Migrating from Windows to Linux made easy

[David Ecklein]

Greg-

This is interesting, especially to those lurkers like myself who, for
various reasons, have held back from full immersion into Linux...

Of course, unless I misunderstand this, "Moveover" merely sugarcoats the
bitter pill of having to abandon one set of applications (Windows) for
another (Linux).  Clearly, it does not offer emulation, but whether it
provides file conversion so that data associated with many possible Windows
applications will be accessible to parallel Linux applications, is not so
clear at all.  But it seems automating the email transfer alone would make
this product well worth its pursuit.

I'll be watching for further discussion, and possible reporting of
experience, on this one!

Dave E.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Greg Rundlett" <greg.rundlett at gmail.com>
To: "blu" <discuss at blu.org>; "GNHLUG" <gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 11:19 PM
Subject: Migrating from Windows to Linux made easy


> Once upon a time, in a land far, far away.....
>
> OK, it was 2000AD, in Lawrence, MA.
>
> We created a product that would migrate various applications, files
> and 'personalization' settings from one flavor of Windows to another.
> It was a real neat product for anyone who ever came near a computer.
> Great for users to upgrade to a new system, but have it feel 'just
> like home'.  Great for system administrators (or the neighborhood
> geek) who has to deal with migrating/upgrading other peoples'
> computers.  Great for companies who often have to do lots of this
> stuff because the process can be expensive in so many ways.  Great for
> manufacturers (lower barriers to upgrade).
>
> The company won "Best New Enterprise Product COMDEX Fall 2000", got
> pirated/squashed by Microsoft, went belly up and sold the technology
> to Symantec -  who still offers the product in their enterprise
> products.
>
> To bring this thread on-topic... I always dreamed of making the thing
> work for migrations from Windows to Linux.
>
> Fastforward to today.  I just came across a post in a Georgia LUG
> website to a company in the UK that apparently does this now.  For
> next to nothing ($10)
> http://www.resolvo.com/products/moveover/index.htm  The really strange
> thing (or not) is that the flash demo looks /awfully/ similar to the
> product GUI that we developed -- making me think that they've simply
> built upon the codebase we started.  I'll have to check out the code,
> because it is at least partly open source
> http://openmoveover.sourceforge.net/
>
> I have not tried it, so I can't say how polished it is, but by the
> looks of it it's got the basics covered.  At $10 it's hard to make a
> case for NOT using such a tool the next time you have to assist a
> friend over from the dark side.  And actually it looks like there is a
> free as in beer option too.
>
> Sadly, upon closer inspection, there doesn't seem to be much code in
> the open source project.  There haven't been any updates since the
> code was originally posted 7-9 months ago, and their product lists FC2
> and Suse 9 support (old).  I wonder if SUSE or anyone might start to
> kick some life into this?