Re: Various (Re: An intersting article), switching, NTFS -Apologies if this send before (outlook stuffing up LOL)-

* Jordan Lewis (jordanlewis <at> optushome.com.au) wrote:
> B) I'm looking at switching to Linux permanently because the .NET
> integration expected in the next Win is worrying me (I've played with it
> in various stages but havn't used it for more than a week as desktop,
> and for my firewall) but I've got issues with some of the software I use
> under Win such as Adobe Acrobat, PhotoShop & Illustrator, Macromedia
> products (namely flash) and various games. What kind of prices do you
> pay for Linux equivalents, do they exist, and how easily obtainable are
> they?
> 
Adobe Acrobat:
	Do you need the writer software or just the reader? There is an
	Adobe provided reader for GNU/Linux which works well IMLE. I'm
	not aware of an Adobe writer existing though. There are tools to
	create PDFs freely avialable on most distributions.

	Question, why do you wish to keep you data in PDFs? If you
	switch to a fully open format such as LaTeX or SGML then you
	will never have to worry about compatability issues again.

Photoshop:
	How professional are your needs? The Gimp does an excellent job,
	although the transition can be somewhat painful as the interface
	is very different to that of Photoshop. If you do not need
	Photoshop format files, then you could take a look at that. For
	the price, nothing, you've nothing to lose.

Macromedai:
	There is a flash player for Mozilla and other GNU/Linux browsers
	which works fairly well. There are some sites it doesn't play
	with.

Games:
	If you mean, can I play my Windows games on GNU/Linux then the
	answer is maybe.  Transmeta have ported a number of games to
	GNU/Linux but be advised that support is limited and it is rare
	to have a Windows game run as well on GNU/Linux. That is hardly
	surprising and not a criticisim. The fact that they've been able
	to code an interface to allow games from a foreign OS to run is
	little short of miraculous.

	There are some Open Source games, I defer to others on that one
	as I tend to use a PS2 for that sort of thing.
	
> C) ...how is NTFS access coming along, if there's decent support out
> I'll do a dual boot immediately. (its really the only thing holding me
> back, I don't want to run XP on FAT32)

What's stopping you dual booting now?  You do not have to have NTFS
write support to dual boot. You will be able to read your files off of
your NTFS filesystem whilst in GNU/Linux and you can then work on them
in GNU/Linux.  Should you need to access those files later in XP, you
can use Samba to network with another machine and transfer them that
way, or you could ftp them up to your web page and then retrieve them
when you reboot. OK, I know it's not an ideal solution but ask yourself
this, how much of your important data do you want to leave on an OS
which Microsoft can have a good poke around in?

Your data, your decision. I've made mine 

Best regards,

Euan.