Stephen C. Daukas wrote:
Q1 - OpenOffice versus MS Office:
What you're going to find is that OO is quite compatible with a few exceptions. I'm a Linux only user making OO work for me in a MS based environment and I've seen some cases where minor things get tweaked or dropped after editing in OO. Page numbers disappeared once. Another case introduced a discrepancy with section numbers. Table of content generation is not always flawless. But overall I have been *very* impressed with the progress OO has made and wholeheartedly recommend it over the other pricey suite. Excel and Powerpoint compatibilty seem even more stable. For sharing content, I use the PDF export engine as much as possible.
Q2 - Heterogeneous access:
I want to be able to access any file created in any of the three environments. I'd like to move files between the Macs at work and one or more of my machines at home without using Email (I want to avoid any constraints like size limitations on attachments). I want to be able to pull and push those files to whatever platform is needed for whatever needs to be done with them.
SAMBA is the best thing going. For UNIX boxes (I can't comment on Macs) I use mostly NFS but SMB works just as well and for multiple OS's. Also, rsync and SSH/SCP and/or a combination of the two work great. I know there's SSH clients for Win (putty) and probably Mac.
I'd also like to drop the static IP because of cost, and have already moved the web site to a commercial provider...
No need for static IP with all of the dynamic DNS providers out there. Check out http://www.dyndns.org/ right here in Worcester. Then use the ddclient daemon (or similar) to keep it up to date.
Q3 - Email:
can do the export, but I have had no luck with any of them knowing about Mozilla. Does anyone know of a way to get email out of Mozilla into an ASCII file-based structure (or something equally vanilla) that can be read by a standard Linux reader?
This is the easiest one yet! Mozilla stores mail in the mbox format, which is pretty much standard UNIX email fare. Any email reader worth its salt can read mbox. Right click on one of your email accounts (top level) and go to properties. The folder listed is where your email is stored. There's an mbox file for each "folder" you have, this can be tar'ed and gzip'ed and imported to another machine easily. You don't need the <folder>.msf files, those are only Mozilla internal tracking stuff. I'd recommend the latest Thunderbird as a mail user agent (MUA). They've got Win and Lin releases.
Beyond that specific issue, what would be the best way to handle email? Right now I limit myself to using one platform and POP only from it. This is because I can travel with the laptop and not all the servers I access allow IMAP. I retrieve mail from 7 different accounts and forwarding is not allowed (nor do I want to have to keep track of that). I don't mind having to do this, but I'm wondering about other options...
Well, if I had the time and motivation, what I want to do is suck all mail onto my home server and export it via IMAP over SSL so I can access it from anywhere and only have 1 copy to worry about. Charter (my ISP) used to allow IMAP to it's mail server, but recently that was turned off and I'm back to POP hell where I have to delete messages multiple times since multiple machines are checking mail all the time. IMAP is superior, if you can use it or provide it to yourself then go that route. HTH. BR