Use OpenOffice? Micro$oft can sue you!

[Welly Wu]

You meant to ask, "Would that mean that Micro$oft can sue Al Gore for creating 'duh In-er-nut'?"

 

[wallijonn]

I wouldn't sweat it. If they go through with it, expect Novell to really beef up Ximian and put a hurting on MS. Where's WordPerfect when you need them? I say have Novell buy out Acrobat while they're at it. Then merge Ximian and Acrobat for a killer app.

As it is MS has "patented" FAT and now makes any manufacturer of camera and USB mem sticks pay them money. So you pay an extra $1 for each mem stick, which goes to MS.

 

[Welly Wu]

I remember that story. I guess M$ is working on patenting the 0s and 1s later for 2005.

Aren't they patenting the double-click too?

 

[Stephonovich]

First, for a distro... gotta be Gentoo. You've got the education and flexibility you get from Debian, the ports system of BSD, and probably the world's best forums for support. What's not to love?

As for the M$ thing, yeah, I read about it. A shame, really. I'm not sure how they could sue for OO being able to output into Word format, I mean, M$ can output into Lotus and WordPerfect, and no one's ever raised a fuss about that. I have a feeling even if they did get sued, they'd just drop support for M$ file formats, but it'd still be available as a seperate download on external servers. Much like EAC 0.95pb3. The European record industry didn't like a feature it had that allowed you to potentially bypass copy protection, so in pb4, it was removed. As such, pb3 was hurriedly mirrored on websites all over the place. Head-Fi had a thread about it, IIRC.

 

[Welly Wu]

It seriously pisses me off that Micro$oft thinks they are so entitled to retain the legal option of suing OpenOffice end users just like the RIAA sues P2P thieves left and right. The only difference is that OpenOffice is free and M$ engages in anti-competitive business tactics. The hypocrisy is so ironic: they get to offer compatibility with other office suites with no legal fusses but when a community based and developed software program gains momentum -- and it's also free to use, recode, and distribute -- M$ feels pressure to revert to its' old ways.

Am I the only person who thinks that Micro$oft views the open source movement and community in a decidedly negative light? They're a multi-national, multi-billion, blue chip company. Why would they feel threatened?

 

[Leto Atreides II]

I would really like to get pissed off about this, but I'm not. I used OpenOffice for a while until I got cable internet, at which point I switched to MSOffice. I've got to say it's a lot better for my needs. Nothing against OpenOffice, it's perfectly useable, especially if you start someone on it with no prior knowledge of MSOffice.

The fact is, Microsoft has some damn good products. I use Visual Studio, Word, and Excel pretty much all the time and I think they're the best availble software for the tasks they are intended for.

 

[amb]

I use SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional and I like it a lot. I've been a SuSE fan for years now, beginning with SuSE 4.3 (ages ago!). I've also used Redhat, Xandros (based on Debian) and Slackware, but I still prefer SuSE.

If only RMAA, expressPCB and a few other programs were ported to Linux, though... It irks me to have to use an M$ OS just to run these apps.

 

[Stephonovich]

Why are they threatened? Maybe because in 2003, Linux had almost 3% of the desktop market, which is a huge jump from .25% in 2002. It's growing, and it's growing fast. It's predicted to hit 10% sometime around 2010. And that's not taking into consideration Linux's server usage, which is currently almost at 30%. (these are not the figures from the M$-sponsored studies, you'll note...) Those are huge numbers for 100% free software, and they represent a growing and ominous threat to M$, whether they admit it or not. While I think they'll have the desktop market cornered at least until we reach the limits of silicon, (no telling what'll happen when quantum computing becomes a reality) they're getting quite worried about the server portion. Especially when big names like Amazon are publicly switching to Linux, and seeing savings of over $50 million a year because of it.

 

[gsferrari]

If someone can help me configure my wireless minipci card in either mandrake or suse or any distro for that matter - I will never go back to XP again.

I dont have hard cable - I am sharing a wireless network and I cannot access the internet via linux which sucks.

Can someone suggest a PCMCIA card that will work without issues in Madrake 10 or Suse 9.1?

Suse is a very very nice distro...the interface is fun

Mandrake is also fun...

Both would be funner with wireless working

If I cannot get either of them to work with my minipci internal wireless card (Gigabyte WIAG something) then I will get a addon card.

Cheers!

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leto Atreides II The fact is, Microsoft has some damn good products. I use Visual Studio, Word, and Excel pretty much all the time and I think they're the best availble software for the tasks they are intended for.

Yeah, until they crash

Office 2K crashed on me more times than I care to count. XP is reportedly even worse. You know how many times I've had OO crash, even when I had supposedly unstable beta versions? Once. Once, in what's coming up on 2 years now. That's a pretty good track record.

Edwood, this page looks to be fairly complete. Let me know if you have any luck.

 

[gsferrari]

Quote:

Originally Posted by amb If only RMAA, expressPCB and a few other programs were ported to Linux, though... It irks me to have to use an M$ OS just to run these apps.

If you can get enough people to back you up and approach a software firm - they will write the program to work in Linux.

It costs money unless there is HUGE demand and the chance for the software company to make some money.

What I like is that most software suites are available in Linux...I am sure there is an equivalent of expressPCB that works in linux...there are too many tech geeks out there who are nix gurus to tolerate MS crap.

Games...thats another thing...I LOOOOOOOoooVE games...sick and tired of playing enemy territory

I want Call Of Duty, BattleField 1942 etc. in Linux

NOTHING can happen until graphics card makers, wireless card makers, sound card makers, motherboard makers etc. open up to the linux community. I cant see what their problem is - why are they so reluctant to release info? If someone releases info and it benefits the linux community I am SURE that a bunch of people will jump in to buy their hardware because it is linux compatible. Other manufacturers will have access to this information but hey - without competition there is no universal gain.

This is the problem

If there was ONLY the foll :-

ATi
AMD
ASUS
Creative
Linksys

(just examples)

there will be more data for linux to work with because none of the above manufacturers will have competition that can gain because these guys release info to the open source world.

Ironic isnt it...you see two cups of tea but you cannot drink from either one of them because you are right in the middle...you turn one way and the other cup falls down and you turn around to look at it and the cup you were looking at falls down...

No tea

 

[amb]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gsferrari If someone can help me configure my wireless minipci card in either mandrake or suse or any distro for that matter - I will never go back to XP again.

Subscribe yourself to the suse-linux-e mailing list (warning, high volume) and ask for help there. I'm sure you'll find a solution.

http://www.suse.com/en/private/suppo.../mailinglists/

 

[wallijonn]

http://www.google.com/search?q=linux...utf-8&oe=utf-8
http://www.google.com/search?q=linux...utf-8&oe=utf-8
http://www.google.com/search?q=SUSE+...utf-8&oe=utf-8

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules...rticle&sid=795

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wire...06/recipe.html

http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/wireless.shtml

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_.../Wireless.html

http://questier.com/howto.html

http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2002/11/wavelan.html

http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/in...=0&#entry24781

http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=637

??? ***** http://www.math.ucla.edu/computing/u...wiresetup.html *****

QUOTE:
"Wireless Tools
Do rpm -q wireless-tools or look for /usr/sbin/iwconfig. If you didn't install it, do that now. In SuSE Linux, start yast2, and under Software click on Install or Remove Software. Use the Search filter and look for wireless-tools (lower case, with a hyphen). Click the checkbox indicating that you want it, and hit Accept. It will ask for your installation media, and install the program."
::ENDQUOTE

 

[lini]

I see another big anti-monopolistic legal action coming up - this time against Microsoft's way of establishing data format monopolies. But that's what you get from too sloppy rules for software patents...

Greetings from Hannover!

Manfred / lini

 

[gsferrari]

This is what I could come up with for my minipci card :-

Card: D-Link DWL-G520
Chipset: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01) pciid: 168c:0013 (rev 01) Other: Works with WEP and WPA with TKIP cipher

What do I do now? Can someone walk me through the installation in mandrake 10 with ndiswapper? We can do this via PM to avoid thread crapping.

Any sort of assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!