Songbird 1.1 which is to be released in a week or two will be directly integrated into 7digital.com online music store.

If they can face the change, perhaps this is a feasible solution.

+1 For Amazon MP3

DRM free is alone enough to switch. After that there are plenty of players that look close enough to iTunes for them to use. Just make a sym link and say its really iTunes but since its on linux the store doesn’t work.

I don’t get what the “MSOffice is much better than OOo” people are saying. It’s great for all of what I’ve thown at it. I personally find the Ribbon annoying un-innovation.

Amazon’s MP3 store is great, but don’t forget Jamiendo and especially Magnatune, where you can choose how much a track or album is worth. If you think the artist did especially well, you can pay them more and if you think it was just OK, don’t pay as much. The artists also get a *much* larger cut of the proceeds. Plus, you can buy in FLAC, MP3. or Vorbis. Wewt!

Under OO its possible to change the pre-configuration to save files as .doc so your Parents don’t have to care about (Microsoft fonts can be easy installed too).

I had this exact problem when I shifted from XP to Ubuntu. I went with VM approach and I am more than happy with it. I am using Sun’s Virtualbox and its cool!!
My system configuration is really old-age – 768MB RAM and 40GB hard disk. But I have created the .vdi file in my external hd of 500GB. And and I have given the guest OS i.e. XP 310 MB RAM and rest to the host i.e. Ubuntu. iTunes is installed in XP and believe me it works like a jiffy. I could browse internet, watch movies while my iTouch is updating and songs are getting copied. Now the best part is as XP will use your host’s internet connection hence you don’t have to configure that again for XP. So, you can browse iTunes Store as well from XP as you are connected in Ubuntu.
As far as office is concerned, I agree with rest of the people. OOo no match to Office 2007.

I agree that Office 2007′s ribbon interface is a lot better than previous years. Either way, we’ll see what happens

I can’t believe you’d replace Office 2007 with Open Office. I used OOo for about two years and still hate the thing. The UI is a mess. Microsoft’s ribbon is an innovation, IMO. It works, and it doesn’t make me angry, that’s all that matters, and more than can be said for OOo.

Virtualbox will work fine on that. I have it running XP for something on my eeepc 701 and it works well enough. Not a speed demon, but you don’t need it to be for one or two apps.

I think the Amazon MP3 store is the way to go, having had a (very) brief look.

As for the previous comment about OOo Vs. Office. I beg to differ…sure there are compatibility issues between the 2, but when most of the documents on there aren’t needed to be edited again, I don’t think you’re going to have massive issues.

The only forseeable problem I have there is emailing to somebody else in .doc format and having word screw up the formatting when opened. Though because 98% of the emails my family send in .doc format aren’t required to be edited again, PDF’s will be fine.

I need to check how well OOo copes with Excel files, and if it works alright, then we’ll be even further along

You can’t actually replace Office with OpenOffice if you actually expect things such as elements keeping within the bottom margin and other simple things like that.

It was a constant and huge problem for me at my last job, where I was allowed to use any OS and program I liked due to a good policy, but had to fight OOo at every step on the way to create even the simplest of documents that didn’t come out broken in a printer. And this is even before attempting to use any MS format, this is when using the native formats to save and producing PDFs and printing. (The trick that should fix it, but doesn’t, is called “register true” but noone seems to know what that even means, it just helps on occasion to toggle that checkbox).

I made do anyway, since that meant I could use Linux without tricksing around with Wine or CodeWeavers. This was on both 2.4 and 3.0 and it was the same when trying the Windows versions.

The point is simply that Slashdot wisdom may say that you can replace it, but you can’t. OOo can’t be used by normal users. Sorry.