ECN Electrical Forum
Discussion Forums for Electricians, Inspectors and Related Professionals

Folks,
Since installing this OS on my other laptop, I'm quite pleased about how it has performed.
Pretty much, it takes nothing to install (I did it with a 2GB pen-drive to use as a Live thing to see if my system would support it) and then killed Windows and installed it on the HDD.
Linux is no longer for geeks and nerds, although saying that you need to be able to sort problems out.

Windows has the problem that it is made so that "everyone" can use it, without having any computer skills what-soever.
Ask any Windows user what a command line is and often you'll get a blank stare.

Ubuntu 10.10 works with most hardware and although it ISN'T WINDOWS it works a lot faster than Windows, it has wireless support and quite a number of other things.
Obviously Ubuntu will not recognise proprietry files like .wma and the like, but it will do .mp3 files.
I am in the process of loading my collection of CD's on to my laptop.
Open source is the way of the future, when M$ realises that, the better off we will all be.

Can you get plug ins for the MS file types? That was always my concern with Linux. Microsoft kept throwing roadblocks in front of them by giving away windoze software that used proprietary file types.

If you're talking about the Windows Media file types (.WMA and .WMV) then they're no problem. A number of third-part codecs exist for them, on Linux and OS X.

How about DOCX? (the Vista and up default for Word)
I have a plug in for XP that works.

Generally Greg, you'd use OpenOffice under Linux.
It also works on Windows.
Believe me, there are work-arounds for almost everything that Windows offers.
People have found out these problems and written code to enable a solution.
This is the beauty of open-source software, you aren't depending on only the developers of the propretiary software, anyone can write this stuff, given a few simple rules and knowledge of how it works.

I guess I will give it a shot some day. I usually have a machine laying around without an OS.

Pretty sure you can open them with OpenOffice, though I haven't gotten any and had set my work computer to save as the old formats.

By the way, .docx and the like (.pptx, etc) have nothing to do with the version of Windows, but rather the version of Office. It's an XML-based format that Microsoft adopted starting with Office 2007, similar to what OpenOffice was already using. It is also an open, ISO/IEC certified standard.

Welcome to the world of free software! Try the Opera browser. I think it's better than Firefox and Google. If it isn't in the Ubuntu list you can download direct and it will self-install.
http://www.opera.com/browser/download/