[ale] Linux replacements for some M$-based junk

[Joe Knapka]

"J.M. Taylor" <jtaylor at onlinea.com> writes:

> I'll second the Win4Lin for the windows apps.
> 
> If they want to replace the Access thing, it's been my experience that
> anything in Access can be recreated by a competent programmer with
> mysql/php or perl or java or other language in a short period of time, and
> it'll be aeons more reliable.

Well, "short period of time" is relative. This particular Access
"application" is a combined accounting/student tracking package for
martial-arts schools. I've already replaced the "student tracking" bit
with a Zope app, which took about three weeks of full-time development
and testing. (I didn't know Zope at the time, so naturally the
learning curve affected the effort required.) I'm not competent to
replace the accounting part, and my friend is not interested in
spending a lot of money on that (I strongly suspect). IOW, he wants to
"save money" immediately, not have to spend a bunch of it to convert
to open source.  If I say to him, "Yeah, it's all free, except you're
going to have to spend a few K$ to convert your Access app", he's
going to say, "Screw it, I'll live with Windows."

> I would not replace their accounting program...a) you don't want to be
> respsonible if something gets lost/screwed up  and b) people who do
> accouting tend to get irritated when their accouting program features
> change.  For this, Win4Lin would be a great choice.
> http://www.netraverse.com/ is their main site, I've been using them for
> about 3 years and have always been pleased with them.

It sounds like Win4Lin is the strongest recommendation. It kinda
sucks that the two really critical apps would still have to
run under Windows, but if reliability is increased, that's
a good thing.
 
> Good luck!
> 
> Jenn

Thanks,

-- Joe

> 
> Greg said:
> > Win4Lin allows one to install Windows 98 on a partition and run it in a
> > window.  I used it w/ QuickBooks, Office, and some other MS programs a
> > year back.