I was a distro hopper back then experimenting with pclos, linux mint, ubuntu, and mepis.
First off, for general use college programs. Yes, there are plenty of linux equivalents. There's almost an equivalent to everything. And when there wasn't, i used wine.
Then i had my excel 2007 class. It was very essential to do my homework at home as opposed to a computer lab with the right software.
So without further ado, i didn't slap down money for office 2007 for a one semester class. This was also back in early 2008 when wine didn't support office 2007 yet. I opted for a virtual machine environment in linux. Yet again, i didn't slap down money for windows for a one semester class.
The virtual machine was the perfect working last ditch effort for getting a program that absolutely wouldn't run in linux to run in linux. And no, i didn't pirate windows or office 2007. I borrowed a copy of xp and office 2007 from a friend, installed them, and just never activated them in the virtual machine. After 30 days of non activated xp, and 21 uses of office (unactivated office just turns into a document viewer after so many uses), the easiest thing to do was just to format and reinstall everything on the virtual machine.
In reality that sounds like a lot of complication just to save some money for one semester and to not use windows as my primary operating system and with everything being legal. But, in reality, it's really easy and fast to redo a virtual machine two to three times a week (this was preferable to spending mad money on an os and expensive office suite i'd only be using once). Since then, wine has come out of beta supporting office 2007 that i have since never needed to touch again. Relying completely on linux is quite possible, and is definitely getting better.
I got away from windows in college too
shamil
(10/07/2011 04:12 am)
First off, for general use college programs. Yes, there are plenty of linux equivalents. There's almost an equivalent to everything. And when there wasn't, i used wine.
Then i had my excel 2007 class. It was very essential to do my homework at home as opposed to a computer lab with the right software.
So without further ado, i didn't slap down money for office 2007 for a one semester class. This was also back in early 2008 when wine didn't support office 2007 yet. I opted for a virtual machine environment in linux. Yet again, i didn't slap down money for windows for a one semester class.
The virtual machine was the perfect working last ditch effort for getting a program that absolutely wouldn't run in linux to run in linux. And no, i didn't pirate windows or office 2007. I borrowed a copy of xp and office 2007 from a friend, installed them, and just never activated them in the virtual machine. After 30 days of non activated xp, and 21 uses of office (unactivated office just turns into a document viewer after so many uses), the easiest thing to do was just to format and reinstall everything on the virtual machine.
In reality that sounds like a lot of complication just to save some money for one semester and to not use windows as my primary operating system and with everything being legal. But, in reality, it's really easy and fast to redo a virtual machine two to three times a week (this was preferable to spending mad money on an os and expensive office suite i'd only be using once). Since then, wine has come out of beta supporting office 2007 that i have since never needed to touch again. Relying completely on linux is quite possible, and is definitely getting better.