The last hurdle to be converted....

[gordonmarkus]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of thinking about converting my home desktop machine to running a linux distro. As I've mentioned in my last post I have some linux experience as I administer my own RH9 server for a web site and forum, and I've administered ES to some extent as well. I'm not sure which distro yet, I quite like RedHat but am open to suggestions. I'm going to try out slackware 10.2 on a spare machine to see how it goes, but I'm open to any advice...

Anyway - there are a couple of things that I think might be barriers to a successful conversion....

I have a hotmail account that I currently access through outlook express. The though of having to use the web interface is not one I relish and would be sufficient to make me keep my desktop running XP. I have way too many contacts to simply bin the account, and setup a new one thats compatible with thunderbird so keeping the account is my only option. I've found a utility called crossover office that seems to allow windows apps to run on linux but alas it's not free unfortunately. I mean if I can get an o/s for nothing then spending $40 on a bit of software that lets me run my old software seems to be a pretty good deal when I look at it. If anyone else is using this software I'd really like to hear from them.

Does anyone know of anything else that will allow me to run MS apps on a linux box so that I can convert 100%. I also use photoshop regularly and MS office as there are some functions that open office doesn't handle so well in terms of spreadsheets.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

-Gordon.

[Patrick]

I have a hotmail account that I currently access through outlook express. The though of having to use the web interface is not one I relish and would be sufficient to make me keep my desktop running XP. I have way too many contacts to simply bin the account, and setup a new one thats compatible with thunderbird so keeping the account is my only option. I've found a utility called crossover office that seems to allow windows apps to run on linux but alas it's not free unfortunately. I mean if I can get an o/s for nothing then spending $40 on a bit of software that lets me run my old software seems to be a pretty good deal when I look at it. If anyone else is using this software I'd really like to hear from them.

Does anyone know of anything else that will allow me to run MS apps on a linux box so that I can convert 100%. I also use photoshop regularly and MS office as there are some functions that open office doesn't handle so well in terms of spreadsheets.

Have you tried installing those windows apps via wine? Crossover is basically wine with an easier installation and configuration. The configuration isn't too horrible as long as you read the documentation. You basically have to setup a pseudo windows directory to fake the windows applications out. In my opinion wine wasn't very usable until fairly recently (9 months ago?).I know you can setup hotmail, gmail or yahoo mail with Thunderbird:
http://webmail.mozdev.org/index.html
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=53174

[gordonmarkus]

Thanks for that - that's really handy to know.

When I looked that the thunderbird FAQ it said hotmail could not be accessed other than via the web portal.

http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/faq#q2.3

I'll take a look at the wine application on my test box so that I can be sure the migration will be as painless as possible...

Thanks again for all your help.

-Gordon

[CptnObvious999]

I thought Thunderbird could import contacts from a file. Maybe hotmail can export to it. Maybe not, seeing as it is Microsoft now