Re: Change of network from Novel Netware 3.12 to Debian 2.1
> N D Naik wrote:
>
> We have a few queries.
> 1) How to convert all our windows files to work under linux
> environment.
This depends on the files. If you have, for instance, MS Word files,
you'll need something that can read these for you. You mention
StarOffice (5.2 is out, btw) but you should be warned that this is not a
lightweight program. If you could convert everything to plain text,
that would be best.
> 2) Will our present system be compatible with Debian 2.1
Generally, no. Linux (Debian) does not operate like DOS/Windows. It
does have a DOS emulator (DOSEmu) that may run your DOS programs, and a
Windows API implementation (Wine) that may run your Windows programs,
but these aren't really as robust as their Windows counterparts.
Additionally, Debian's DOSEmu ships with FreeDOS, which is really subpar
... you can download a copy of Novell DOS 7 (formerly DR DOS) from their
site for use within DOSEmu; I've had good luck with this.
> 3) Will it require additional hardware.
Probably not. If you want to run X, you may have some video card issues
though. I suspect X also uses more RAM that Windows (3.1) but can't
really say for sure. If you're running Win95 on these machines, I think
you'll be pleased with the performance of Linux even with X running.
> 4) What are additional Software requirements? (Apart from Staroffice
> 5.1a)
This is a question you need to ask yourself. ;-)
> 5) Can we work on X-Windows interface or Dos interface.
Depends on your needs - X should run on all of these.
> 6) Transfer from Foxpro database to Mysql or Postgres. Any other
> frontend recommended.
This is worrisome. Foxpro is really just DBase and there are many ways
to get data out of it. There is free code you can compile; I've written
some myself for report generation. Languages such as PHP (and most
likely Perl as well) should be able to access these files without
problem.
However, none of these provide you with any sort of useful frontend,
unless you're willing to give up the UI for SQL, which are just commands
and can get pretty hairy. There are some projects that want to create
an Access-like program, but these are *far* from anything useful.
You'll probably have to end up writing a lot of code yourself to get
what you want here ...
An alternative, of course, is to just continue to run Foxpro from within
DOSEmu (or Wine, if you're talking about Visual Foxpro).
> 7) What are the differences between Gnome and KDE.
Hmm. From a user perspective, KDE is more mature, which generally means
more featureful and more robust. It also has more applications, and
more support, although probably not from this list.
Another option you have is installing Linux only at the server end, and
migrating clients as time permits, or as applications become available.
Linux can act as a Novell server and the clients none the wiser.
Christopher
Reply to: