The desktop wars

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 22:40 -0400, Steven Pasternak wrote:
> Peter Gordon wrote:
> > Steven Pasternak wrote:
> >   
> >> We aren't in the 1990's anymore. Firefox/Thunderbird are what many
> >> people use under windows, so there isn't really much transition there.
> >> OpenOffice works almost like M$, and even has file-format compatibility.
> >>     
> >
> > Good. The apps are cross-platform and interact well with other apps and
> > file formats. Now how does Granny User transfer her settings from
> > Windows Firefox/Thunderbird/OO.org/etc. to Linux? Currently no easy way
> > exists to do this (of which I am aware). By "easy" here, I want there to
> > be some way to have a dialog which says "I want to transfer these
> > settings/bookmarks/preferences/et al. from my Windows applications to my
> > Linux installation" with clickable options for Firefox, Thunderbird,
> > OpenOffice.org, Gaim) and the user could just click it. Even nice would
> > be things like transferring what we could of a user's MS Outlook setup
> > to the corresponding Evolution configuration or transferring a Trillian
> > buddy list to Gaim, etc. It would be very difficult to ensure everything
> > was transferred correctly, but I think it would really help people learn
> > to use GNU/Linux further without the trouble of reconfiguring their
> > client software for instant messaging, email, web browsing, etc. (Hey, a
> > geek can dream, right? :o)
> >
> >   
> My dad has linux and winxp dual booted and spent a couple of hours 
> manually transfering and fighting windows, but in the end could do it 
> (although you need outlook to export from its crappy format to transfer 
> the emails.). Transferring the stuff from the mozilla apps was the 
> easiest part. It probably wouldn't be to hard to have a program that 
> checks c:\windows\profiles (or wherever windows hides its user info) for 
> users and looks in c:\program files for things like mozilla and internet 
> explorer, etc. and runs an import wizard. I wouldn't be surprised if 
> that happened in the next few years, especially since apple is gaining 
> momentum and, being freebsd at the core, would be a LOT easier to import 
> from.
----
Thunderbird can import Outlook email & address books

You can set up an IMAP server and move the email to the IMAP server and
then it's usable by any and all mail clients

Apple isn't gaining much momentum...they are just buying a bunch of tv
time

Craig