SuSe Linux on AmigaONE & MS Office

[Tomas]

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

Welcome to the forum btw

[Floid]

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.

[Floid]

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

[Tomas]

Well, if you'd read what the poor guy wrote, it sounds like he's got some formulas and Access tables

ah sorry, didnt get that.... that would be worse indeed  :-(

[redfox]

@Vallerian

No need to appologize for having a x86 PC running MS Windows98 and MS Office.  Some of the rest of us also run x86 PCs and MS software.

My advice ... if you have the money available and enough room for two machines, keep your existing machine to run the MS software and setup the AmigaOne in it's own case to run Linux and AmigaOS.

If you wish, network them together.  If you have a broadband internet connection, get an inexpensive router and use both machines on the internet.

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redfox