Ready to take the plunge into Linux and XML....

[Aidan Wilson]

By the way, an academic license for OxygenXML, which includes personal 
not-for-profit use, is $64.

http://www.oxygenxml.com/buy_new_licenses_academic.html

-Aidan

On Tue, 11 May 2010, Aidan Wilson wrote:

> Heather, as a linux convert of some 4 years ago, and as a former Windows 
> slave, I fully recommend upgrading to Ubuntu. The amount of control over how 
> your computer operates is wonderful - you'll find that you can make it do 
> what you want it to do, how you want it to do it, as opposed to Windows doing 
> what it thinks you want to do, and doing it however it likes.
>
> However I would warn that there can, nay, will be difficult times when you 
> need to configure something somewhere to fix some serious issue (such as an 
> external wi-fi card not being supported immediately, or flash not working 
> unless you manually download and install it from Adobe). It will require you 
> to perform some actions in the terminal (Unix version of cmd).
>
> But on the plus side, there is a huge support community of volunteers who are 
> always willing to help out Windows apostates. Firstly there are the Ubuntu 
> Forums (http://ubuntuforums.org/) where you will likely get timely advice, or 
> if you're familiar with chatrooms, there's the #ubuntu channel on the 
> freenode IRC server (irc://chat.freenode.net/#ubuntu - needs an IRC client, 
> like ircle on a mac or babbel on both mac and windows). Here, there are 
> probably hundreds of users who tend to answer questions very quickly.
>
> I'd also suggest, if you want to keep windows, to run a dual-boot. The 
> configuration I had, which worked extraordinarily well for 3 years, was to 
> take my laptop hard drive and partition it into three drives, one for data 
> and the other two for the two operating systems, linux and windows. Both can 
> communicate with the data partition equally well, so the net effect is that 
> you can simply reboot in windows and go back to the file you were just 
> working on in linux and open it in a windows program. However this 
> configuration takes quite some setting up.
>
> As for XML, you really should get a license for Oxygen, an XML editor. It 
> won't teach you about xml, W3schools is excellent for that, but it will allow 
> you to edit XML files without breaking the very delicate structure, as it 
> validates as you type, and produces errors and red squiggly lines under 
> ill-formed chunks.
>
> -Aidan Wilson
>
>