I think fedora needs...

Bryan Anderson fedora at bryananderson.co.uk
Mon Nov 24 14:23:15 UTC 2003


Andy Green wrote:

> Open Office draw manages this for me, there's also Dia and Sodipodi.

I have installed Sodipodi and it looks at first glance to be able to do 
the job I need.....but I have the horrible task now of re-saving all my
CorelDraw files into something that Sodipodi can open.

>>>MS Publisher equivalent
> Open Office

Have just installed Scribus and that looks interesting, but I will also
look into OpenOffice. I still have these ex-Windows mind-sets, in that 
when I tried to use MS Office desktop publishing, the results were not 
good, bloated and very often incompatible with other peoples systems, so 
I avoided OpenOffice thinking it may suffer the same fate. I will look 
into it though.

> Gimp is better than it seems at first meeting it.  There is a MUCH newer 
> 1.3.23 beta version of Gimp available for download from http://www.gimp.org/ 
> too, I think somebody was talking about it earlier as being packaged.  Its 
> meant to be a beta but I started using it a couple of months ago and its 
> perfectly stable.

Again - I'll look it up - YUM says that the version I have 1.2.? is up 
to date, so I'll do a search for a FC1/RH package.

>>>Kazaa/Soulseek clients
> 
> Bittorrent is pretty good.  I don't use the other P2P any more but there used 
> to be limewire and other such things that ran on Linux (with Java I think in 
> the case of limewire).

Kazaa used to be useful, but now all I get are movie previews. I use 
Soulseek a lot as I held a repository of Palm freeware and the combined 
chat/file share facility was good. However, as I am now leaving Windows 
behind, and a lot of what I did on the Palm was tied to Windows (there 
are not that many Linux versions of 'Windows versions of Palm software')
I might be leaving that behind. I'm certainly not going to give up on 
Linux just because of p2p apps.

> If you MUST stay with Windows for one or two apps because they just can't come 
> over, Vmware is a great solution (at $299 tho).  This literally makes your 
> Windows session a window on your Linux desktop and it runs fully concurrently 
> sharing the hardware.  Windows runs drivers that fake up hardware while 
> actually passing the requests through to your regular Linux drivers.  Its 
> REALLY GOOD, you can even have things like XP and 98 up at the same time 
> without leaving Linux.  There's a 30-day trial for free at 
> http://www.vmware.com.

For that price, I could get a low-power PC and a KVM switch and not lose 
on performance on the Linux box.

> Well, fair enough, but its surprisingly hard to frame an email complaining 
> about someone complaining without inadvertantly becoming guilty of the very 
> thing you abhor... wouldn't it've been more useful if your email had 
> contained something more than the same kind of complaint you were complaining 
> about :?)

Well - personally I am prepared to offer whatever contribution I can, 
given the time to get into Linux and to find out what contribution I can 
give. At the moment I consider myself a newbie so don't feel confident 
in being 'responsible' for anything. In addition - I can't code at all, 
but I guess that there may be a need for help with hosting/building web 
sites/etc?

And I wasn't complaining - I was commenting. To complain about the lack 
of a piece for software when the guys writing and maintaining this stuff 
are doing it for free, in spare time, would be downright rude. I 
complain about MS software and the quality of software that I have paid 
money for - my comments were simply a wish-list.

And yes - it can be very difficult to find your way through the vast 
number of packages out there....but now that I've found:

http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-en/table.shtml

...it ought to be a lot easier!

Bryan Anderson <fedora at bryananderson.co.uk>





More information about the fedora-list mailing list