Re: small school: replacements for MS Word and Excel
First of all, let me apologize to everyone on the list for knocking the
signal/noise ratio out of whack, I'll stop saying inflamitory things after this
post.
>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.
What you own is already free to you, M$ isn't renting software yet, so if no
hardware upgrades or additions are taking place, there is no cost savings.
The reason why I believe the intent of the original poster was to "evangelize"
Linux is outlined rather well in your reply:
>I agree that there are not likely to be easy to manage (idiot proof) solutions,
>but they definitely are worthy of trial.
Granted, Linux in general is quite a bit nicer to maintain than NT, but if a
working system is in place which won't see much upgrading, odds are that
evangelization is at least somewhere in the list of motivations. In either
case, it wouldn't do well to give a fresh audience of students a poor show from
Linux in any arena. I've seen many students take a "This particular install of
this OS sucks for this purpose, hence the OS and all things associated with it
suck." attitude towards MacOS because the only time they saw it was in poorly
applied public school installations, it would be a shame to see the same happen
to Linux. Also, having used StarOffice for all my school stuff for the last
1+1/4 years, it is my opinion drawn from my experience only that it is an
acceptable, albeit slower and less stable alternative to Word and company
(That is to say it will make Linux look bad.)
>I do NOT think NTFS offers ANY advantage over ext2 as far as functionality and
>definitely not in performance.
Just as an experiment, start your ext2 based system doing a whole bunch of disk
reads and writes, then unplug it, rinse and repeat two or three times and I
think you'll see things my way. NTFS is slow and Reiser can be a little
harder to work with, but that psuedo-journaling magic they work so well yields
better crash recovery than ext2, and it's rather essential to have this in a
machine that only does office stuff(This is what I meant when reffering to
reliability earlier, it is technically a lack of a feature, but I like to think
of it as instability, sort of like not having memory protection.)
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