[ale] Partially OT: moving apps from old to new PC's(non-Linux)

[Brian Chase]

griffisb at bellsouth.net wrote:
>  
> 
>> 
>>From: Geoffrey <esoteric at 3times25.net> 
>> 
>>I've got to say, this is a perfect opportunity to move them to Linux.  
>>Save them money, and have more robust systems. 
>> 
>>Don't tell me they can't learn it, my 60+ mother-in-law is on SuSE 9.0  
>>right now and has been on Linux for a couple of years now. 
>> 
>>Email and browser at first.  Most recently using OpenOffice to maintain  
>>the family reunion address book. 
>> 
> 
>  
> It would be good. My main concern is that the Parish records are in a Paradox 
> database (old stuff, it loads under DOS on the server). I'd hate to tackle that 
> project. But, since there should be a few "spare" PC's after all data is 
> transferred and tested, it would be a good idea to set up at least one Linux 
> PC. 
>  

The Paradox database might not be as painful as you think.  I'm sure 
Paradox has some sort of flat-file export, CSV, tab-delimited, etc. 
Might import into PostgreSQL or MySQL with a little bit of tweaking.