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Do they even read what they write?

"OO.o Writer is the fastest and most responsive word processor available for Linux today."

"KWord is fast. It's probably the fastest-loading and maybe the most responsive word processor in the roundup."

Apparently they didn't try AbiWord then.

On my desktop box, it's up an running within a fraction of a second. Yes really.

There are *nixy xml manipulation tools like XMLStarlet. However, using XPath isn't quite a straightforward as grep. If you want to use traditional *nix tools on the text in an ODT (Open Document Text) document, the simplest approach is to export a plain text file from one of the several ODT editors like AbiWord, Google Docs, or of course, OpenOffice.

nfortunately Word is the only guy left on the block

I say that governments and the people can demand the standards and APIs to be open, and then competition will naturally follow.

• OpenOffice.org Hackers - note that the domain is ooo.ximian.com.
• Hacker's guide says CVS checkout is based at :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome.
• Planet OOO features a few faces I remember from Planet GNOME, in particular, Michael Meeks.

We've used several "office" applications here in schools and I must say this:

Staroffice was terrible when we brought it in. Hard to use, with incompatability errors and a generally unpleasant interface. For quite awhile it propogated a mindset that anything that wasn't MS Office was frightening

Openoffice.org on the other hand (and perhaps more modern StarOffice versions), is very nice, better interface, decent (and improving) compatability, etc. Kids picked up Impress faster that I have, and design some *very* kickass presentations with it. The built-in PDF export facility from the document editors is nice too...

For those that prefer a slightly nicer interface than OO, depending on your version I've found quite a few people enjoyed Abiword as a replacement for the just word component of office.

Seriously, even as an OSS advocate I really disliked StarOffice, but there were/are better alternatives out there.

(With OO.o being cross-platform and all, why would KOffice be used? I gave up on AbiWord in favor of OO.o for that very reason...)

To get a spell checker in Linux, there is open office, Abi Word (both of which do red squigglies below misspelled words), and one can always type in "ispell -a" at the shell prompt and start typing in words which they're not sure of the spelling of.

Yup, I remember that. I grew up in that. And I, ever the agent for change, was one of the principle students actively working to break the Apple monopoly and get Windows computers installed as well, mainly because at that time Windows tended to piss me off just a little bit less.

Now, of course, I am learning that life has a wicked sense of humour, and have spent the last 5 years or so prying the beasty Microsoft fingers from my family and friends, mostly in the area of moving them off IE/OE and onto Mozilla, or maybe even off Office and onto Abiword or OpenOffice. And of course, I am still personally a bit of a geek - my entire music collection is in Ogg Vorbis, and I usually run some distro of Linux on my home box. But I'm much more even tempered - I keep Windows and Office around for my wife's grad school studies, because that just makes more sense, and try to stick with the battles that win themselves (Mozilla vs IE/OE) rather than those that are uphill (Linux vs. Windows) with others.

Abiword 2.0 was released today.

Unfortunately, the court only posts its decisions in MS Word format...

AbiWord can read MS Word documents.

As the other reply mentioned, this is off-topic.

But on the other hand, I run Linux on a p166mmx laptop /w 96mb ram.

I run Debian on it, with the Ion window manager and XFree86 3.3.6 (cos I don't like the glidepoint, and I use mostly console apps on it), but you could use IceWM, Blackbox or XFCE, all of which are in Debian Stable (Woody).

For a web browser I use Dillo mostly but Mozilla for some stuff (SSL etc). I don't use email on that machine though.

For productivity I have vim :P but AbiWord and Gnumeric would work okay I would imagine.

Basically, keep it sensible, and don't go for any memory intensive stuff (KDE / GNOME). Recompiling the kernel would help.

It's a nice laptop actually, apart from the HDD has a maximum transfer rate of 4mb/s, which is it's downpoint. Still, it's adequate for it's needs.

Martin

Just do a compatible word processor? What a great idea! I can't believe that nobody though of that before.

Do you think that 100% compatibility will be hard to achieve?

Well, gotta go. I just had an idea . . . why don't I just invent an engine that runs on water and gives off cotton candy as exhaust?

By the way, KWord uses gzipped XML as its file format.

-Peter

I'm hoping this version takes advantage of the Ps2's graphic capabilites, rather then what I've seen on EQ before.

Me too!?! What are capabilites???

Does Hemos even know how to spell the word capabilities or is "capabilites" a word? I can't find a definition for "capabilites" anywhere. Or is this a /. thing? AbiWord is recognizing it as spelled correctly as I type this.

AbiWord is a great free open source replacement for WordPad. It's only 4 MB I think. Anyway, I don't think people are asking M$ to remove every last thing from windows, just the obvious things like IE. I could make a crappy program like wordpad, IE cost millions to make and update constantly. You know there is something idiotic about having to update IE every time you install M$ products. If the court told them the punishment was, Win98 would be forced into open source, they would suddenly change their tune asking to remove IE from windows, and messenger, media player. The big expensive software that no one could afford to give away, the intent of course, to destroy the market for that software.

One burning question I have is, If they had to make a fake video and lie the first time about removing IE and how it broke windows, where is this proof this time. They obviously have no way of proving IE is impossible to remove. They are lying.

What are the major differences currently between OpenOffice and StarOffice?

I remember a DoD procurement elated to StarOffice, has the price remained the same? (Are they running it on Solaris anyway?)

the other aspect to consider is that Mac OS X is POSIX compliant. Many open source apps can be ported (see the other story posted today). I could see how AbiWord, or many other open source Office apps could kill the need for purchasing M$ products.

Of course, the POSIX-compliance would be sufficient only if the office apps aren't graphical apps. :-)

(I.e., there's more to the API used by GUI applications than the "core OS" API. GUI apps from POSIX+X either have to be made to use the native MacOS X GUI APIs, or need to use a toolkit that can hide the native GUI APIs or drawing layer, or need to be run under an X server.

AbiWord, for example, currently appears to require an X server on MacOS X, according to the AbiWord download page.)

I can't tell you how relieved I was to see that the BSA aren't targeting the town I live in (Saginaw, Michigan). With all the pirated software that I must have on my computer, I would surely owe them something. Heck, even my office suite is pirated. My desktop environment is pirated. Let them come on by and audit me...

Abiword is cross platform application using native widgets (GTK on Unix). You might want to have a look at how they did it. They must have sorted out cross platform printing as well and some other none GUI issues.

While linux is improving nicely, it still lacks heavily in any music reporduction,

Actually, there's quite a bit of music production software for Linux.

media interfaces

You mean like Shockwave and MP3s?

business applications.

Such as Excel and Word?

I'd rather pay 199.00 bucks for something that works out of the box and comes with lots of software then several hours downloading, burning iso's and then chasing down the latest versions of all apps waisting a whole entire weekend or business days (thus costing more then the 199.00 XP package).

So would I. Fortunately, if I want to run Linux, I can get a complete set of CD-ROMs from CheapBytes for less than fifteen bucks (including postage) and usually install or upgrade the whole system in about two hours, most of it hands-free. Most of these systems have a reputation for running smoothly "right out of the box."

...

FYI, AbiWord uses an XML-based format for its documents. It also exports rtf, html, utf, and LaTeX. It's also free software and GTK. It's not feature-complete yet (no bullets or lists for one thing) but it is very lean and fast. It's also evolving fast, so anything that isn't supported yet should be RSN.


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