How many of you completely switched to Linux?

[BoyOfDestiny]

I've been using Ubuntu for about 3-4 weeks. For my laptop, my needs are pretty simple - browser, email, gaim, a few simple games. Ubuntu is great.

But for my office there are still a few things I'm trying to figure out.
The toughest I think is doing multi-page scanning from an ADF (page feed) scanner directly to PDF. If you know how to do that or if it can be done, I would very much appreciate some help. I think it's the last really critical thing I need ******* for. I'd love to recover that disk space from XP.

Multi-page scanning is a function I do a lot, and replacing it with too many steps makes the process too slow to be practical. XSane seems to make great huge jpegs, which is bad, but it does seem to know about ADF scanners. It would be cool if I could take the output of XSane and pipe it to something that would convert to PDF and shrink the image size all in one step.

Any ideas?

I've got an HP OfficeJet V40 and I scan documents that have 2-20 pages fairly frequently. I save the results as PDF so it can be opened and read on just about any PC. I've got about 4-5 years of records kept this way and I'm not too interested in changing formats. My incoming documents are sometimes hardcopy that I must scan, but also come from web pages that I print to PDF.

Well, been using ubuntu 6.06 happily for laptop and desktop. Anyway, I bet for your scanning you could do a simple shell script that would handle it.

in the repos
sane-utils
imagemagick

sane-utils contains scanimage
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/scanimage.1.html

You can choose the image filetype, and make it increment the image names with --batch-double for double sided scanning

Then use imagemagick to resize

For images to pdf (didn't see it in the ubuntu repos, google turned this up)
http://www.wizards.de/~frank/pstill.html

I don't think it would be too bad to just have a folder of images and tar/zip them.

Anyway, hope this gives you a good start, I'm sure some people on the forums will help you with a script, would be about 3 or 4 lines I think, put a little short-cut on the desktop and you'd be set.

I have a lot of fun with scripting, great for automating reptitive tasks (downloading and building from source, building packages, downloading at specified times, etc.) Don't be afraid to play with it a little bit. I'm still a bit of a newbie myself, but man pages and google are very helpful (bash scripts would be a keyword in searching.)

try
man imagemagick
in terminal
to see the usage and examples.

[raja]

I am finding Ubuntu fantastic and would love to switch over completely. So what keeps me from removing XP?
1. MATLAB - of which I have only a windows version. On wine it doesnt work as well and though Octave may be OK as a replacement, I am more comfortable with MATLAB.
2. I need to do some work with word documents with a bibliography manager. Bibus works beatifully with Ooffice too, but it does not seem to be possible to work on a document alternately with MSword and Ooffice. And since I have colleagues who will need to read and edit the file with word, I need word for now.
3. A good interface for playing chess on the free internet chess server. Though there are ways of doing it from linux, none of then equals my favourite interface - babaschess.
So I am still going back to XP now and then, but atleast from a dual boot, I have switched to runnung XP inside ubuntu on vmware!

[Cyraxzz]

100% Ubuntu = )

[orb9220]

winXP? Is that a virus? Oh yeah I had it for a decade before I took my ubuntu meds.

Now feeling fine.

[D!mon]

100% Kubuntu since version 5.10 since beginning of May

[poloman2]

I havent switched completely to linux, but will as soon as i find out how to get my mp3 files to play, as soon as i figure out how to install XAAMP, and i how to run dreamweaver in wine...

also as soon as my mom learns what difference between linux and windows is, she doesnt get it yet...funny ain't?

[slimdog360]

I need to play games evry now and again, also linux is not very good with printers. I need my canon ip3000 to work properly in linux, which includes the auto duplexing, one feature I couldnt live without.
Also any sort of scientific software in linux is generally terrible, I need a good circuit simulator and math package. Octave for the math stuff goes alright but could be better, particularly plotting wise.
Basically if I could get a good circuit simulator, which also working in windows, and my printer working I could completely change.
Everything else though in linux is fantastic.

[bajara]

No ******* on my laptop since May...

The 3 desktop computers on my house run ******* because they're used by my family (one runs Debian/XP, the other XP and the last one 98).

[abandoned_hussam]

Over 2 years now windows-free.

[atrus123]

We do still have one really old laptop which is running some form of Windows (I forget which). Aside from that, we use Ubuntu, SuSE, and Gentoo, exclusively.