[scribus] Template for business cards

[Rob Oakes]

> Sometimes it helps to have more than one OS on your computer. For Open 
> Source projects the Windows version is often late in coming and harder 
> to install. For example on Slackware Linux all the bits and pieces 
> needed for compiling Scribus come with the system, the compiler, the 
> linker, the QT4 libraries and so on. It is a fair amount of work to 
> assemble and install these on other Linux flavors, and even more work 
> on MSWIn and OS X.  So those who live on the bleeding edge, like me, 
> find that Linux is a more comfortable way to go.

I'll second this.  If you're doing a lot with OpenSource, the only operating system to use is Linux. My work toolchain includes:

- Scribus
- LaTeX
- LyX
- R / ggplot2 / RKWard
- ImageMagick
- Python
- Spyder
- numpy
- ITK
- PyQt / Qt

(and probably others I've overlooked).

To install these applications on a Windows or Mac is a multi-day affair.  Longer if I have to compile anything from source.  On a Linux computer (I use Ubuntu, mostly), I install the OS and run a simple shell script.  Nearly everything is available from the repositories and it takes maybe an hour or so to download and install.  During that time, I can work on other stuff.

The more invested I become in open source solutions, the more sense that Linux makes.  I prefer to run it natively, but there are a few places where I'm not able to do that.  In those cases a virtual machine works quite well.  I even get decent performance when running models and compiling large LyX/LaTeX documents (true monsters with several hundred pages of text and many thousands of images).

If it's not feasible to partition and multiboot, a virtual machine can save a lot of time.

Cheers,

Rob