[ILUG] Office migrations to Linux

[fuzzbucket]

Glen Gray wrote:
> Has anyone done anything on this before ?
> 
> There's a small company office that we have dealings with and they
> seem to be suffering from outdated technology and malware
> infestations. They are all running on Dell Celereon machines
> (300-400MHz) and 64MB RAM. They are a typical small office using
> Outlook for email and Word/Excel etc.
> 

Should be fine for a desktop if you can bring the RAM up to 128MB.
Problem is OpenOffice will take an age to run - I installed it on the
family's PII - we're talking the guts of a minute here to get the GUI,
but once it's open it's quite responsive on that box (350MHz, 256K L2,
192MB RAM). Is AbiWord any lighter? Not used it myself.

XFCE4 is a friendly enough light desktop - although you might try IceWM
or XPde... Then again, I didn't have a particularly inspiring experience
with XPde.

> Moving to Linux wouldn't really suit the current hardware setup.
> They'll need more RAM per machine which may alleviate the issue.
> Getting email and contacts out of Outlook might be tricky. But the
> biggie is that they use TAS Books 2 for accounts. Anyone know if that
> runs under Wine ?
> 

Would something like GNUcash be suitable for this? I'm not great when it
comes to accouting so I don't know how appropraite it is. I wouldn't
consider wine as an option on such low-end hardware.

> I may just setup a sample office machine for them and try it all out 
> myself. Then they can have a look and see if they'd be happy.
> 
> I guess I'll have to think carefully about what distro to use. I have
> a personal preference for Gnome and was thinking maybe of Ubuntu or 
> Fedora. But I may try Yoper and SUSE too. In fact, Novel Linux
> Desktop will be out soon too so that might be a contender.

Don't know how Gnome would perform on a Celery. I'd be inclined to go
for something a lot lighter, such as xfce with an "Explorer" style file
manager - xffm, which comes with xfce by default, isn't the best. There
was another one which Cobind was using which seemed just the ticket but
I can't find any info on it now - Cobind now uses Nautilus which I think
is a little heavy for general office use. I'll update this if I happen
across the one Cobind used.

Good luck - resistance to change is a strong tendency in many offices!

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