I have a Niece (student) who has an Apple computer and she wants MS Office ($140) for Christmas. In the past she has stuck her nose up for Open Office when I mentioned it.

I thought if Knoppix has a version for Mac or OpenOffice has a live version that will run on a Mac we could let her play with it and if it is satisfactory for her needs, we could give her that and $50 rather then spend $140 for that MS stuff.

Help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Why can't she just install it and see if she likes it on Mac OS...and then uninstall it if she doesn't?

I don't understand why you would go through the trouble of booting into another OS to run a memory-resident version of a program she could install on her computer in a minute or two and test in an environment she if comfortable with. Making her use Open Office in a completely different operating system isn't a very good indicator of how she would adapt to it when she would be using it day-to-day.

I had suggested that, but no. She had installed Gimp as one time and it took over and she said never again.

Thanks for the suggeston

Should have bought MS Office On Black Friday. Office Depot was selling it for $69.99 all day long. Wow a Niece expecting a $140.00 present from an uncle/aunt that's umm kinda greedy imho. I mean I'd love to be able to spend that on my Nephew for Christmas, but then who is going to pay my bills ?

For some reason (anyone care to speculate ?) All the Schools are telling the students they MUST HAVE MS Office to do their homework, They must turn in Word Documents, Powerpoint presentations and Excel Spreadsheets.

I've got a couple people running Open Office 3.0 for their school work and I've set the program defaults to save those documents in Microsoft formats by default. Once this was done they have been able to successfully complete and turn in their assignments and haven't had any issues. I can understand some people not understanding there are alternatives and thinking they have to have the latest and greatest MS Office in order to succeed. How very sad.

Anyone see the Slashdot article last week on the Teacher taking the Linux CD's the kid was handing out to other students, because there is NO such thing as a free OS or software, and he was violating someones copyright ? Yes, institutions of higher learning indeed.....

I know, but she didn't know what she wanted them. Incidently, she is married, has two children 9 and 11. She has gone bock to school (agninst her husband's wishes) studing graphics Her Mother is helping on the tuition and we gave her the computer, so we haven't been stingy.

But I thank you for your help

http://www.microsoft.com/student/dis...s/default.aspx
Office 2007 Ultimate Student Teacher for $59.95 in case you haven't pulled the trigger yet..



And to go with that how about a US Patent application for pay as you go computing from Microsoft..

at least we are not there yet...

Thanks a lot. Will look into that. I should of thought of that myself.

Last time I checked yea, they are still saying turn in things in powerpoint or word format. I am going to slashdot to check for that article. Sounds like a good read.

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/08/12/10/001236.shtml

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/1...kids-back.html

I wonder how the follow up on this, if any, came out..

That was a great read. I did like how the teacher said she will research it as time permits. So why not research first and get the facts before making a fool of yourself? But I guess we will have to wait until school is back in session before we get to hear about any updates. Thanks for the links.

I have suggested this subject for our next LUG meeting.

If indeed it is necessary.

If the Apple is a newer model, it has an Intel processor and will boot most of the later linux live-cds, although with the reservation that some will be better at hardware detection than others.

http://www.livecdlist.com/

If it is a PPC model, Ubuntu and Gentoo should work.

http://www.livecdlist.com/?pick=Linux_PPC&showonly=All

Even if linux gives the woman qualms, she might like it if she took the effort to learn it. At linux we're optimists.

She spends quite a bit of time here with her 2 boys.
I setup my older computer for the 10 year old with ubuntu on it and turned him loose. He got scolded. She said we are using Apple in this family. So be it.

Apple has a package called iWork that has word processor, spreadsheet, and PowerPoint-like program. They can open MS Office files, but have some feature limitations. We have it on a machine at home, and it's fine. I think it is $80.

The problem with the student/teacher versions of MS Office, is that they are not upgradable, if that is a concern. You have to buy another copy if you ever want to upgrade.

I can't imagine trying to get her to use Linux and OpenOffice on a Mac.

I can't imagine using a Mac