I would be interested in this also. I've looked into things like LDAP, kerberos, YP, etc. I can find loads of information but little in the way of guidance, and actual setting up advice. Especially when it comes to email, and also mixing local and roaming profiles (i.e. for those with their own laptop).

It often works, but sometimes I have to write back and request a non-proprietary document format. I tend to send out PDFs, although most people can deal with ODT/ODS format. Luckily LibreOffice has the "Save as PDF" function.

OpenOffice 4.0, opens docx almost identical to msword, at least in my experience.

Yes, we've been working only with slack boxes in my medical office. No issues regarding M$ compatibility. Stable and reliable.

Sadly Slackware has been repeatedly yanked over BitTorrent for a while now as funds have been going to pay for necessities, especially petrol (gasoline) to get to and from work, as well as put food on the table. Obama sadly hasn't made anything easier for us here in the states tax-wise and it's only getting worse, but that's another topic.

If I could buy a copy of Patrick's official retail versions, I would. However, until the US economy and my working situation gets better, I'm stuck in a rut between free software copies, free student releases, and freeware/open source software till things get better.

Even with the LibreOffice 4.x, I sometimes have had .docx file opened in a jumbled format e.g. distorted font and header/footer missing.

Regards.

I find that it varies. Overall .doc files open OK in LibreOffice - but there are annoying things, such as text boxes getting converted to frames - which behave differently. Or the positioning of certain elements on the page moving about. Nothing insurmountable, but a period of transition and education for users is necessary. Also, as someone else has pointed out, once documents become complicated, with various embedded objects and fancier formatting, the chances of things going missing or wrongly formatted when they are opened in LibreOffice increases.

I've been using Slackware as office and multimedia computer for the past ten years. When I need to interact back and forth with customers or colleagues who use MS-Office (basically 99% of them), using Libre Office or Open Office was not an option : too much trouble with SmartArts, Styles, embedded medias and data, macros, etc. Luckily, MS-Office 2003 and 2007 run reasonably well with Wine (as long as there are no macros in Excel files) and I usually manage without ressorting to reboot to some old WinXP on my laptop. For the rest, and especially personnal files and the small animation company I run, everything is done very well using Libre Office. I also use Scribus for PAO, and it runs great.
I tend to favor tools that also exist on Windows and Mac. This way, the persons I work with in the animation company and who still run Windows or Mac can install the same tools I use.

It all needs more support from big players. If Her Majesty's Government here in the UK said that from now on all Government websites would provide all documents in the open document format so that they were accessible to all then that would be a massive leap forward.

All the time MS is ruling the roost we're stymied.

I'm using NIS and NFS, a somehow antique solution, but it JustWorks(tm) and is not too difficult to setup. I document all my configurations, so here's the corresponding HOWTO:

http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:net...ing_profiles?s[]=nis

And here's the original:

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/L...+NIS-HOWTO.txt

Cheers,

Niki

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Hi, I found that to get optimal printing, it's worth to look for the appropriate PPD file for the printer you want to work with on www.openprinting.org/driver/Postscript. Download that and suddenly you get colour where before only black and white was given via the normal drivers coming with the distribution.

Further, Slackware is my main OS; all windows-specific programs I have to use are running on a virtual windows copy, running in virtual box.
Gimp; Inkscape, PDFshuffler, Libreoffice, VLC, leafpad, CLCsequence viewer replace all the obvious windows/adobe counterparts; if only Mupdf would allow one to print files...

rob

+1 on that, though it's not Slackware-specific. It concerns Linux as a whole. Setting up a new printer sometimes turns out to be one of these rare occasions where I want to throw the half dozen Linux boxes in my office out of the window and replace them by Macs.

But the feeling doesn't last.

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Yes. I have used Slackware for many years, partially at first and full time since 2009. I have several machines, including an HTPC and all are Slackware based.

My profession of technical writer pretty much requires using MS Word or FrameMaker. I don't bother with solutions such as OpenOffice/LibreOffice (OO/LO) or WINE. I use vitual machines (VM).

I don't use OO/LO professionally although current discussions with another person might lead to a contract using either as the front-end for creating XML files. That said, I have found OO/LO support of doc(x) leaves much to be desired. The general perspective is the simpler the document structure the better the conversion. Yet I have witnessed poor inmporting/exporting even with simple documents.

The import/export round trip sometimes creates buggy documents. By round trip I mean importing a dox(x) and saving as such.

I have some complex documents that I never have been able to convert seamlessly. For those documents I still use Word 97 in an NT4 VM. I'm not knocking OO/LO as I have on my to-do list to master the software. Yet I'm realistic about expections worth doc(x) support. The doc(x) standard is closed and I don't blame software developers whith their reversen engineering efforts.

As I use VMs, normally I never encounter doc(x) issues. Yet often I ask for a PDF and get that sent to me.

I'd looked there before. No luck for our printer. I ended up going to Xerox, downloading a PPD from there and editing it to print colour. I realised I could have done that with a PPD file from openprinting.org, but Xerox were advertising support for our printer. Which they don't.

Our other printer is a Brother multifunction. Nothing works on it in Linux.

I have quite some experience with setting up various Brother printers for clients. I even published an article in a french print magazine about that subject a few years ago. Until now, I pretty much got every single one of them to work. But you have to use the drivers shipped by Brother. They usually come as a pair : driver + cupswrapper.

Someone wrote an article about the subject on the Slackware Documentation Project:

http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:har...installation?s[]=brother

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