Learn how to use Wine – a clever way of running Windows programs under Linux – for my accounts program. See if the scanner behaves, read the manuals (again) and try out more programs.Will I give up Windows altogether? Probably. The more I use Linux, the better I like it despite the challenges. It hasn’t crashed; it’s immune to Windows viruses; it won’t fall victim to spyware, worms or hackers; and it feels (and looks) refreshingly different But best of all, Linux promises greater choice at less cost. Just give it time to climb more of the Windows mountain.’Moving to Linux’ by Marcel Gagn?s published by Addison-Wesley, £26.99. Linux is unfinished business without the panache of Windows XP.

There are compensations; open source is an embarrassment of riches. You don’t need to buy an expensive application for occasional jobs anymore.Here’s what I need to do next. Find a word processor that reads my WordPerfect files properly and offers a word count on selected text. If you’re a Microsoft Office user, OpenOffice provides no-frills basics. Diehard Corel WordPerfect fans will discover that OpenOffice won’t read their files without a hard-to-install add-on. I tried installing Kword (part of KDE Office) to find it opened WordPerfect documents with unacceptably ragged results.

This left me no choice (other than Windows), but to write this feature using OpenOffice.I could go on And on. There’s stuff that’s much better than Windows, and stuff that isn’t. Outlook Express stores its email messages in a proprietary format Mozilla can’t import them; but KDE’s Kmail can. Using Kmail, I imported the messages into the Unix “mbox” format, then copied the mbox files from Kmail into the Mozilla mail store using the superb Linux file manager-cum-browser, Konqueror.Things are still tricky for word-processing, spreadsheets and the like. But I had my eye on Mozilla as it offered email, a browser and a web page composer.

I easily installed Mozilla (you can get it for Windows too) and was immediately hooked by tabbed, menace-proof browsing.Onward and upward, and another sheer face of incompatibility. My first target for program replacement was Microsoft’s Outlook Express, infamous for vulnerabilities that allow viruses to strike from the preview pane Suse had given me Kmail – part of the KDE desktop. Much browsing later (in Windows, of course) and I had the right Conexant driver software, written by helpful Canadian company Linuxant.As you work through this early stuff, there’s a nagging problem for Windows XP-ers. Windows ignores Linux and its UFS filesystem altogether, so you cannot retrieve work from there.