Thinking of Going Ubuntu 100% today

[mamamia88]

well yesterday i decided to try the windows 7 beta. but when i tried to schrink my vista partitition it wouldn't let me and told me to run check disk. i did that and the next morning i get bsod upon startup every time even in safe mode. so i am thinking of going ubuntu 100% when i get home but my only qualm is that i might need to use excel for my accounting class which i am in now. and i like to watch streaming soccer games on sopcast since i am american and don't get many games. can these be overcome so i can use ubuntu 100%?

[RichardLinx]

I'm not sure about streaming soccer games on sopcast (I've never tried). As for excel It should work fine for most things, unless you're doing something extremely advanced.

EDIT: I just checked, sopcast works with Ubuntu so no problems there. :D

I say go for it! Ubuntu is a great distro and you wont regret it (hopefully). Be sure to check It runs as a LiveCD first though to insure you don't have too many future problems. And look forward to even better releases in the future, benchmark tests show that 9.04 Alpha boots in under 24 seconds. :)

[eragon100]

well yesterday i decided to try the windows 7 beta. but when i tried to schrink my vista partitition it wouldn't let me and told me to run check disk. i did that and the next morning i get bsod upon startup every time even in safe mode. so i am thinking of going ubuntu 100% when i get home but my only qualm is that i might need to use excel for my accounting class which i am in now. and i like to watch streaming soccer games on sopcast since i am american and don't get many games. can these be overcome so i can use ubuntu 100%?

If you need something like excell just use the included clone, openoffice.org calc. If you really need excell, just run the windows version on ubuntu using the free software "wine". www.winehq.org

It runs excel 2000, 2002, 2003, and I believe 2007 as well. You can look it up on their site in the section called "appdb". Wine also runs 1000's of other windows programs, such as a ton of commercial games, both old and new, microsoft office, photoshop, itunes, winrar, and a million programs more.

[stimpack]

And VirtualBox is great if you ever need access to Vista again.

Not tried sopcast, watch mine from justin.tv flash-based. But a 'sopcast linux' google search shows a few interesting results.

[Bölvaður]

Spreadsheet: OpenOffice3 should be more than enough, you install it by adding the reposities from the ooo which will then upgrate ooo2 to 3.
If there is something that is only in MSoffice then it seems very easy to install Wine from Add/remove and then just open the setup file with wine. My professor uses msoffice2003 and it seems to work find under wine... but it looks so out of place on his kde desktop :D


Watching football: Seems to be working according to the second post.


I would not expect much actual trouble, but would rather expect you having to adjust a little bit so you may think there are issues. Follow the ubuntuforums may actually minimize that kind of troubles.
Oh I am probably not making a lot of sense, but my neighbor is broadcasting her high IQ too loudly for my taste so I cannot concentrate.

[gn2]

A Vista Recovery CD (http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/) might help get your Vista installation sorted.

[mamamia88]

well i got a vista disc and a copy of office 2007 is there any way to create a dummed down version of vista so i can run it halfway decent in virtualbox? i only need excel so i don't want to have to reboot every time just for that

[RichardLinx]

well i got a vista disc and a copy of office 2007 is there any way to create a dummed down version of vista so i can run it halfway decent in virtualbox? i only need excel so i don't want to have to reboot every time just for that

I don't have much experience with Vista (Almost none at all actually) but If you install It in virtualbox you should be able to uninstall any programs you don't need. And If your only going to be using It for excel you wont need to give much RAM to your virtual machine anyway.

However I don't see why you won't be able to use the openoffice equivalent of excel (Calc). And you might be able to run Excel 2007 through wine or crossover office (Crossover costs money).

[toupeiro]

I've been running ubuntu 100% almost three years now without a need to revert back to windows. I really think openoffice will handle all your excel needs, but should you just need to train yourself on Excel 2007, the compatability is VERY good with wine. Do some googling and you will find some great walkthroughs on how to install office 2007 in Ubuntu with wine.

Welcome aboard!

[minsf]

mamamia, please please keep track of your threads. see my post (#10) here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1039431

[uberdonkey5]

Yeh, Excel is the thing that keeps me form going completely ubuntu. Spreadsheet is good, but the programming language for macros is different. There is software to convert excel macros to openoffice, but it is notoriously unreliable.

Portable apps apparently does a version of microsoft office which opens up in its own virtual program, but I believe this may be illegal (as it is obtainable free).

To be honest, I would go dual boot, with XP and ubuntu, but allocate at least half of disk space to ubuntu. You don't even have to have XP in the boot menu (have delay of zero seconds), but its always there if you need it. Basically there is still stuff that linux is not good at (games, high def video editing). Despite being extremely close to going 100% ubuntu, I still have windows just in case. Not sure what others think, but I find some security in having 2 OSs even though I rarely use windows.

[albinootje]

so i am thinking of going ubuntu 100% when i get home but my only qualm is that i might need to use excel for my accounting class which i am in now.

There's not only OpenOffice for handling excel spreadsheets, but there's also Gnumeric (both in the Ubuntu repositories).
Several weeks ago a colleague needed to move some email addressbook from some email-account to his thunderbird installation.
For that we needed to edit a cvs file, while working on that, I found out that in Gnumeric it was much more pleasant to edit that file than in OpenOffice. Just FYI, YMMV. You have the choice between at least two, and for $ 0.00.

And of course there's VirtualBox to run MS-Windows inside Linux.
Don't forget to install the Guest Additions in your guest VM.

[chris4585]

I don't know if it works but for sopcast

http://code.google.com/p/sopcast-player/downloads/list