I’ve been looking for an alternative to Microsoft Publisher since the dawn of time…  Ok not quite but I’ve often thought that if an alternative existed the school could drop the $7000 per year cost of maintaining Microsoft Office.  The Macs could run Neo Office and the PCs could run OpenOffice.  Or both could run OpenOffice.

The two main advantages are cost and familiarity.  The cost is, of course, free.  Being that OpenOffice is cross platform is a big advantage because the interface is identical no matter if it’s Windows or Linux or Mac.  Currently we have Microsoft Office 2007 on the Windows computers and Microsoft Office 2008 on the Macs.  While MS claims them to be the same, they are not.  The interface is very different and MS doesn’t offer Publisher on the Mac side.

Scribus- alternative to MS Publisher?

The biggest holdup has been publisher because so many teachers use it to create newsletters to send home.  I’ve been waiting for a good alternative to present itself and while OpenOffice doesn’t yet have a clear cut choice it appears that another open source package, Scribus, might do the trick.  At least during my five minute trial and test of features it appears to work very much the same.  It doesn’t have some of the polish and word wrap appears to be funky but it does do many of the things the teachers want and think they need.

This discovery will weigh heavy on my mind as I try to investigate the possibility of eliminating MS Office from the school’s standard software and by doing so save over $6000 per year!

Popularity: 25% [?]

I upgraded my Dell XPS M1210 laptop from Linux Mint 7 Gloria to Linux Mint 8 Helena last night. This was all done from the terminal while running version 7 and it amazes me how well the upgrade does. Even though Mint recommends downloading the 8 install CD and doing a complete wipe and fresh install I decided to try the upgrade solution. I figured if anything went wrong I would then do the full wipe.

This was the proceedure:
Open a terminal and type the following commands:

• gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list (Change all occurrences of “gloria” to “helena”, and all occurences of “jaunty” to “karmic”, remove the lines for the Community section of the Linux Mint repository, then save the file and close the editor)
• apt update
• apt install mint-info-main (choose “Y” or “I” to install the package maintainer’s version)
• apt install mint-meta-main(choose “Y” or “I” to install the package maintainer’s version)

In the terminal, repeat the following commands until both upgrade commands show no upgrades available:

• apt upgrade
• apt dist-upgrade
• apt install mint-meta-main

I had to reinstall Firefox for some reason.  Perhaps something went wrong with the upgrade from 3.0 to 3.5.  I had Google Chrome open at the time of the upgrade because I was surfing while the downloads and upgrading was going on.

Not a lot of major changes.  Clearly a nice new theme and wallpaper with a new icon set and some of the dialog boxes have added features like the popup screens telling you about your wireless network status have a timer wheel letting you see visually how log they will remain visible before automatically vanishing as well as an option to always hide the message in the future.

I’ve been running Mint since version 6 and for over 4 years on this particular laptop with stellar results.  It hasn’t crashed and I can perform any and all tasks I need to do.  I’m very pleased!

Popularity: 27% [?]

Today Shantelle played her last peewee basketball game. This could potentially be her last peewee game ever unless the school district decides to get rid of 6th grade sports next year. Unfortunately they lost to Granby but the coaches said they had a great season and everybody loved practice and the games. I’ll post some pics later.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Shortly after we had a nice snow storm dropping 6-8 inches of snow the following two days were colder than -20 degrees F. I love it when it snows because it’s not nearly as cold. I’m tired of the bitter cold winters. Maybe it’s time to look into moving somewhere warmer- like Alaska.

Popularity: 27% [?]