Open Source Software vs. Commercial Software:
Migration from Windows to Linux
An IT Professional's Testimonial
Additional Software: Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird
The software below are products that I chose to fit my everyday needs on the computer. I did the research and picked the most popular and best application for each task that I need to do. Below are my recommendations of software and why I chose them.
Web Browser - Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is by far my top choice for a browser. This is truly a great
browser, and very stable. I upgraded to the latest Firefox package from Fedora.
However, I noticed that when I opened it all of the fonts (including the menus),
were quite small. I found that it is because Firefox incorrectly detected the
screen resolution. This seems to be an issue that I ran across because I have
an older video card, I think. I haven't seen this happen on newer computers
and newer video cards. If this happens to you, go to about.config (in the address
bar), change "layout.css" to "0". Close and reopen Firefox
and it should look a lot better.
Adobe Flash Support (for Firefox)
It can't get any easier than this: Download the RPM package from Adobe's website and install.Sun Java Support (for Firefox)
Download .rpm.bin file from Sun's website and do the following:
- Run the .rpm.bin file: (./file.rpm.bin)
- Create a symbolic link with these commands:
cd /usr/lib/firefox*/plugins
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_06/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so- Check the Firefox plugins page (type in the word "about:plugins" in the address bar, and verify Java is listed).
- Uninstall the java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin package run the command "rpm -e java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin" to remote the IcedTea plugin from Firefox. Icedtea is an implementation of Java from the open source community. While it does work with a lot of things, there are some things that it doesn't work with. In my example above, I installed the official Java package from Sun, which in my experience seems to work with just about everything.
Adobe Acrobat Reader
It can't get any easier than this: Download the RPM package from Adobe's website and install.Importing Saved Passwords from Netscape
- Importing from Netscape 7:
- Copy {random chars}.s from the profile folder of NS7 to the .mozilla profile folder, and rename it to "signons2.txt", where "{random chars}" is a series of random characters and numbers.
- Copy key3.db from the profile folder of NS7 to the .mozilla profile folder.
Importing Bookmarks from Netscape/Mozilla
- Simply copy the file "bookmarks.html" from the old Netscape/Mozilla profile folder to the .mozilla profile folder.
Email Program - Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is an excellent mail program. Linux has other alternatives,
but I have found that Thunderbird has a wide array of plugins available that
make it very feature-rich. If you find that you needed the resolution fix that
I had to apply for Firefox, you can do the same for Thunderbird (Edit / Preferences
/ Advanced / Config Editor), and change "layout.css" to "0".
Calendar Program - Mozilla Sunbird
Mozilla Sunbird is a great program for handling all types of calendar events,
notifications, tasks, etc. I won't go into detail on how to use this program,
but if you install it, here's a tip that will allow you to run Sunbird in the
background, so notifications and other things will work and keep you informed:
Other Visual Fixes
I made a few more modifications in order to get all of my fonts near
or close to the same size, both in Firefox and Thunderbird, and other applications
as well. My main issue was that the resolution for my video card detected by
X11 was just slightly off. The resolution can be set in: System / Preferences
/ Look & Feel / Appearance / Fonts / Details. For instance, changing the
detected value of 81 to 80 could clear up all applications so that they all
show the exact same font size. Then to make things even more consistent, I changed
the default fonts for applications:
Next, I installed the "msttcore-fonts-2.0-2" package (found on Google, it's not provided by Fedora) for Microsoft fonts. This adds fonts such as Times New Roman, Courier New, and others.
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Linux: Additional Software: OpenOffice, Dia, Gnome Planner
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Basic Tweaking