[KLUG Advocacy] Re: Desktop Penguins -- "Ability Office" read Access MDB and has ADO support

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sat, 2002-05-11 at 09:17, Bruce Smith wrote:
> When it comes up that there is no M$-Office on Linux,

Of course people forget that MS Office isn't even a proprietary standard
since it is self-INcompatible.  Not only between versions, but as well
as the version that runs on Mac.

> I point out things like Open/Star-Office.  THEN I get the
> statement that people need M$-Access

MS Access is the _ultimate_bastard_ of the world.  But people blindly
use it.  And the world requires 50% more IT workers as a result.  ;-P

> and how to do that with the Linux office products that don't
> have a database.  hen I point out that Star has a database
> module (that I've never tried, and know absolutely nothing about)

If I remember correctly, StarOffice actually supports Sleepycat
(Berkeley db), and a few other methods of data access (SQL too?).  The
default of Adabas (or whatever it is called) is not all it's limited to.

> I get the question about the thousands of M$-Access databases
> already created and if any Linux office product will convert
> them overas easily as it converts Word/Excel documents.
> That's where I'm stumped.  Any good ways to do this???

There is an Office suite for Linux, ported from the Windows version with
WINELIB inluding Microsoft DAO (Data Access Objects).  Hold on, I'm
digging up the info ...

"Ability Office 2000" Alpha Release for Linux:
http://ability.com/linux/

RPMs and install details are here:
http://ability.com/linux/linuxdlsp.php

It seems a few things run emulated under WINE.  That's probably for
binary stuff they didn't write (like those components from Microsoft) --
so they couldn't port with WINELIB.

BTW, there is also a project for converting data in proprietary Access
mdb (97/Jet3 and 2000/Jet4) files into SQL tables:
http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/

-- Bryan

-- 
The US government could be 100x more effective, and 1/100th the
Constitutional worry, if it dictated its policy to Microsoft as
THE MAJOR CUSTOMER it is, and not THE REGULATOR it fails to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, SmithConcepts, Inc.   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineers and IT Professionals     http://www.SmithConcepts.com