On Fri, 30 Oct 2009, Brian D. Ropers-Huilman wrote: > On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 11:59, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > >> In case anyone is interested, I have been using VirtualBox, which is >> free software, and it has been working well-enough for me. It was not >> very hard to install and get started. I'm running Windows XP on >> VirtualBox installed on Ubuntu 64 9.04. > > I also run VB OSE and find it works great. There are some documents I > need to massage here at work (our Purchasing department is a prime > example) where OOo (even at v3.1.1) just doesn't cut it. At home I also > use an XPSP3 image to watch Netflix movies in full-screen and it works > great. Exactly -- it's that kind of thing that makes a complete break from Windows either very inconvenient or impossible. When colleagues need exact formatting of a document or for some VBS program to work, we get stuck with Microsoft Office in Windows. There just isn't a free-software answer just yet. I expect that we'll move toward wider use of open formats, though, and that is bound to help a lot. Mike