Replace Access?

[Andrew King]

Nigel said:

> Hi, I have yet to try this, but http://www.unixodbc.org/doc/OOoMySQL.pdf
> tells of a way to do it. http://linuxworld.com.au/article.php3?aid=341&tid=1
> gives some further info.
> 
> Apparently, you can set up an interface with openoffice.org, and MySQL or
> whatever you prefer, using the Java ODBC drivers from openoffice.org. If you
> do this, please let us all know how you get on, as we want to switch
> completely to OSS, since Windows is really winding me up! 

Excellent - thanks. Give me a few weeks and I'll let you know...

> Spent half of Xmas
> struggling with the low level formatting/fdisking of an 80GB HD with
> Win98SE. The Debian 50% was no trouble at all, despite me re-writing the MBR
> etc. many times! Yes, I know about the newer version of fdisk now, thank
> you! It wasn't very useful either!

That's a point, if anyone else has found this - I've often lately tried 
to install new 95/98/NT/2k machines by first partitioning with the fdisk 
program with toms rootboot disk, and then formatting (where possible) 
with mkdosfs. But quite often things have screwed up - I've got through 
the first part of the install, to where it resets, and then it hasn't 
rebooted properly. Yet they still see the partitions right (and the 
partition table /looks/ right in a hex editor - it's not like there's 
too much to them really is it), and what they wrote to the filesystem is 
still readable. Could there be any reason why partitioning or formatting 
using the linux tools can screw up windows even if it's all done before 
the windows install's started?

Andrew