Project Open
Twenty oh-six (2006) is approaching at the speed of light. I’m selecting a few projects to work on during the new year. Becoming Open is my first pick.
During twenty oh-six I intend to systematically switch to using open software for personal use. This will not be cold turkey, but right away I’m going to use the (first rate!) OpenOffice suite of programs, unless I can not. The exceptions should be rare; when they occur, you’ll read about it here.
I’ll approach the operating system a bit differently. I use a few PCs. This two-year old HP I am writing on is set up with XP, and for now I won’t bother with making a short-term change.
But for my work IBM ThinkPad I plan to add the VMWare system, so I can run Linux and XP side by side. I have a number of work systems that require Windows. But if it’s easy to switch to Linux with a couple of mouse clicks. I hope to start doing a fair amount of my work using the Linux environment.
I already use the FireFox browser, Thunderbird email client and GAIM instant messaging applications. Skype (which is becoming mission critical for me) has a Linux version. And naturally OpenOffice runs equally well on Linux as it does on XP.
It will take some fiddling, because I’ll need to get the Cisco VPN client working on Linux, as well as the VNC remote access program I use to access certain servers at work.
The one barrier I am aware of that the OpenOffice spreadsheet doesn’t handle Excel macros. So I am sure I’ll be forced to use Excel for some spreadsheets.
As best I can tell, OpenOffice handles PowerPoint very well, but again, time will tell.
If you have already accomplished what I am setting out to do, please comment or email me. (My address is buried near the end of my About page.