MS Frontpage works in Linux via VirtualBox

[L4U]

Just posting this to let others know who either are stuck with, or still prefer MS Frontpage as their web building editor that it works perfectly when running Windows XP in Oracle's free VM VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/).

This way is sooo much more convenient and time saving than having to log out of Linux into your Windows dual boot each time you want to work on your website.

[foxmulder881]

Or better still, use a native Linux web editor such as Bluefish. Frontpage is very outdated.

[L4U]

Or better still, use a native Linux web editor such as Bluefish. Frontpage is very outdated.
Bluefish is for advanced web builders and is not a WYSIWYG. The only comparable Linux WYSIWYG web editor is Kompozer, but they recommend you convert your web pages by starting from scratch which is quite an undertaking if you have a large website. It also lacks a lot of convenient features that Frontpage has.

Just praise VirtualBox. It saved me from having to go back to Windows because I was getting tired of having to restart my computer into my XP dual boot each time I needed to work on my site.

[NightwishFan]

You can also try openoffice for WYSIWYG, but I personally will never code anything meant to be seen using that kind of tool. Thats me though. ;)

[Legendary_Bibo]

I heard dreamweaver was the easiest to make cool looking web pages. I would like to make a web page because I would be able to host it (I think), but I lack money, and time to learn html. Is there anything similar? I never used dreamweaver though.

[L4U]

You can also try openoffice for WYSIWYG
That is probably the closet to Frontpage, but it's not as good and doesn't have file management, so only meant for single/few-page websites.

I asked OO to make a full-fledged web editor like Frontpage is to MS Office, but they weren't interested at this time. Too bad. They would of made a LOT of former and future x-Frontpage users very happy.

[L4U]

I heard dreamweaver was the easiest to make cool looking web pages. I would like to make a web page because I would be able to host it (I think), but I lack money, and time to learn html. Is there anything similar? I never used dreamweaver though.
Frontpage is way easier than DW for beginners.

For beginning web building in Linux, try OpenOffice Write/Web, Mozilla SeaMonkey, or Kompozer.

[NightwishFan]

They made us use Dreamweaver in school. I did not like it I prefer coding sometimes to it, it always made bloated code back then.

[Paqman]

Frontpage is way easier than DW for beginners.


No it ain't. It produces terrible code which is difficult to maintain and doesn't comply with standards, so your site won't get indexed well by the search engines.

Throwing up a Frontpage site might seem like an easy win, but you're actually causing yourself more grief by using such a bad tool.

[Techsnap]

Frontpage, that's fine if you like doing personal sites and stuff but if you wanted to do professional level stuff I recommend either learning to code properly or Microsoft Expression Web.

As for it working in Windows in VirtualBox... wow who would have thought a program which is running on the OS its designed for would run!

[robsoles]

No it ain't. It produces terrible code which is difficult to maintain and doesn't comply with standards, so your site won't get indexed well by the search engines.

Throwing up a Frontpage site might seem like an easy win, but you're actually causing yourself more grief by using such a bad tool.

Thoroughly agree!

Hey OP, did you ever try http://validator.w3.org/ on your homepage? That is what Paqman is talking about when mentions 'standards'.

Further info is that frontpage encourages you to keep your webserver open in a way that makes it even easier to exploit than practically any thing other than leaving poorly written PHP snippets throughout your site!

[foxmulder881]

Bluefish is for advanced web builders and is not a WYSIWYG.

So much to learn padawin. I guess one day you'll graduate to a real web developing tool.


It also lacks a lot of convenient features that Frontpage has.

I hope you are kidding with that comment. :shock:


Just praise VirtualBox. It saved me from having to go back to Windows because I was getting tired of having to restart my computer into my XP dual boot each time I needed to work on my site.

This comment makes me laugh. Still, whatever floats your boat I guess. And if VB+MSFP works for you, kudos to you for finding a solution.


I heard dreamweaver was the easiest to make cool looking web pages. I would like to make a web page because I would be able to host it (I think), but I lack money, and time to learn html. Is there anything similar? I never used dreamweaver though.

I use Dreamweaver in a professional development environment and there's simply nothing that compares to it.

If you don't know what you're doing, there's lots of online development tools to get you started on your own site quickly and easily.


It doesn't comply with standards <snip>

What this man says. ;) If you do insist on using a MS product for your website, upgrade to Expression Web as its Frontpage's upgrade/replacement. Even though I'd recommend avoiding that too in favor of Dreamweaver.

[Telengard C64]

wow who would have thought a program which is running on the OS its designed for would run!

^ was my initial reaction upon reading the title of this thread. :P

I still make all my web pages in hand coded HTML documents using Emacs, Kate, or whatever text editor is handy. Does that make me an old fuddy duddy?

[foxmulder881]

Not at all mate. In addition to Dreamweaver, I do some small edits in emacs. ;-)

[L4U]

Man, what's with all the snobs?

[L4U]

I hope you are kidding with that comment. :shock:
Can Kompozer do shared borders, drag-n-drop images, auto-thumbnailer, or artwork?

[NightwishFan]

Sorry if I seem snobby (though you might not have meant me), I am a firm believe in strict conforming code, and some of the other folks here that mentioned alternatives may believe that as well.

[Dustin2128]

Or better still, use a native Linux web editor such as Bluefish. Frontpage is very outdated.
Agreed.

[Legendary_Bibo]

Well I started using Kompozer, and I like it. I just have to learn how to do some things to make it look good. (Little Big Planet has definitely taught me how to get creative to get things to work) I had one issue though, my webpage looked right in Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and sort of Opera (I don't care about IE because I know that's going to take some super knowledge of HTML). The only issue Opera had was that it wouldn't display my background. I read on a guide to use the tiling ability of web browsers to lower the size of my web page, I don't think Opera supports it though.

[Telengard C64]

@L4U, don't take it the wrong way. It's just that most of us would much rather use Free and open source software native to our system than run a proprietary, encumbered program in a virtual machine. Given the audience in this forum, I think the reactions you've garnered so far have been somewhat predictable and rather mild.

Please don't be offended, but I think the thing you may be missing is that a Windows program running in Windows comes as no surprise to anyone. I'm still scratching my head wondering why you would expect it might not work?

I was required to use Front Page for school to complete a class. The instructor positively raged at me for criticizing his choice of software. I did what I had to do though, and it didn't kill me.

IMHO the fact that you cared enough to write up this report of your experience should count for something. Hope you'll keep the attitude of sharing as you continue on with Ubuntu.

[bikeboy]

If your HTML/CSS coding ability is still at the Frontpage level (which is fine), I have three words for you - Content Management System. That way you don't burden the rest of us with buggy, MS specific pages, and you'll probably be able to achieve FAR more.

[robsoles]

... Content Management System. ...

http://www.joomla.org/

I've got two business sites (for others) and a handful hobby sites in it and boy it is extensible with a comparable community to here on ubuntuforums.org!

[chriswyatt]

My tip for learning to web design is to learn how to hard-code first, that way you can see what a mess Frontpage makes of your HTML :).

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

As for it working in Windows in VirtualBox... wow who would have thought a program which is running on the OS its designed for would run!


Please don't be offended, but I think the thing you may be missing is that a Windows program running in Windows comes as no surprise to anyone. I'm still scratching my head wondering why you would expect it might not work?

That was my first reaction regarding MS Frontpage; however, I remembered that if you need 3D acceleration, some of the hypervisors don't work very well. I use virtualization (hypervisors) for things other than gaming. As a matter of fact, I don't play computer games at all. I realize that some users have only tried hypervisors for gaming; therefore, I thought that the OP may base the post on previous experiences trying to run games in virtual machines.

The OP was trying to be helpful! :)

[Legendary_Bibo]

http://www.joomla.org/

I've got two business sites (for others) and a handful hobby sites in it and boy it is extensible with a comparable community to here on ubuntuforums.org!

I'm going throw myself out to the wolves here and look stupid, but I still don't know what it is exactly. I read the about thing, and I'm still unclear. So is it for building websites or something?

[Telengard C64]

@Old_Gray_Wolf seems a little convoluted, but makes some sense now that you mention it. Why does Frontpage need 3d acceleration though?

[robsoles]

I'm going throw myself out to the wolves here and look stupid, but I still don't know what it is exactly. I read the about thing, and I'm still unclear. So is it for building websites or something?

Don't stress too much about wolves around here.


Joomla is a bit like a website in a can, if you will, and it can be 'dressed' any way you like and has extensions and addons coming out of it's ears.

People who can code in PHP have the further delight that if they really don't like something about it they can change it more specifically without relying on others - I have found that with just one extension and one minor edit to a tract of code in that extension I have a website that I am very happy to call mine or sell to others - Virtuemart is a shopping cart that is also written in PHP and makes a fine partner for a Joomla website.

Content Management Systems make owning and updating a website a lot easier, even for older hands that learnt HTML & CSS (and even PHP/CFM/ASP/JS) - there are other CMS, just google for instance http://www.google.com/search?q=content+management+systems (Note: I don't think Joomla is in top ten results at the moment but this doesn't reflect the quality of this open source CMS!)

[Giant Speck]

1. FrontPage is a dead application. Microsoft killed it off six years ago. As web standards continue to rapidly evolve, FrontPage will not be able to keep up.

2. Running an application in Windows in Virtualbox is not making it "work in Linux". For it to "work in Linux" properly, it needs to be able to run natively or at the very least, in WINE.

[Legendary_Bibo]

Don't stress too much about wolves around here.


Joomla is a bit like a website in a can, if you will, and it can be 'dressed' any way you like and has extensions and addons coming out of it's ears.

People who can code in PHP have the further delight that if they really don't like something about it they can change it more specifically without relying on others - I have found that with just one extension and one minor edit to a tract of code in that extension I have a website that I am very happy to call mine or sell to others - Virtuemart is a shopping cart that is also written in PHP and makes a fine partner for a Joomla website.

Content Management Systems make owning and updating a website a lot easier, even for older hands that learnt HTML & CSS (and even PHP/CFM/ASP/JS) - there are other CMS, just google for instance http://www.google.com/search?q=content+management+systems (Note: I don't think Joomla is in top ten results at the moment but this doesn't reflect the quality of this open source CMS!)

Ah, this might help with my conundrum. I was actually wondering how I would update my comic site without having to change the HTML everytime and have my website automatically build its own archive.

[forrestcupp]

Just posting this to let others know who either are stuck with, or still prefer MS Frontpage as their web building editor that it works perfectly when running Windows XP in Oracle's free VM VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/).
People still use Frontpage? Like Giant Speck said, it's been dead for a very long time, and web standards have already changed a lot in that time. My web hosting service finally completely dropped support for Frontpage last year.

But you're right that using a vm is much more convenient than rebooting.


@L4U, don't take it the wrong way. It's just that most of us would much rather use Free and open source software native to our system than run a proprietary, encumbered program in a virtual machine.That's true for a lot of people, but not true enough to make a generalized statement like that. There are a lot of people around who would willingly run software in a vm because there aren't good Free alternatives. It's just this particular example that isn't great.

[bikeboy]

Yep, the CMS takes care of the HTML & CSS for each page, you more or less just do the content. They're usually (eg. Joomla, Drupal) template based systems, so the whole site can be modified with a change to the template css/html/php files.

http://php.opensourcecms.com/ <<< check out their demos for a better idea of how it works.

[Warpnow]

I second the bid for CMSs, though I think Drupal > Joomla.

[Legendary_Bibo]

I just wish Joomla was easier to install. Luckily I just have to follow the installation instructions. Even a shell script would have been sufficient.

[robsoles]

I just wish Joomla was easier to install. Luckily I just have to follow the installation instructions. Even a shell script would have been sufficient.

It is fairly well straight forward once you unpack their archive into the root directory of your web server which has PHP and MySQL (it supports other SQL servers) enabled you make sure you are the next person to access the site on it's home page and answer a few questions.


You can try it on a machine on your home network (or your PC if you don't have a server on your home network) by installing a LAMP or similar setup before you try it on a live web-service.


I like comics, you might be surprised how much I will be inclined to help if you ask for more help!

[Legendary_Bibo]

It is fairly well straight forward once you unpack their archive into the root directory of your web server which has PHP and MySQL (it supports other SQL servers) enabled you make sure you are the next person to access the site on it's home page and answer a few questions.


You can try it on a machine on your home network (or your PC if you don't have a server on your home network) by installing a LAMP or similar setup before you try it on a live web-service.


I like comics, you might be surprised how much I will be inclined to help if you ask for more help!

I installed Drupal, but I couldn't figure out how to start it. I will probably install Joomla on my other computer that I plan on using to host the site. I didn't know hosting a website was so confusing. :confused:

[robsoles]

Drupal is brilliant if you are a bit more advanced than Joomla requires - that is at least the take I got from having to fix a couple of drupal sites whilst working for an SEO (search based marketing) company previously.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

@Old_Gray_Wolf seems a little convoluted, but makes some sense now that you mention it. Why does Frontpage need 3d acceleration though?

It doesn't. I didn't intend to imply it did; however, what I wrote can be interpreted that way.