The Linux community has always had a goal to make Linux a useful and well-used desktop operating system. Thanks to the teams of KDE, Gnome, and countless other development groups there’s been a lot of attention paid to making software more usable for beginners converting from Windows.

I found a real treat today. Ryen Kim is proving that Linux is ready to be used on a primary desktop computer. He’s writing about it at Linux Home. My particular favorite post of his so far is his one about BloGTK - a Linux (GTK-based) blog-writer.

Welcome to the Linux Blogosphere Ryen!

There are several ways to run Dreamweaver on Linux: you can use Wine and run the executable directly (or run it in CrossOver Office), use a virtualization tool like VMWare or the Xen Hypervisor to run Windows on Linux, or try to hack the Mac OSX release to work on your Yellow Dog Linux system.

Despite these possibilities, I recommend scrapping Dreamweaver altogether. There are tools designed natively for Linux that can do the job you’re trying to do and then some. Dreamweaver is actually two tools in one and it’s only sorta good at either task.

Dreamweaver as a layout/design tool

This is the real strength of Dreamweaver. Those who have worked extensively with Dreamweaver know how it handles layouts. It’s excellent at tables, excellent at image maps, acceptable at CSS (but not at creating CSS), lousy at proper placement and DIV floating.

I’ve used Dreamweaver to make many layouts and I found it clumsy at times but acceptable overall.

For this task I’d recommend using Nvu. It’s uses Gecko (the rendering engine for Firefox, Netscape, and Mozilla) and is far more standards-compliant than DW.

Dreamweaver as a coding/programming tool

This is where Dreamweaver falls behind the needs of it’s users. It has many ‘behaviors’ and built-in snippets of code but it doesn’t let programmers do their business with ease. Particularly with transferring files and managing versions it hasn’t updated it’s site checkout policy in four years. While the entire open source community is addressing the needs of multiple-developer applications Dreamweaver is an underpowered ftp client at best.

For this task I’d recommend Quanta Plus. It doesn’t bother with a local copy of files so there is less to be worried about when editing. It stores the project file and everything but the current cache of your opened files directly on the server. Despite excellent transfer and site management capabilities, it’s greatest feature would have to be it’s editor.
Quanta uses an embedded form of Kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor) to edit code and it has more features that most coders would know to hope for.
Some of Kate’s features include:

• Collapsible Code Trees.
  This means that any time you have opening and closing brackets or braces in your code that are on different lines Kate will allow you to click a small icon next to the opening character’s line and collapse the whole block of code from your view. 20K PHP includes suddenly become very easy.
• Colorized Code
  Dreamweaver does a decent job coloring the code as you type it in code view, but it doesn’t support the number of syntaces or support them as well as Kate.
• Speed
  Dreamweaver has some latency between editing and updating and can have a VERY difficult time with files over 70K in size. Kate has no such problems. Based on the very best that KDE developers have to offer it provides power and functionality combined with well-engineered programming as only an open source application can offer.

So make the move, find a whole fleet of applications ready to pick up where Dreamweaver left off. And for you Photoshop users, don’t forget to get Photoshop on Linux in a similar way.

If you’re thinking of moving from Windows to Linux and you’re not sure if the software that you’re familiar with is going to be there for you on the other side, check out this comparison of Windows-Linux software.

For users of Outlook there are the following:

• Evolution
• Bynari Insight GroupWare Suite
• Aethera
• Sylpheed
• Sylpheed-claws

That’s just an example. It’s usually the case that for any single Windows program you’ll have several GNU/Linux options available to you.

Windows users have to be constantly on guard against viruses and spyware. Using Firefox significantly lowers the number of programs that illicitly install themselves, but the problem remains and is increasingly costly.

Linux users don’t need to fear spyware in the way Windows users need to for several reasons:

• Not nearly as many people use Linux as Windows, so a virus has a better chance if it’s written for Windows
• There is more diversity in the way Linux is structured than Windows - so it is difficult to predict what kind of system a Linux virus would run into
• There are many ‘features’ of Windows that allow simple scripts to do powerful things without any security protection.
• Virus writers know that the average Linux user is far more computer savvy than the average Windows user, so they go for easier targets
• Linux has a built-in permissions system that keeps programs that one user runs from infecting all the other programs (see first link at end of article).

There have been some semi-successful worms and viruses on Linux, but they’ve existed primarily as a mathmatical curiosity than as a threat to commerce. Occasionally there are worms that affect certain web applications that run on Linux (like the recent worm that affected PHPBB2 bulletin boards), but this is a result of poor PHP or Perl practices rather than a fault in Linux.

So should *nix users be wary of spyware? No, not really. That is, until Linux is the most common operating system. It’s already the core of OSX and there are rumors that Windows is planning on a Linux sandbox to run inside of Windows. Then we’ll need to pay more attention.

For more information on Linux viruses:
Linux: The short life and hard times of a Linux virus
Linux GUIs could allow viruses

Clete Blackwell writes at The Linux Blog:

Linux has progressed greatly in the years since its beginning, but so has Windows. There is a constant battle for the desktop. Microsoft plans to release its new operating system, Longhorn, in the coming years, but by then, KDE will have QT4 released along with a whole new version. KDE 3.4 has great improvements as well. Is Linux (or should I say KDE) friendly enough? Almost. Is Windows friendly enough? Yes.

He measures and compares various parts of Windows and Linux (KDE mostly) for ease of use from the perspective of a new Linux user. This will be a handy read for those who are attempting to choose a distribution or are contemplating whether it’s worthwhile to switch to Linux.

One of the best things about running Microsoft Windows XP on a laptop is the excellent support for multiple batteries, hibernation, standby, etc. For those of us who use computers for many different tasks and like to keep applications open for days, hibernation is essential. Not having full-quality support for hibernation on my laptop was one of the first serious technology gaps I ran into between Windows and Linux. Also, the inability to hot-swap my dvd-burner and spare battery proved to be a real pain.

The development of ACPI on Linux is coming along but moving slowly. The ACPI packages that are coming out have partial support for hibernation (suspend to disk), standby (suspend to RAM), and another, even less complex form of standby. They aren’t on par with Microsoft’s technology yet, but they are coming along.

A common way to start using Linux is to have a working Windows XP installation taking up a full drive and wanting to give just a little room to Linux. This is how I started long ago and it’s not too unlike how I do it now.

There are some hitches to installing Linux and Windows together, some of which involve the MBR (Master Boot Record). Those who have attempted to dual-boot systems will surely have one or two stories of unexpectedly-overwritten MBRs.

Here is an article about using NTLDR (the Windows software for the MBR) and keeping Windows intact, while installing Linux into a second hard drive.

The computer in question was a standard white-box PC with Windows XP installed on its one hard drive. One option was to shrink the exiting Windows partition with NTFSresize and install Linux in the resulting free space. However, this was too intrusive. I did not have a backup of the data on the Windows machine, and didn’t want to take the time to make one, so I was loath to do anything that could wipe it out.

Note: The instructions given in this article could just as easily be applied to installing Linux into a partition on the primary drive. The only change required would be to install GRUB or LILO into hda2 (or whatever number) instead of hdb.

In Eric Clapsaddle’s Article A Linux Island in a C:\ of Windows, Part 1 | Linux Journal he discusses how to use Linux at work without buying any new hardware or trying to dual-boot anything. VMWare is a handy program that simulates a computer within your computer, so you can have a whole different PC running in a window on your desktop. The best part of this article is one of the comments: (by Paul Archer)

Repartition your drive and install Linux as if you were going to do a standard dual-boot setup. Then run VMWare under Windows and point it to the Linux partition. Now when you’re ready to switch to Linux as the primary OS, you can boot to Linux and setup VMWare on Linux to run Windows.
With this setup, you have the ability to access both OSes from either OS. And SuSE has a system profile switcher that would come in really handy for running Linux under VMWare and then switching to running natively.

So you want to run Winamp on Linux huh? Yeah, me too ’cause version 5 is pretty sweet. I’m going to save you a lot of time though by telling you not to even try. Really, don’t try. Instead, just run XMMS. It’s basically Winamp 2.x that was written to work natively on Linux. It functions like Winamp, it looks like Winamp, it even uses Winamp skins! I recommend you stick with it for all of your mp3 playing.

As for video, well I don’t even use Winamp on XP for video much considering how much slower it loads than Windows Media Player, and I’d recommend using one of the default video players for whatever version of Linux you’re running. If you choose to use the Gnome desktop environment you should use Totem and if you run KDE you should use Kaffeine. Both of these are based on Xine which (if you get a regular, full version) includes support for as many kinds of video as windows was ever able to play.
Seriously, if you can jam with XMMS and watch movies on Totem and Kaffeine give props to Winamp but don’t try to take it with you into the Linux world.

I got a really good deal on two wireless Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer mice a while back (thanks to SlickDeals.net) and I’ve had some luck using them under Linux. For some reason my most current installation (I reinstall every few weeks) doesn’t want to cooperate. It’s something to do with my XF86Config file but I thought I had it set the same way as the last two or three times.
Anyway, if you’re trying to use your Intellimouse under Linux, then here’s the place I learned how to do it.