Peter Gordon wrote:
Steven Pasternak wrote:
We aren't in the 1990's anymore. Firefox/Thunderbird are what many
people use under windows, so there isn't really much transition there.
OpenOffice works almost like M$, and even has file-format compatibility.
Good. The apps are cross-platform and interact well with other apps and
file formats. Now how does Granny User transfer her settings from
Windows Firefox/Thunderbird/OO.org/etc. to Linux? Currently no easy way
exists to do this (of which I am aware). By "easy" here, I want there to
be some way to have a dialog which says "I want to transfer these
settings/bookmarks/preferences/et al. from my Windows applications to my
Linux installation" with clickable options for Firefox, Thunderbird,
OpenOffice.org, Gaim) and the user could just click it. Even nice would
be things like transferring what we could of a user's MS Outlook setup
to the corresponding Evolution configuration or transferring a Trillian
buddy list to Gaim, etc. It would be very difficult to ensure everything
was transferred correctly, but I think it would really help people learn
to use GNU/Linux further without the trouble of reconfiguring their
client software for instant messaging, email, web browsing, etc. (Hey, a
geek can dream, right? :o)
My dad has linux and winxp dual booted and spent a couple of hours
manually transfering and fighting windows, but in the end could do it
(although you need outlook to export from its crappy format to transfer
the emails.). Transferring the stuff from the mozilla apps was the
easiest part. It probably wouldn't be to hard to have a program that
checks c:\windows\profiles (or wherever windows hides its user info) for
users and looks in c:\program files for things like mozilla and internet
explorer, etc. and runs an import wizard. I wouldn't be surprised if
that happened in the next few years, especially since apple is gaining
momentum and, being freebsd at the core, would be a LOT easier to import
from.
