Following in the steps of his holiness Richard Stallman (www.stallman.org and shown in the picture below blessing a computer that is MS free) I am now in the process of liberating my computers from Microsoft and other similar virus like systems (did anyone say Adobe?).
The first step has been to substitute a few of the key systems with open source solutions.
Firstly I have substituted Internet Explorer with Mozilla Firefox and have also had a look at the Thunderbird / Lightning Internet browser from Mozilla to see if it will be able to do the job that Microsoft Outlook has been doing. Seems it will and I managed importing all contacts, appointments and e-mails from my existing Outlook system.
Then I have realized that Open Office offers a significantly better product than Microsoft Office does – at least when it comes to text editor and spread sheet calculator. Access might be better than Base, but then on the other hand when do I really need the databases I made 5 years ago? Maybe I can import them into Base before the final change-over.
As for my good old favorite Frontpage, there seems to be several solutions. One of the ones I liked was Nvu which runs on MS and Linux systems. Obviously some of my old websites gets f***ed up when they are imported, but then that is probably something I can workaround and fix. At least new websites I will develop in this system and the main Jakobs Villas website will soon be based on a php database.
As for the key problems Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop I am testing som vector graphic and raster software at present. Most likely I will end with Xara Xtreme and/or InkScape.
Then only remains to see how I get my aging Compaq Evo N800v laptop to run Ubuntu, and even more interesting how I get a mobile phone that will synchronize with my contacts.
Any ideas out there?
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