SuSe Linux on AmigaONE & MS Office

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Since you already have a fast PC, you could easily download the Windows version of Openoffice.org (from, well, Openoffice.org), and see if the import/export is good enough to live with or not.  

Keep in mind that Sun has a pay version of StarOffice floating about that's much lighter (and potentially has had more MS-tracking work done on it) than the older free versions that OpenOffice itself is based on.  The bloated old codebase was released to the OpenOffice team, while their streamlined? version continued on as a commercial product.  Only thing is, *that* might not have a PowerPC port either.

Remember that a decent Office machine costs $300 or less these days; if you're going to declare it a necessary evil, don't let it keep you from doing what you like. With a broadband link, you could VNC from your AmigaOne into the machine at your office, too.  (That said, I'm not a big fan of VNC's methodology, but if you're just using it to run Office...)

There's a company out there with a better remote desktop solution that basically handles VNC-like operations over a compressed X11 protocol (and maybe had a 'bridge' for Windows' Remote Desktop Protocol?), which seems to suggest that, at least, window-dragging would remain fast and sharp, even if the images in each would be compressed (their screenshots looked pretty lossless)... unfortunately, I can't remember who they were.  Anyone else know what I'm talking about?

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Ah, found it - I was thinking of NoMachine's NX product.

From their "introduction to 'NX' technology, just to explain why I think it sounds nifty...

NoMachine has developed exclusive X protocol compression techniques and an integrated set of proxy agents that make it possible to run complete remote desktop sessions, even at full screen, using narrowband Internet connections, at speeds as low as those offered by a 9600 band modem.

[...]

 NX accessibility and remote computing capabilities are not limited to Linux desktops and servers. NX encapsulates and translates into X protocol the Remote Desktop Protocol used by Microsoft Windows NT/2000 Terminal Server Edition and Citrix Metaframe, and Remote Frame Buffer, the protocol used by VNC, another Open Source remote computing facility, available numerous different operating systems.

Only question is whether they've got builds for PPC; they already support PSX2 and Zaurus, so some community-directed spam can't hurt.  (Looks like the thin/fat client roles play a good part in both Genesi and Eyetech's sales strategies.)

Edit:  Ah, here's a rather recursive screenshot showing it acting as a Windows RDP client (actually taken on Windows XP, that's a fullscreen NX session running on Windows, connected to a Linux box, that's running a windowed session connected to *another* Linux box, which is then running a session acting as an RDP client to another Windows box!  Looks like they're showing off the lack of quality degradation...) ...

In the meantime, of course, you could try rdesktop, which is Free and probably compiles on PowerPC.  Unfortunately, it's not really clear how maintained the project is, though people can take nice screenshots with it, too.  

None of the protocols are perfect, but given enough bandwidth, you'll probably get a clearer, less-artifacted session over RDP (with Windows) or X11 (with X programs) than you would using VNC.

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Tomas wrote:
Whats wrong with open office or staroffice? It is m$ office compitable...

Well, if you'd read what the poor guy wrote, it sounds like he's got some formulas and Access tables (and more pity to him, if that's the case - everything I hear about Access is a horror story, though I'm lucky to have never had to personally use it) that would be complex, at least for his skills, to go porting about on a daily basis.

Obviously, seeing how much OpenOffice can handle seamlessly is a good idea; the .XLS import and export may shuffle back and forth fine (how much work does anyone *want* to be doing from home, anyway?) ... If not, the remote access solution sounds fair.  An employer shouldn't be able to dictate the purchases you make for yourself (even though they often do, true enough), and your work machine is the tool they've provided you for doing your work -- use it to its fullest, and if they want you to work from home, they should let you take advantage of the tool to do it.  If it's a small operation, and you're more concerned about the trouble it'll be to yourself to set up... just remember, Microsoft did this to you to force you to keep buying Office.

That said, again, he could probably be getting by with a 300MHz Celeron (or the equivalent Via chip), so while VirtualPC on MoL on Linux won't be a speed demon, it should get the job done (though you might want a gigabyte of RAM, to handle all that).  The difference is that Bochs is fairly unoptimized - it's aimed at providing purely accurate emulation, for developers banging x86 code on all platforms - while VirtualPC probably has a fair few optimizations that work well on the PowerPC but weren't worth including in Bochs.

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Vallerian wrote:
But, I came to an idea (probably impossible, but still - no harm asking) to buy AmigaONE motherboard, use the existing components I have (graphic card, hard disk, etc), and put SuSe Linux as main OS.

Oh, one final note - if you recycle the case, graphics, and drives, you'll still be left with an Athlon, mainboard and RAM (assuming you're doing the right thing, and buying memory guaranteed to work with the notoriously finicky Mais.) ...  A case and power supply today can be had for $40, drives are cheap if you know where to look, and graphics cards grow on trees - especially if you just need 2D output for office applications.  An old Matrox G200 would be overkill, in fact, and probably runs $5 on eBay now.

So, while it'd be better to have the power-sipping AmigaOne in a cheap case with a cheap supply, and the finger-burning Athlon in an expensive case with one of those gold-plated 400W monsters, you can worry about swapping things around later.  If you decide VNC or rdesktop don't cut it, and you really must have A Windows Machine in the house, you can skid by for a month or two, and assemble all the parts to rebirth your Athlon on the cheap.  By then, OS4 may be proving (or not proving) itself as a platform, there'll probably be a new generation of 3D cards on the market, and you'll be able to decide which machine more deserves such upgrades.

Heck, maybe you'll be comfortable enough with Linux to try DragonFly BSD on the Athlon (no, it's not ready for prime-time; I'd give it about a year?), and see what happens when people apply Amiga principles to UNIX. :-D