Two answer two questions that have popped up:
To Mr. Hamilton:
Yes, the current partitioning programs can create partitions dynamically. Both Partition Magic, a commercial product, and fdisk, a free linux one, can take your six gigabyte Windows drive that has two gigs free, and turn the last gig into a Linux partition without touching the data in the five gig space left for your Windows stuff. You can even wipe Linux off your PC and have that space reassigned to your Windows drive when you are done experimenting with Linux. Most of the current Linux "Office" packages like StarOffice and Applixware (which should still be owned by Red Hat, I think) can read current and prior MS Office file formats.
To Mr. Yeung:
I've worked at the help desk for a major IT consultancy where we occasionally had to call our vendors for help. Usually, they were useless, but the service contracts covered our bosses ass, so that if things didn't get fixed we could tell the CIO that the vendor was working on it. Since our help desk team was so wonderful, it was rare that we couldn't solve problems on our own :)
When I was a PERL programmer, everything I needed to know was in the O'Reilly and Associates PERL books, and the details were filled in by asking specific questions on the net or using the major search engines appropriately.
---matt |
