On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 10:03:36AM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
On 04 Nov 09:47, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 10:03:15PM +0000, Alistair Macgregor wrote:
Can someone please help with some advice.
At the moment I run a dual boot system, with Windows XP and Ubuntu sharing my hard drive. I would like to go the whole hog and rid myself of windows. I know I can do 90% of what I use my computer for under Linux, office, graphics and music.
The only thing I'm having trouble with is an equivalent for Planetside Terragen landscape generator. Is there anything compatible or am I stuck running it in WINE.
Personally I'd go for running XP in VirtualBox, it's what I do for the odd bits and pieces that I can't transfer to Linux, in my case these are:- Epson software for my scanner
Huh?! Does it not work with SANE? What make/model Epson scanner?
Oh yes, of course it works with SANE but I want the specialised slide and negative scanning ability and that most certainly doesn't work with SANE. Even Vuescan doesn't work nearly as well (or easily) as the supplied Epson software. In particular the ability to scan multiple images using the slide holder or negative holder works only with the Epson software.
An access database (I keep meaning to transfer to Dabo)Hmm, there was a thingummy that'd play with those... mdbtools, IIRC, but that won't give you the shiny forms etc... doesn't look like it's been worked on for a few years though :( I believe there was an ODBC layer that'd talk at 'em too - oh, no, that appears to have been part of mdbtools too...
Dabo does all I need (and more), I wrote the Access myself so know pretty well what it does. It's not incredibly complex but there are quite a few forms etc. and some little 'clever bits'.
Occasional web sites that need IE to work (many French ones)ies4linux. (http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page)
.... but, but, that doesn't do what one needs. Most of the problem with sites that only work with IE is that they use all of the nasty 'only in windows' hanging on bits. The above specifically excludes them as it's only for testing that a site will work in IE.
Depending on the size of the access database (I'm assuming that it's not huge, otherwise you'd have moved it to a sane format a long time ago) it might not take very long to migrate it to something like pgaccess or oobase, it appears that pgaccess has kinda died a bit, which I don't suppose is that suprising now that OpenOffice.org Base actually seems to work.
Dabo, dabo, dabo, dabo. Sits on top of just about any database you want to use, has all the framework, forms, etc. you could possibly want, is written in python and has lots of excellent support on the mailing list.
The real issue though is that it's simply still *easier* to run a few oddball things in XP in virtualbox, plus it's there if you need to try something else which for some reason doesn't work in Linux (often it doesn't work in Windows either but it's nice to be able to check). Finally it means I can often help friends and family on the phone by doing the same thing on my screen that they're doing to see where they're going wrong.
What have you got *against* running XP (or Vista or W7) in VirtualBox? It's free, it's easy to set up and very, very few people don't have a licence they can use.