My family has used Macs primarily for years now, but we are considering replacing our oldest Mac with a PC running Linux. Although I've never actually used Linux yet I have heard a lot about it and I have some experience with UNIX (bash shell) because Mac OS X is UNIX-based. Right now I am in the process of gathering as much info about Linux as I can.

Linux appears to have much of the software we need (several of which I already use with OS X) but there are a few apps I have yet to find for Linux. Your help is greatly appreciated.

• encyclopedia (ala World Book, Britannica, Grolier, etc.)
• SSH client (Is openssh good?)
• HTML/PHP text editor with tag-coloring
• Geneology software with GEDCOM support

I have no idea about the encyclopedia or the geneology.....

Bluefish is supposively a good HTMl/PHP text editor with tag-coloring. You can also do that on numerous other editors.

OpenSSH is probably the best ssh client in exsistance (isn't it what Apple uses on OSX? I am pretty sure it is).

Places like freshmeat.net and sourceforge.net are good places to find what kind of software is around for linux. At least what kind of free software is around anyway.

Thank you for the fast reply. I just looked in one of the OS X books and, yes, OpenSSH is the SSH server that comes with OS X. I actually already knew about SourceForge but was using Fink to find the apps I listed above to no avail. I'll take a look over there now.

Check out GRAMPS for your geneology needs and Wikipedia for the encyclopidia.

Other genealogy software: geneweb (html based) and lifelines (text-based).

best html editor in linux: quanta...... it runs circles around bluefish

ya, that was the one I was trying to remember. In ever use anything other then Vi myself, but I know Vi drives most people nuts so I usually don't suggest it.

for encyclopedias, do you mean cd-based or online?

worldbook has a very nice online version www.worldbookonline.com (but you do have to pay....)

you can use encarta (ya, it is run by m$, but that does not make it bad; it is intrinsically only semi-intellectual but a decent place for just facts)

even cd-based things should be usable in programs like wine (unless the new ones have copy protection with safedisc or cdchecks)

I meant CD-ROM based encyclopedia (ie. sofware, not web pages). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Wine was only a way to add Windows APIs to Linux so that open-source Windows-specific software could compile to be run on Linux. I don't have the source code for commercial apps like this.

no, wine is able to run .exe files and the api layer makes the windows-specific files think that they are in windows; wine redirects the windows-calls to linux libraries or some dll files

the software does not need to be open source (but the "winelib" is what enables developers to convert source from windows into linux-specific code)

http://www.winehq.com/
"Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows binaries to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris."

Sweet!

Interesting. Does it color PHP code as well?

Depending on how old your oldest Mac is, you may wanna just install Debian for PPC instead of buying a PC. Just a thought...


or MDK, or RHL, or a few others, I think (Slack?)

Actually, you can see my Macs by following the link in my signature. The second one is the one we will be replacing, and it's quite outdated hardware wise. Besides, I've heard that Linux is much better on x86 than PPC.