The Old Tin Shed

Hi all; As you know I have written about Linux Mint a couple of times now, I have found it amazing and so windows like without all the windows issues. There have however been a couple of issues that have had me dual booting.  The not least of which is the fact that I need MS office for school.  Now the free word processor that comes with mint is great for basic stuff, but if you want the whole hog you really cant get away from MS office. I have several times over the last year tried without success to install MS office into mint both using wine and VirtualBox without much success.  Well that changed tonight. I needed Office for a major assignment I have due and I am sick of booting and rebooting to get stuff, I tried again with VirtualBox with no joy.  Then I found this link http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=79912&f=42 Now I know its not all done in a gui and needs some commands at terminal but it works.  If your unsure on using termina...

OK another tech post.  About 7 weeks ago, I embarked on a mission to find a windows replacement desktop, one the works straight out of the box.  A operating system that is easy to set-up and doesn't require a computing degree or to use command prompts. For Linux editions this has pretty much been impossible.  I have tried most of the standard offering such as Ubuntu, Fedora, PC-BSD, etc and had issues with sound, printing, Skype and flash to mention a few.  Ubuntu has always been a strong contender, especially in the Kubuntu derivative. Now my PC is no monster with lots of specialist drivers required, I use a standard ASUS motherboard and an AMD CPU.  You would expect that most of the offerings would cope adequately with what I have but that is not the case. Linux still has to pull its finger out and get the basics right before they go redesigning the desktop, it seems stupid to me to get a user to use...