[ale] OpenOffice Draw for Site Maps?

[Paul Cartwright]

On Thu January 29 2009, JK wrote:
> > and that is exactly why I keep XP on my laptop, because I use Visio for
> > every job.. not for ME, but to give to my boss & clients... who don't do
> > linux..
>
> If your laptop has an adequate amount of RAM (>1GB), you may
> want to make friends with VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org)
> if you haven't already.  VirtualBox runs unmodified Intel guest
> OS's on a number of Intel host OS's, and includes 64-bit support
> for both host and guest. It's a virtualizer, not an emulator, so
> guest OS performance is pretty decent. I've got it installed on
> my laptop (1.5GB) and it literally took me only about five minutes
> to install it and configure a virtual WinXP instance (then
> another 40 minutes to install XP on the guest machine).
> I gave the virtual machine 512M of RAM and that seems adequate
> to do once-in-a-while stuff under XP.  So you can install
> Visio on the virtual machine, then edit VSDs directly on the
> host OS's Linux filesystem from within the XP environment.
>
> I'm not sure how VirtualBox compares to Xen or other hypervisors,
> performace- or feature-wise, but is sure was easy as pie to set

I run virtualbox on my desktop, under Debian. I had ( before my new Seagate 
drive crashed) about 6 different OSes installed, including CentOS, Fedora 10, 
Ubuntu server, and windows XP.. ( that drive finally got sent back to Seagate 
today..)
unfortunately my XP laptop is old enough and under powered enough where I just 
don't think it could handle it, plus it has a small enough drive where I am 
already out of space.. my laptop is 3 years old, and I am considering a new 
one. IF I get a new one, it WILL have 4Gb memory and a large enough hard 
drive to run Virtualbox.. count on it.
This just seems like rebuilding a bridge, when what we really need is 
OpenOffice support for Visio, or a Visio standard that OpenOffice will work 
with.

-- 
Paul Cartwright
Registered Linux user # 367800
Registered Ubuntu User #12459