Switching Operating Systems and How it Affects a Business

[Michael Hopcroft]

After a disastrous system crash, I no longer trust Microsoft products. As a result, I am now running Red Hat Linux 9.  I can;t access any of my old Windows files yet, although I am told that is possible by people who know a lot more about Linux than i do. (Of coruse, that would include several seven-year-old boys.)

How does this affect my business. Aside from having to replace or find another way to get at a lot of files, not that much.  I can still use the Internet (although my ICQ number is different now thanks to the Linux clone software and I don't have my old contact list, so if you want to keep in touch with ICQ please contact me by ICQ and I can put you on my contact list at my new number.) I need to test file transfer through LICQ, but hopefully that can be taken care of this weekend. I have to recover a lot of files, either by finding a way to access my odl Windows hard drive, transferring the files, or having the publishers who sent me comps send me comps again. Zip files work just fine, and I can read all the file formats common in the industry.

It's just that technically the next few weeks are going to be awkward. I'm still learning the system, and don't know exactly what I'll find. I don't even know how to install new software in Red Hat, so someone will have to explain it or teach me.

[Nathan]

I feel for you.

I am mainly a Mac guy, although I am using a PC right now too. I've used Linux quite a bit, and it works good. Redhat is fairly easy to use too I think. There should be a package installer which allows you to install new software. It sets it up for you which is a major relief. Make sure you check out OpenOffice or AbiWord for word processing software.

Always backup your stuff folks -- it pays. :)

Go pick you up a linux book -- they are very helpful in getting down basic system maintenance and how to find stuff.

Oh and whoops: How will it affect your business? It shouldn't. Using OpenOffce, you should be able to get to all of your old files, save them a new, and get going again. You may have glitches when working with certain hardware and printers. Internet should work the same. Email should work the same. You may encounter glitches with more proprietary stuff like Flash, media formats, and so on... Otherwise, I'm not sure. Do you do your layout yourself? If so, you might not find as sophisticated tools on Linux...

Thanks,
Nathan

[Trevis Martin]

It's entropy.

I'm a Mac guy but being a computer tech for PC's (I know...weird) I have learned that you do not EVER completely trust a complex system, software or hardware, because the question is not IF it's going to break, it's when.

Thus religiously back up anything important.

regards,

Trevis

[talysman]

Mike, did the hard drive crash, or did Windows itself crash? if you can still access the hard drive but can't boot Windows, then yes, you should be able to retrieve your files by mounting that drive as a fat32 file system in linux. people who partition their drives and create dual boot machines use this to transfer information back and forth between Windows and Linux (I've done it, and that was 8 years ago, back when the technique was still experimental.)

if, on the other hand, the hard drive crashed, it's probably not the fault of Windows, but of the hardware. you might as well consider the data lost in this case, unless you have backups (Linux and Windows can read the same CD-R format, so this would be good.) in theory, data can be sometimes be recovered from a dead or even erased hard drive, but this is a highly expensive job and I don't even have an idea where to find an expert on that technique. data recovery consultants usually work for large corporations or for national law enforcement; I presume there's only a few people/companies that do this, but I don't know who they are.

of course, none of that is really relevant to rpg publishing, but I suppose your (implied) question was: how will your rpg publishing be affected by a switch to Linux? it shouldn't be affected at all. OpenOffice.org will open MS Word/Excell/Powerpoint docs, of course; ghostscript can allow you to deal with PDFs. the tricky part may be layout, depending on how you did layout before; InDesign, Pagemaker and QuarkExpress are not available for Linux. there's the vague posibility that one of these may (partially?) run using one of the emulation or VM techniques (Wine, WineX, vmware or its open-source clone...) there is also a Linux native layout program based on TeX/LaTeX called Klyx (I think). if you didn't use any layout program fancier than MS Word, or if you hired someone else for layout, you shouldn't have a problem, of course.

good luck!

[Catalyst]

Mike, just to touch on something that seems to be leaping out at me here, if you need to access a given file, post about it with as much detail as you think necessary, and I'm sure you'll get several methods back on how to get at the file through something in Linux.

Red Hat has a package system that's pretty cool. I'm not sure about RH9, but there should be a "package manager" somewhere that will list available software packages that you can download and install. I haven't used RH9, myself, but it sounds like some of the other people here can assist there, though the manuals and howto's should get you rolling nicely.

John, it sounded to me like the file system was still intact. RH9 should be able to mount a FAT32 file system, but I'm not sure about NTFS access if Mike's Windows configuration was NTFS. Anyone have experience with that here if Mike was running NTFS?

[Clay]

Michael,

This board is inhabited by at least two high-priced Linux/UNIX consultants who have a soft spot for the industry: Clinton and myself.

If you do your own layout, this might be a swell time to consider hiring somebody to do it for you.  The only thing I've seen on Linux that can do decent layout is LaTeX. I've gotten some really fantastic results out of it, but it's a big learning curve, and you don't get to play "Fun with Fonts" the way you do with other packages.

The good news is that if the physical media of your hard drive is in good shape, Linux can read it without any problem.  Linux can read more file systems that any other operating system I know of.  If the media took a dive, you might check out www.lazarus.com. I know of them because they own the domain name I wanted for my company, but through no other methods.  Kodak also has good data recovery services, and Polaroid may. Both companies have great customer service.

You'll also be happy to know that regular backups are much easier now. There's a nice job scheduling system (cron) that makes automating things much easier.  

In addition to OpenOffice, which I have heard many people curse, often from distant offices, you might try AbiWord.  AbiWord also reads Word files, but is a much more solid piece of software than OpenOffice. It's the only word processor we even use in our house.

[ejh]

Consider the "LyX" document processor.

It's a strange and radical word processor and is intended to make it easy to get the gorgeous formatting of LaTeX without having to know LaTeX.