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Office Suite
Ubuntu was distributed with the OpenOffice suite until their last release when a switch was made to LibreOffice. Both are comparable, with the exception of their database software, to Microsoft Office. LibreOffice's spreadsheet program, Calc is the most similar to its Office counterpart Excel. All of the functions that are available in Excel are present in Calc, however some are named differently. The syntax for functions is also identical to Excel. From the few graphs I've constructed with Calc, I have seen no difference in syntax or presentation in comparison to Excel. As far as Writer is concerned, all of the essential features and details from Word can be found in Writer. In fact the "Save as pdf" is only present in the most recent version of Word and has been a feature of many open source word processors for quite some time.
Civilization IV
I am not much of a gamer, but the Civ franchise has been a favorite of mine going back to Civ 2, with Civ 4 being my favorite. Civ 4 is playable on Ubuntu, but as other threads throughout the Internet will tell you, it takes a few tweaks. I have never used PlayonLinux for installation or executing the .exe file to run the game. I found that you can accomplish the installation fine with wine. After installing the latest version (using Ubuntu Software Center), I created a folder on my Desktop and copied the entire contents of the Civ 4 CDs into the folder. I strongly recommend this since the installer will have difficulty when CDs need to be switched. As long as al of the .cab files are together, you'll be fine. Additionally, right click on the setup.exe file and enable the read/write permissions. Follow all of the instructions during the install, but make your life easy and leave all checked boxes as is and go with the express install. There are 3 dll files you will need to copy into the "Sid Meier's Civilization IV" directory. They are d3dx9_36.dll, msxml3.dll, and msxml3r.dll. Finally, start "Configure Wine." I'm not sure if the Windows version matters, but I have it set to XP. The important piece here is to click on the Libraries tab, and select msxml3 as a native/builtin override. At this point, you should be ready to go. The patches can be downloaded and installed without further issue. Make sure you set the permissions so that the .exe can be executed. I exclusively play Beyond the Sword and some mods I have downloaded. As in Windows, mods must be downloaded into the appropriate directory for them to be used. I play the Rise of Mankind/A New Dawn mods often and have never run into a problem. Although Beyond the Sword is a single CD, I copy it to the Desktop first and reset the permission on the setup.exe for ease and simplicity.
Ebooks
Calibre ebook management has a linux version that operates identically to the Windows version.

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Last update: Thursday, December 08, 2011