VMWare / Wine

Patton Echols p.echols at comcast.net
Fri Feb 23 00:27:23 UTC 2007


On 02/22/2007 12:46 PM, Peter Garrett wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:02:44 -0800
> Patton Echols <p.echols at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> Does anyone have thoughts on why I should choose one route over the other?
>>     
>
> Looking at your original post in the previous thread, I notice that you are
> entirely focused on working out a way to run Windows - is there any
> possibility that you could use Linux for the needs your users have?
>   

Well, there are two different things going on. 

(1) In the prior thread we're talking about running in an educational 
environment.  Part of what is being taught is "Word" "Excel" etc.  
Things to get students ready for the work world.  If it were up to me, 
they'd learn open source software and everyone would quickly discover 
that the thought process is the same, even if the commands are 
different.  (If you know how to do a mail merge in WordPerfect, you can 
figure out what to do in Open Office or in Word.)  I fully beliieve that 
a person who can work OpenOffice would have no problem if the boss 
insisted on MSOffice.  But I'm not the administrator, not an "Educator" 
nor any kind of decision maker at this level.  I agree that Linux would 
be a good choice (See #2) and I'll suggest it, but I don't think I can 
win that battle.
(2) Yes, I think Linux is a good idea.  That's why I run it on my laptop 
as the most used OS.  However, there are a few windows apps that I still 
need. Mostly related to my astronomy hobby.  Until I find a linux 
replacement . . .
> For example, which applications are fundamental, and are there Linux
> equivalents for them? A listing of the apps you need might trigger
> discussion of alternatives.
>   

Ok, But if anyone responds to any of these, might I suggest starting a 
new thread???

Cartes du Ciel - Yes there is a linux version in Beta.  It is very rough 
around the edges.  The windows version is a little clunky, the linux 
version is worse, both usability and display.  (For planetarium 
software, minimum requirement is the ability to select and deselect 
catalogs on the fly including the Tycho-2, WDS, SAO, etc.  )  If that 
was the ONLY reason I still needed windows, I'd probably bite the bullet 
and buy XEphem.

Virtual Moon Atlas - Not even a Beta AFAIK

registax - able to extract frames from an avi, select the least 
distorted frames, align, stack and process into an image, with 
selections for "drizzle" mode, derotation, wavelet processing, etc.  
(This one says it runs under wine, but I'll need to upgrade to version 4)

WinOccult - A program for predicting lunar and asteroid occultations of 
bright stars,

HP PhotoDelux (like Photoshop Lite) -- Yes, yes, I know that the Gimp is 
supposed to be great - and I am determined to spend the time to figure 
it out if I can, (especially since Photodelux is on the home desktop and 
not the lappy where it belongs.) But it seems to me that the interfaces 
are completely non intuitive.  Just trying to crop a picture left me 
pulling hair out, let alone trying to get a layer to act as advertised . . .

Intervideo DVD Creator - For capturing video and doing non linear 
editing and burning to dvd.  (In a perfect world I'd like to see one 
that you can view the frame by frame video with audio diagram underneath 
(like you see in audacity) so you can cut at an exact frame or manually 
synchronize audio to video when the capture goes poorly.



> If you actually have apps that *must* run on Windows on all machines, then
> this is not an option of course. 
>
> An alternative might be to analyse whether some portion of your machines
> could be fully migrated to Linux, while keeping some for purposes that
> definitely require Windows. The thin client approach using for example
> Edubuntu / ltsp could still be at least a partial solution, and save time,
> money and license woes at the same time.
>
> This might also ease your problems with broken installs, since Linux has a
> multi-user model and is inherently less vulnerable to "fooling around" by
> users.  Sudo/root is needed to really mess things up, and if you run
> thin clients you don't have to administer all the boxes as much, as
> most of the important system things are on the server :-) The updates
> problems are also easier to solve with apt / synaptic / update manager, and
> you might consider setting up a local mirror or proxy for Ubuntu
> repositories.
>
>   
Yeah, I agree, and once I have more experience with Ubuntu, so I can 
answer objections, I plan to make that pitch.  I personally think there 
is far more upside than down in that environment.  But it is a tough 
political battle, especially since the teachers would need to retrain 
themselves a little bit.

Thanks though.




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