On Friday 26 March 2004 06:04, Liam Marshall wrote:
There are a few critical courses we offer that we cannot abandon if we do switch over. I have surfed the net and discovered that we could go with SUSE workstations and still teach Java Programming, but can we also get Visual Basic to work on a workstation loaded with SUSE?
Probably not, there are a few projects to port VB to linux but it seems they're not very complete. There are other RAD languages you could teach instead though, such as Python, that are cross platform and not tied to a single vendor. As a school you shouldn't be so tied to a single commercial company anyway. You should be teaching people the common basic foundations that they can then use on any platform and in any language
We also spent a great deal of money, for a school, and got some fantastic textbooks for Microsoft Office XP courses. Can I somehow still run Office XP on SUSE? I have heard that there is a program that allows for the running of Windows programs on Linux.. Would that work?
Yes, there is http://codeweavers.com. It works pretty well.
I am assuming that I won't need to runn Samba if I am in a total linux environment (server and workstations) I assume that all I need is to run NIS server and clients. Is that correct?
NIS is an LDAP like directory service. If authentication is what you want then you are correct. If you want file sharing though you want to use NFS (Network File System)
Finally, from the SUSE website I see that SUSE Professional can run server software. I am assuming that I can buy one copy of Professional, use it to load the server and use it to load workstations as well.
Yes, that is correct
Is it legal to do so or do I have to buy one copy for each machine?
No, it's legal
Can I download an ISO? I don't think it is free but I don't know enough.
Not an ISO, but the installation files are available on ftp.suse.com and its mirrors (prefer a mirror, suse.com gets very bogged down.) http://www.suse.de/en/private/download/suse_linux/index.html