Comments on: A Personal Free Software Desktop Experience

By: Yuri de Groot

Yuri de Groot — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:06:10 +0000

My wife has been a similar test case and seldom requires assistance. Mind you, all software installation and updates are handled by me so she’s more comparable to a user in a managed environment. Apps are OpenOffice, Firefox and sometimes Scribus.

By: partition softwarer

partition softwarer — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 05:21:36 +0000

As the uper said ,there are many ways to solve one problem , so here ,you can use the software to do it :http://partitionwizard.com

By: Brenda Chawner

Brenda Chawner — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 05:04:40 +0000

Thanks for these comments, Grant and Bruce. I was Jemma’s supervisor, and I should probably make it clear that I left her to explore Ubuntu and OpenOffice on her own, and asked her to let me know if she needed help.

She liked finding her own solutions, and the page orientation question came up once toward the end of the project. It wasn’t a show stopper by any means. I was reasonably sure there was a solution, but since her final report was done on a wiki I didn’t need to find it at the time.

If I do this again, I’d probably look for a one-page ‘Open Office’ tips and tricks sheet I could give my research assistant to bring them up to speed with some of the key differences, now that I know what some of the issues are.

Overall I consider this experiment a success, and gave Jemma an Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD so that she can install it on her own computer if she wants.

By: Bruce Kingsbury

Bruce Kingsbury — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:53:49 +0000

I found the comment about changing one page to landscape interesting. The way OpenOffice does this is quite different to MS Office and I guess not obvious to an MS Office user. Once you get used to the idea of ‘styles’ though it’s quite logical.

You can not only configure one page of your document to be landscape, you can also configure it to be A3 or A5, or to use a particular tray in the printer. MS Office will allow you to do simple things like ‘first page is a different tray’ but I don’t think it has anywhere near the same capabilities as OpenOffice.

By: Grant McLean

Grant McLean — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:55:51 +0000

There are a number of alternative ways to address printing via Windows. Installing an ODF plugin in Word or saving the document as a .doc from OpenOffice are both likely to result in niggly formatting differences. One option is to install OpenOffice on the Windows machine too. There’s no reason why OpenOffice and MS Office can’t coexist on the same machine – with each being used to handle its native format. Another option is to save in PDF format from OpenOffice on Linux – no plugins required.

However all those alternative assume you’re going to copy the files across to the Windows machine manually. If the two machines are on the same network you could use the Windows control panel to share the printer and print directly to it from any application on the Linux laptop.