Re: small school: replacements for MS Word and Excel

[John Foster <jfoster@augustmail.com>]

If you are going to have to foot the financial burden for even a small
network using Microsoft products (you said 12) the cost is rather
prohibitive if you are depending on local budgets. I suspect that is the
reason for seeking a replacement rather than "evangelizing" Linux. It is
just for this reason that virtually ALL of the Mexican public school
systems networks are being converted to Linux. This is an ongoing, well
publicized project. I agree that there are not likely to be easy to
manage (idiot proof) solutions, but they definitely are worthy of trial.
I do think that there are tools that will do what you want, but not in a
related suite other than StarOffice 5.2. and if properly installed I
believe it offers at least the same functionality as MS Office. Lyx is
an excellent word processor/actually a publishing tool and has
capabilities far beyond MS Word. I do NOT think NTFS offers ANY
advantage over ext2 as far as functionality and definitely not in
performance. And if there is real concern then reiserfs is available
though a bit more difficult to install. In most cases there is likely to
be a network advisor or sysadmin person who will handle all of these
problems. The 2 real advantages here are cost savings and the very real
advantage of this list as a source of help and encouragement. Try to get
either from Microsoft.....

John Foster
AdVance-Computing Systems