Hey Bruce,
If I may contribute my $0.02CAD.
This is probably not the answer you are looking for, but I personally
use online dictionaries. However, I know that there are a number of FOSS
dictionary available that use free sources. Take a look in your package
manager. Hopefully, there stuff in there that would be of help for you.
Otherwise, as you proposed, used Wine. As a gamer, I use Wine and Cedega
a lot, and I've never had an issue with copy/paste to/from. (On a
personal note, if a game does not work with Wine or Cedega, then it
doesn't get played until that gets fixed -- don't have Windows!).
I use Kubuntu with KDE 4.2 myself on an HP laptop. I've learned to
detest HP for their crappy hardware. As of now, everything works except
suspend :(. However, wireless has been working marvelously well since
Intrepid. I could not go back.
If you would like to help Linuxifying UoO, I might recommend that you
simply use Linux. Chances are, it's not that the U doesn't want to use
alternate OSes, it that they don't know/understand the alternatives. No
one likes to look ignorant, thus just mentioning Linux, OpenOffice, KDE,
etc, will most likely encourage curiosity. Folks might start to to look
it up and research it.
Hope that helps!
J-F
Bruce Miller wrote:
When I get my IBM ThinkPad back from IBM's laptop doctors, I would like to rebuild it to use Linux as much as possible and Windows as little as possible.
I am studying translation at the University of Ottawa. Dictionaries are central to a translator's life and several of the best have only Windows engines. I am hoping that I could get them running satisfactorily with Wine. Just to double-check, I am assuming that it is possible to copy/paste from an application in Wine into a native Linux application. If Wine doesn't work, I would see the next fall-back would be VirtualBox. The ability to copy/paste from a Windows application into a Linux one is highly desirable, although not absolutely mandatory.
The greater worry, however, is wireless networking at the University of Ottawa. The University's central computer services appear to be incorrigibly Microsoft-centric. Attempts to utter the word Linux at the computer services' help desk in the reference section of the Main Library have drawn blank stares. There are two hits on Google about Linux and wireless access at the UofO: neither is particularly recent and both suggest that it is a total pain in the ***. Does anyone have recent and reliable experience?
My preferred distribution is Kubuntu. I tend to newer distributions on laptops, simply because there has been considerable recent progress on hibernate/suspend/resume in recent kernels.
I would welcome advice on Linuxifying life at the University.
--
Bruce Miller, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
bruce [ at ] brmiller [ dot ] ca; (613) 745-1151
Commenting on budget forecasting on the day the budget of the Government of Canada was announced, a retired senior manager of Environment Canada said on the CBC that "economists were invented to make weather forecasters look good."
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