I thought I'd drop a summary to the list of my experiences of switching 100% from Windows to SuSE 7.1 on the desktop. I'd just like to say a big thanks to everyone on this list who has over the last year helped me both directly and indirectly to learn about Linux and resolve my specific problems. Without this community I would not have been able to make this transition. I have been playing with SuSE since 6.0 so it wasn't as big a transition as just picking up Linux one day and wiping the windows partition. In other words I have been preparing a long time for this day. Last Monday I felt the time was right. My daily desktop is a Toshiba Satellite 2805 laptop. It's specs are: PIII 700Mhz 256MB 20GB Savage Graphics Card (either MX or IX can't remember which right now) Yamaha YMF-754 sound card DVD Intel PC100 PCI ethernet card Xircom PCI WinModem The hard drive is partitioned with WinME at the beginning and then a couple of Linux partitions (/boot and /). Then in the extended partition are two FAT32 partitions with my data on. The support for this modem is in development and not yet really working but it isn't really a problem I connect to the internet through the network at work and through an old pc at home. I had already installed SuSE 7.1 with no major problems. I setup X using Sax2 and I installed KDE2.1.1. I had better explain a little bit about my work and the tasks that I do daily on the desktop. I sell natural stone (mainly granite) from China to Europe. I have a partner who is mainly responsible for production and shipping whilst I am mainly responsible for sales/communicating with clients and preparing quotations/sales documents. My most important tool is e-mail (isn't it for everyone?). Long ago I decided to stop sending other people MS formatted documents and switched to pdf and where necessary text files. However I receive a fair number of word and excel docs from my clients and partner. I also write and use a lot of python scripts to automate processes. So first thing Monday morning with a shiny new KDE desktop in front of me was to get e-mail working. I had played with Kmail for sometime and had decided to use that as my mail client. When compared with Outlook, which I had been using daily since its' early incarnation as Exchange Inbox sometime in 96, it is a poor substitute. Nevertheless with a bit of getting used to I figured I could be just as productive with it. Call me lazy but I particularly like its' drag-and-drop integration with KDE. I also like it's integration with Abbrowser. So first step was to get my mail from Outlook to Kmail. In Windows I had already prepared for this by converting my mail to Outlook Express. From here I simply used the Kmail Import utility. It handled the couple of hundred megabytes very well and after a couple of hours all my e-mails were in Kmail. Some tidying up with folder names and re-making subfolders and every thing was OK. After setting up my accounts and filters the first sign of a problem was when I tried to send a mail to the list announcing my conversion - it just got bounced back. It seems that Kmail was doing something strange to the envelope. Not a show stopper in itself. A couple of days of playing with Kmail and I decided that OK it works, it's useable, it's stable. But it's not very pleasant to work with. It doesn't do a good job of threading messages is my main argument, but actually it's just lots of small niggles that made me feel uncomfortable with it. Quite by chance whilst talking about these problems with Chris Reeves I decided to have a look at Mozilla. I played around with copying mail boxes from Kmail to Mozilla and although I wouldn't describe it as a quick process it certainly isn't difficult. I was using Mozilla 6.0 that comes with 7.1. Mozilla brought its' own set of problems. For one it is a lot slower than Kmail. Copying large quantities of mail from one folder to another is best done whilst having a cup of coffee or two. I could go on and on about each detail but I'll round up by saying that I have upgraded to Mozilla 8.1 from mozilla.org and although not perfect I'm happy with it for the time being. I still have great hopes for Kmail but will wait and see. A quick word about the network at work. My friend has a start-up telecoms company and I use a desk in his office, in return I troubleshoot his Windows network. It's just simple peer-to-peer network with a DDN connection, half a dozen pc's and a couple of printers. On Monday afternoon I received a pdf document from a client that needed to be faxed on to somebodyelse. No phone line and no modem so setting up and sending the fax direct from Linux was out of the question. So I thought I would print it and send it from the office fax machine. The printer is on a win98 machine and is a HP PCL6 compatible laser printer. I have read all the docs that come with SuSE about network printing. The docs in the manual describes a step by step process of how to print in a TCP/IP network. Looking at the manual again (12.6 Printing in a TCP/IP Network) it doesn't mention Windows. I just assumed that this should work for Windows as well. I still have no idea whether this method should work for a windows based print server. Anyway I hacked around following the instructions to the letter. I couldn't get it to work. Work on this went on into Tuesday (I had booted into Windows printed the document and faxed it on). During this time it came up that I had to access somebodyelse's files on a shared folder. I thought I would give LinNeighberhood a try. Very impressive. I started it up and a few clicks later I was viewing shared folders exactly as if I was in Windows network neighberhood. The printing problem was still on my desk and I was reading printing HOW-TO's, seaching mailing lists and posting to this list. Also I was looking at setting up remote printers in YAST2. From Yast2 I got the impression that I should be able to set up a SAMBA printer with a few clicks of the mouse. A few mouse clicks later and it still didn't work. At this point I assumed that SAMBA was set up and running OK. I think I thought this because LinNeighberhood was working. After more wasted time I concluded that samba wasn't starting at bootup. Slipped into Yast2 rc.config and set START_SAMBA to "yes". Saved. Rebooted computer. Still no SAMBA. Looked at rc.config with a text editor and found that START_SAMBA was set to "no". Here is a quick digression into my experiences with Yast2. Firstly I think that the work SuSE has done is fantastic. This has to be the easiest point and click configuration tool for Linux. I was moaning under 7.0 that at least Mandrake7.1's interface to DrakConf/LinuxConf was superior to Yast/Yast2 (from the newbie's viewpoint) even if it regularly crashed. I think Yast2 is lightyears ahead of that. I particularly like the integration with KDE's control panel. OK the "root" button doesn't work but I'm sure it will in the next version. In short really REALLY impressive. Except that I have noticed on several occassions on both my computers that sometimes when you set settings using Yast2 they aren't recorded. Not a big problem and again I'm sure that this will be fixed. Back to SAMBA. I got it working and then through a combination of Yast2 and Yast1 I got the network printer configured. It works fine. How exactly I did it I don't know. By now it's late Wednesday and I have had a number of excel and word docs arriving in my inbox. The files are a mixture of Office 95, Office 97 and Office 2000 formats as well as rtf text files. Now in the past I have used Star Office a lot; before I returned to China a few months ago I had been using SO on Win2000 in preference to MSOffice. I actually prefer working in SO. I had tried showing it to some of my clients still using Office95 but their faces just glazed over and they didn't want to know. Anyway I had also bought Applixware Office and was keen to give it a go. I have posted about this already but I will briefly outline my experiences with it. It failed on a lot of word files although generally I was able to get the important information and copy and paste them into new files. Excel files were a complete failure although in Applixware's defence most of them are pretty complicated spreadsheets. Applixware itself if you ignore the interoperability issue is very nice although some of the features are a little more cumbersome to use than their office counterparts. Also some features aren't very intuitive or complete. For example in all my docs I like to have a date stamp of the document creation date. In Applix Word I can't figure out how to set this up in a template. I can have the creartion date of the template, the date the file is saved or the date it is printed. If I want to have the file creation date I have to write a shelf script. I am looking forward to learning SHELF and using it to automate complex processes but I think that it's a bit much to have to learn a new language and write a macro just to get a file creation date. Maybe I'm wrong and I just haven't understood Templates in Applix. I look forward to being corrected. Star Office looked like the next alternative. Now I should say in advance that under 7.0 and X4.02 I had problems using SO5.2. Big problems - it crashed my whole system. But it worked under X3.x. Anyway I thought I'd try it first under 7.1 and X4.02 and see what happened. Hit the shortcut on the desktop a whirring StarOffice button appeared on the panel and then disappeared. Strange but I just concluded that it was the 4.02 issue. Better use X3.x again. Now under 7.0 I got X3.x set up by downloading a drop in binary replacement for XF86_SVGA and then using sax. I tried the same procedure didn't work. I'm not going to go into too much length but simply say that I couldn't get sax to work. I could have tried XF86Config but I really wanted to get sax to work. I still don't know why it didn't work. I looked at abiword. OK on .doc files, useless on .rtf. Also all table formatting got lost. Gnumeric opened my excel spreadsheets and is quite impressive. Only slight glitch was formatting some cells with multiline text. But hey the English version of Excel has the same problem when opening spreadsheets created on a Chinese version. Gnumeric even has a built in feature to print straight to pdf. Very cool. Only problem is that merged cells cause the formatting to go hay wire and text to be hidden. Nevertheless an impressive program. A quick mention on Koffice. At the moment, from the point of view of interoperability with the MS world it is of no use. However I have high hopes for Koffice and considering how the rest of KDE has been developed I have no reason to doubt that in the end this won't be KDE's killer app. So Wednesday and Thursday I had to boot into Windows a couple of times to convert and print a few files. I also had a play with Wine and managed to get Excel2000 to open a few files. When I have time I am going to try and install Word and Excel97 and see how that works. Thursday I had to run a couple of python scripts to generate some reports. Fortunately a long time ago I had forseen that these scripts might have to run on different machines and I had abstracted all the paths out into one script. However I knew there was a bug in the Linux part of the script so I had to change that. Now I could have just fired up any text editor but I wanted to get idle working (idle is the editor that comes with the python distribution). To my surprise it was not on my system nor could I find it on the Cds. It used to be available for download but now is included as part of the distribution. I didn't fancy messing about with my python installation by re-installing so I just copied the whole package from my windows box. Spent an hour fiddling with permissions. Then everything worked fine. By Friday morning I had e-mail, printing and python working. I was also producing documents from ApplixOffice and converting them to pdf's ok. But I still had a big problem with MS formatted docs that I was receiving. Friday after lunch, I don't know why, but I re-installed Star Office using yast. This time it worked fine. Everything set up OK and it even starts acceptably fast. All my document problems solved. As the icing on the cake just before I finished work for the weekend I got the wheel on my mouse working. Bliss Monday morning I will be able to work with about 98% of the functionality that I had under windows. There are still a few things that I have to work out. Mainly how to read, write and print Chinese. Some of this is a font issue. Also sound isn't working but that isn't a necessity for work. In converting to a Linux desktop I had a few teething problems but nothing that was a real show stopper. Probably I should have prepared a bit more but my philosophy is that I am more like to learn faster on the job than theorizing about the job. I'm sure many people can't afford the time during their daily work to make the conversion but having taken the decision to change I am very glad that I have seen it through. I am sure that from this point onwards my experience of the Linux desktop can only get better and better. Waiting from KDE1.2 until now was a good choice. The new KDE desktop really is very productive and the wealth of useful programs (not just KDE ones) is very encouraging. I wish anyone else that converts on the desktop the best of luck. Jethro