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Thats the way. If someone didnt switch yet from win to a clickety-click-self-everything-autoconfigured-and- managed linux, because 'linux? thats a complicated hax0r-system!', then here's the opportunity. a nice and powerful, and not expensive mac. And of course it does run linux if you want :) Its little, silent, powerful (no I am no apple representative) - and it just workz. Viruses? Ha. Ha. Ha. And you still can use the MS office things, until you get seomething better. OOo for example. Throw out your windows - have fun.

erm ... This is just as dumb as saying that windows' biggest disadvantage is, that wihtout MS Office installed you cannot open Excel files.
Have a look at http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.4/index.html


(oh that article about the disadvantage of OSs you find here

Why? Only he can say for sure, but possible reasons could be:

• distract the public from trying Linux or other Free or Open Source Software, or at least delay them.
• distract the public from real open document standards
• distract policy makers from the fact that WordML is still closed
• distract home users and businesses from OpenOffice.org
• distract everybody from FireFox, Mozilla and Opera.
• distract the public from ongoing Windows security failures
• distract investors from the fact that MS has halved research and development
• distract pundits from Longhorn's list of features getting shorter and release getting later
• distract home users from the Mac mini
• distract investors from the EU anti-trust case
• distract businesses and lawmakers from the VC-1 codec
• distract European businesses from the software patent threat
• ... etc.

The last version of Microsoft Word I used was in Office 2000. I got tired of it because it is so quirky with layout.

Open Office is a bit quirky, too, and they are different quirks. Many times people forget the many, many hours they spent learning to avoid the Office 2000 quirks. They want Open Office to be perfect, and they have forgotten how imperfect Microsoft Word is.

If you test Open Office, be sure you test the latest version, 1.1.4. Version 2.0 will be available in April or May of this year.

It's understandable that people who have invested hours in learning Microsoft Word don't want to invest hours again. They just want to get the job done. On the other hand, it would be crazy for the Open Office developers to implement the hundreds of ways Microsoft Office is quirky.

Generally, when you send documents outside your company, you should send PDF files. That guards against accidental changes. To do this in Open Office, just click the PDF icon in the toolbar. To do this in Microsoft Word, install an extra-cost package.

The last version of Microsoft Word I used was in Office 2000. I got tired of it because it is so quirky with layout.

Open Office is a bit quirky, too, and they are different quirks. Many times people forget the many, many hours they spent learning to avoid the Office 2000 quirks. They want Open Office to be perfect, and they have forgotten how imperfect Microsoft Word is.

If you test Open Office, be sure you test the latest version, 1.1.4. Version 2.0 will be available in April or May of this year.

It's understandable that people who have invested hours in learning Microsoft Word don't want to invest hours again. They just want to get the job done. On the other hand, it would be crazy for the Open Office developers to implement the hundreds of ways Microsoft Office is quirky.

Generally, when you send documents outside your company, you should send PDF files. That guards against accidental changes. To do this in Open Office, just click the PDF icon in the toolbar. To do this in Microsoft Word, install an extra-cost package.

Also OpenOffice is lacking seriously in user friendlieness in 1 point (see http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1 820)

It affects many users and has serious consequences for business. We tried and promoted OpenOffice to some of our customers but they decided to switch back to MS Excel because of the "Decimal point is seperator" option which is lacking in OO.

Seriously, if OO only fixed this bug first before anything else, I could go and install OO on about 100 computers easily.

http://openoffice.org/

Wonder what the exact relationship of Solaris with Open Solaris going to be? Probably, it will be something like OpenOffice and StarOffice.

Simon,

The outside PR person for that release is an Open Source expert that you may have met, and is quite clueful. She was doing what Sun asked of her and her company. She and Sun know that some simple facts will be taken out of the release by the press, and some more esoteric ones will not, and that because of the construction of the release the press would in almost every case overstate the importance of the patent release. I have done my best this week to counter that overstatement.

Regarding copyright aggregation, in every case I know of except for Sun, the copyright aggregator is an IRS-certified 501(c)3 charitable non-profit organization. Thus, there is a higher standard regarding the aggregator's benificient behavior than can be applied to Sun. Sun, too, announced their intention to create an outside foundation to hold the OpenOffice software, and then they reneged upon that promise.

Aggregation may have something to do with "governance", I'm not sure what, but Sun promoted its reason as having to do with defending the entire program in a court of law. That rationale still survives in garbled form in the licensing FAQ where it says The JCA ensures that Sun can defend license violations if necessary. Note that it doesn't say prosecute license violations. The original language was defend the entire program.

You should be aware that I have been critical of IBM and its patents. When Bob Macmillan of IDG brought a question of mine into an IBM executive presentation at LinuxWorld, it helped goad IBM into declaring that it wouldn't enforce its own patents upon the Linux kernel. I also did not refrain from mentioning IBM in connection with the Ravicher report, which was presented at my LinuxWorld press conference, and probably was a big factor in inspiring the IBM patent grant.

Thanks

Bruce

I will definitely miss that loading time (of approx. 2 minutes) of Acrobat Reater and that invaluable information on those 4573 (or something) patents that they have for one document reader software!

Use Ghostscript then. The GSview graphical interface is available for Windows, OS/2 and Linux (though I personally prefer gv there). It supports PDF and Postscript formats (PS, EPS, etc.), and can display, print and easily convert between them, and even convert them to raster formats, so it is actually much more useful than Acrobat Reader, while being much less bloated at the same time. Ghostscript and GSview are always present on my CDs with useful Windows software, along with OpenOffice.org (which can save as PDF, nota bene), AbiWord, Firefox, ClamWin and PuTTY, to name just a few. If you work with serious printing, Ghostscript is a must.

The proper link is here. Slashcode always embeds a space if you paste in a long link without using the proper HTML.

The award was part of "Networking Industry Awards 2003", was for "best software" and did not represent that it was a judgement about the community involvement in the project. Maddog was there to get his own award. Organizations who give awards are usually in it to get publicity for themselves. Thus, don't read too much into them.

The list of OpenOffice project leads is here. Although some of the leads don't work for Sun, very few of them seem to be volunteers. The collab.net folks are Sun contractors, etc. It's difficult to judge who is behind an @openoffice.org address, and there are a lot of those.

Thanks

Bruce

Now there is only office for 300 dollars, and you get MS(doesn't)works free w/ a new pc

Unfortunately, you are badly uninformed.

But hey, why let facts stop some good FUD?

Or even a free one.

"I'd really like to see some on-line evidence of this. Has Microsoft competition in office suites really cut prices there?"

Oddly enough... the price dropped 100% in the office suites arena. ;)

OpenOffice.org is the name of the software.

That's not a name. It's a Web address. When the Web address is "openoffice.org," the name is Open Office. What about this is confounding you?

But "open source" software has nothing at all to do with freedom. If it had anything to do with freedom, the software would be in the public domain. Since it's not, it's not about freedom. It's a commercial enterprise just like any other.

I'm really not interested in studies. I'm interested in my own personal experience, which says precisely the opposite. A million articles add up to precisely nothing when my own experience tells me otherwise.

Yes, of course it is. As I said, I paid for such support myself, in the form of an in-house, full-time employee whose job it was to install and maintain Linux on our computers. My experience was so incredibly bad that I will not be considering a similar arrangement again. Ever.

> Precisely how is is better than OpenOffice.org.

I assume you're referring to Open Office. (I'm not sure what the company's Web site has to do with this.)

Actually he's probably referring to the software that is called OpenOffice.org, not Open Office, due to trademark conflicts.

>I've found the F/OSS community to be VERY helpful for the most part.

Boy oh boy. You're either lying, or your experiences have not been typical.

What makes you think your experience is more typical than his? We use Linux, Apache, Samba, Tomcat and other open source products on both our workstations and servers at my job and we have had excellent reliability and support. This is no less anecdotal than your experience but I don't see any reason to believe that my experience is less typical than yours.

The last time I ever used Linux for anything was the day the IT guy I'd hired to maintain my small company's computers told me that I should stick to Windows because I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to burn some files to a CD with Linux. I fired the IT guy[...]

So an IT guy that you apparently considered incompetent told you Linux was hard. This is supposed to be compelling?

I'm sorry that so many of you Slashdotters seem to think that being politically correct is reason enough to use bad software. It's not.

We use open source software because we like the support, reliability and licensing freedom. Open source is about a lot more than being politically correct, but I think you already knew that.

Ohh a standardised open document format. wonder why no-one has ever thought of that one before.

I installed it no problems on my PowerBook G4 on 10.3, I had to d/l X11 from Apple's web site, but it was cake after that. There is excelent documentation. Here is a link to the dmg.bz2.
I use it everyday, although not macros.

GNOME has their own GNOME-ized version,...

Which, just for the record, is also true for KDE, of course... :)

You are probably already aware but gnome icons in OOo does not make it a Gnome project. Suse already shipped 9.2 with KDE-ified OOo. See http://dot.kde.org/1101482981/ http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5679/4/ screenshot3180/" http://www.openoffice.org/files/documents/159/1804 /NWF_icons_writer.jpg

The Dev snapshots of OpenOffice (2.0) have a very nice GUI (and Access like) front end for databases (any database OOo can use as a data source).

You can see a few screenshots here:
http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/ooo19/base/i ndex.html

It isn't ready yet, but it is worth keeping an eye on.

http://porting.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?lis t=dev&msgNo=14479.

Actually yes, it does. Basically they have made clear that there are no plans to Aquafy 2.0. See:

there won't be much Aqua work (if any) going into the main OOo code line because the main OOo code is so far out of sync with NeoOffice/J.

What it looks like is that they have recognised that NEOoffice is a valid port

Yes, but that forked from OOo 1.x.

I do not agree!

Qt apps can look quite nice on MacOSX, okay it OpenWriter will not look as native as Apple's own 'Pages'.

Pages:
http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/word.html

Native Mac apps often have different GUI layouting. An as you say...

> Mac people like polished apps ... Mac users like that.

OSX apps do not just use Aqua for the Widgets, they have a completely diferent approach to GUI design!

I think the Qt NWF http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/ooo-nwf.html
will be a good basis for a version of OOo that blends in with MasOSX, since:
- Qt uses more native Aqua routines in every new release
- if there is a MacOSX version of OOo using Qt-lib then it will be much easier to just ajust the GUI of OOo that it matches the OSX feel (i.e. get some nice big icon in that toolbar)

Conclusion:
Yes, I do have confidence in the Qt road to a MasOSX port of OOo, because it is a much better startingpoint than the current OOo version running on OSX:

http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/images/swrit er_osx.png

Which is plain ugly (as you can see) and needs X11 AFAIK.

Just see how KOffice (using Qt) is doing in comparison:
http://ranger.befunk.com/screenshots/qt-mac-kword- 20040101.png
And this is only a proof-of-concept kind of quick-port. No addional GUI refactoring has been done! Since that is what every GUI apps that is ported to OSX needs!

Last screenshot to prove my last statements:
http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/images/compa re_ms_osx.png
This is the current difference between OOoWriter-for-OSX an OSX' most used wordprocessor: MS Word. This prove 2 things IMHO:
- OSX users do massively use badly intergrated apps (i.e. MS Word)
- OOo cant get much worse...

_cies.

I do not agree!

Qt apps can look quite nice on MacOSX, okay it OpenWriter will not look as native as Apple's own 'Pages'.

Pages:
http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/word.html

Native Mac apps often have different GUI layouting. An as you say...

> Mac people like polished apps ... Mac users like that.

OSX apps do not just use Aqua for the Widgets, they have a completely diferent approach to GUI design!

I think the Qt NWF http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/ooo-nwf.html
will be a good basis for a version of OOo that blends in with MasOSX, since:
- Qt uses more native Aqua routines in every new release
- if there is a MacOSX version of OOo using Qt-lib then it will be much easier to just ajust the GUI of OOo that it matches the OSX feel (i.e. get some nice big icon in that toolbar)

Conclusion:
Yes, I do have confidence in the Qt road to a MasOSX port of OOo, because it is a much better startingpoint than the current OOo version running on OSX:

http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/images/swrit er_osx.png

Which is plain ugly (as you can see) and needs X11 AFAIK.

Just see how KOffice (using Qt) is doing in comparison:
http://ranger.befunk.com/screenshots/qt-mac-kword- 20040101.png
And this is only a proof-of-concept kind of quick-port. No addional GUI refactoring has been done! Since that is what every GUI apps that is ported to OSX needs!

Last screenshot to prove my last statements:
http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/images/compa re_ms_osx.png
This is the current difference between OOoWriter-for-OSX an OSX' most used wordprocessor: MS Word. This prove 2 things IMHO:
- OSX users do massively use badly intergrated apps (i.e. MS Word)
- OOo cant get much worse...

_cies.

I thought that, apart from bug-fixing the 1.1.x effort, we would get together with the 2.0 tree, and start adding the Aqua gui on the basis what Ed and Patrick have done and learned. Now that Ed and Patrick have problems with the license that is imposed, that does not change most of this arrangement. Only their Gui-code would reside outside the official OpenOffice tree. NeoOffice imports the complete OpenOffice tree, and builds on top of that.

So there could be as many as three OS X versions -- NeoOffice/J, X11 and "native." With different license possibilities for each. It gives me a headache just trying to keep it straight on paper, let alone trying to somehow coordinate all three of these efforts.

2. Event handling, fonts, and printing will take up most of your time Most of the postings that I have seen about Aquafication refer seem to focus solely on getting Aqua widgets on the screen. In other words, everyone gravitates to the "sexy" engineering work. Surprisingly, this is not the hard engineering work. The really hard engineering work is getting all the tedious details of event handling, font layout and rendering, and printing implemented correct. Essentially, VCL is a full-featured cross-platform GUI framework (similar to QT, Java AWT, etc.) so you need to reimplement almost all of that framework before OOo becomes even reasonably stable. When I first NeoOffice/J, getting native windows, buttons, lines, etc. to draw on the screen was finished rather quickly. But implementation slowed to a crawl when I implemented event handling and font rendering. Why? Because the native event handling and font rendering behavior is wildly different on Mac OS X than it is on X11 but your VCL framework implementation must ensure that this different behavior is properly mapped to VCL's platform independent behavior.

I looked at OOo with the thought of helping out with the native port, but recoiled when I actually looked at ths sheer size and complexity and skill necessary. Another important point in the linked post is that moving to Aqua will take "a couple thousand hours of developer time," which I actually think is being optimistic. Unless an experienced somebody or, more likely, team of sombodies is willing to put their nose to the project 40 hours a week, like it's a full time job, it's not going to happen. And even if it does happen, it will break compatibility with the rest of OOo.

OOo, I'm sorry to see you go. At this point it might be easier to start from AbiWord and move out to develop a full office suite on the Mac. The tension between being "Mac-like" and coordination with the rest of OOo -- which isn't anywhere near as mature as MSO, yet, anyway -- is too great.

First of all, this is NOT related to Apple announcing iWork. At all. No, there's no conspiracy.

Second, this is OLD news. Anyone who's even remotely followed OpenOffice.org Mac OS X porting work knew any potential Aqua port was on the back burner. Way on the back burner. With the stove unplugged.

Third, the X11 port will ALWAYS continue to exist.

Fourth, there is a Mac OS X graphical port, albeit via Java, in the form of NeoOffice (1, 2). This project has come a LONG way since its relatively recent inception, and is an impressive work melding OpenOffice with the Mac OS X look and feel. There's more work to be done, but the latest 1.1 development release is impressive.

Fifth, there are gargantuan technical hurdles to maintaining a full Aqua port of OpenOffice without greater engineering support (perhaps from the likes of Sun, who has shown zero interest in maintaining OpenOffice for Mac OS X, much less maintaining a commercial StarOffice for Mac OS X). These are all detailed here, incidentally by one of NeoOffice's chief representatives.

So calm down. This isn't an Apple conspiracy, or the end of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. OpenOffice will continue, in X11 form AND in the likes of things such as NeoOffice. If anyone is to blame for the official OpenOffice.org Aqua port going by the wayside, frankly, it's a lot closer to Sun than anyone else.

Apparently this says it all about an Aqua port. NeoOffice/J works pretty well and I'm sure it'll just get better. So looks like that's the only version of OOo for Mac for the forseeable future.

As far as OOo being the future of office apps, I dunno. There's something to be said about simplicity and OOo inherits all of M$'s bad habits, specifically more is more. I do agree witht he open file format approach tho.

Frankly, I'd like some office apps with core functionality and that's it. That's why I like Keynote so much over PP - besides the fact that it looks a million times better.

Otherwise, this is just a scam to

1. force MA citizens to buy MSO 2003 in order to access public data. MSO 2004, in turn, requires MS Windows and DRM...
2. distract from the advantages and rising success of OpenOffice.org

Massachusetts should insist on *open* formats, not PR gimmicks. If that one company can take the keys to unlocking public data to its grave, where will that leave MA after all that investment? Not to mention, what are the privacy ramifactions of a format that phones home for every read, write, open, close, save, copy, print, and mail?

Running OpenOffice on a Windows system with multiple users where said users are not administrators is a problem for me and an impediment to the adoption of OpenOffice for many of my clients. Most Windows software I run needs to be installed only once while administrator and then all other nonpriveleged users can run the software. This doesn't appear to be the case with OO.

Installing OO.o for Multiple Users. Worked on every Windows machine I've ever installed OO.o on, without fail.

That's why the OO.o FAQ exists.

Running OpenOffice on a Windows system with multiple users where said users are not administrators is a problem for me and an impediment to the adoption of OpenOffice for many of my clients. Most Windows software I run needs to be installed only once while administrator and then all other nonpriveleged users can run the software. This doesn't appear to be the case with OO.

Installing OO.o for Multiple Users. Worked on every Windows machine I've ever installed OO.o on, without fail.

That's why the OO.o FAQ exists.

Then why would he have trouble with OpenOffice.org?

The only thing I can think of is that OOo has a 32k row limit while Excel has a 64k row limit.

See the Migration Guide.

Open source can't survive in this market because nobody of consequence really wants it to.

Alpha/beta versions of such tools are available externally.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 is for Mac OS X (X11)
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_download s.html

OO is for X-11...no-one I know has been able to install it properly due to dependency hell

don't bother with OO -- use NeoOffice instead (office suite)
http://www.neooffice.org/

or AbiWord (word processing only)
http://www.abisource.com/

or spend $60 and get
Nisus (word processing only)
http://www.nisus.com/

I have all three and like each for different reasons but tend to use NeoOffice and Nisus the most...

The MacOS version requires XFree86 to run and work has slowed on the Aqua and Quartz tracks.

I'm quite certain that should this rumored office suite actually come to market that it will not require XF86 to run. This should please the average Mac user that finds the current OOo interface terrible looking, not to mention very interesting to use.

Don't get me wrong, I use OOo and am happy for it. I hope to help the porting along as much as I can. Right now, it's still scary for most (Mac) people.

Slashdot's Apple section: Rumors for Nerds. Speculation that matters.

What? Is it chopped liver? There's a MacOS version.

Using OpenOffice is admirable, but for a 134 page document? I stay away from office suites for documents longer than a handful of pages...

They never heard of LaTeX? :)

You are thinking of the RTF format which is published.

Unfortunately the RTF filter in Open Office does not convert everything properly. For instance, drawing objects (a text box is a drawing object in RTF too) are not converted at all. This is Issue 3790

Also if you have not read it alreaedy, the migration guide is a good read.

You are thinking of the RTF format which is published.

Unfortunately the RTF filter in Open Office does not convert everything properly. For instance, drawing objects (a text box is a drawing object in RTF too) are not converted at all. This is Issue 3790

Also if you have not read it alreaedy, the migration guide is a good read.

For the last 5 years Windows 2000 has had WFP to protect against core files being overwritten. I've not had a single "DLL hell" experience yet in ~15 years of using Windows.
However I've installed Firefox on ten different distros (probably more now) and never once seen an icon for it appear automatically in my GNOME menu. Why is this so broken? APT, Synaptic, RPM, yum, etc. are all basically broken from my point of view, but we put up with them because it's worth the fuss. Millions of computer users can't even find a new icon on the DESKTOP, much less dink around with non-standard filesystem heirarchies (which distro do you use?) and symlinks.
Pet peeve of the day (which happens to be relevant to this thread) : Windows downloads are only a fraction the size of equivalent Linux apps. Try OO.o, Firefox, etc. My Xandros 3 install had to download 40MB (using the lovely APT) which doesn't compare well to a 4MB download for Windows.
Seriously, you should look into using something more current than Windows 3.11.

To compare apples to apples:
OO.o:
Windows - 45MB
Linux - 77MB

Firefox (with installer):
Windows - 4803KB
Linux - 8422 KB

Thunderbird:
Windows - 5877 KB
Linux - 10113 KB

I've heard enough about bloody shared libraries that evidently NEVER get shared, and instead I end up with five different incompatible versions of glibc/GTK/whatever and it's also annoying to wait while APT downloads an EXTRA 300% of the listed download size. If making *NIX installers like Windows means that I'll have all the advantages, and all of the downfalls, then I'll take it thank you very much. It's a great deal better than what we've got now.

Yes, the OpenOffice suite appears to be overlooked so far. OpenOffice 1.1.4 appears to be the current version.

Don't forget the Extensions for Firefox such as Ad-Block.

And of course, there's OpenOffice.

Here's my list of spyware/adware free apps, in no particular order:

Crap Cleaner - Cleans temp files, cookies, etc
P2P + Codec Packs - Kazaa Lite Resurrection, K-Lite Codec Packs, QuickTime Alternative, Real Alternative
Gmail Notifier - System tray icon that checks your google mail
Winamp - Media Player
Open Office - Office Suite
AbiWord - Word Processing
GIMP - Image Editor
Paint.Net - Image Editor
AVG Antivirus - Decent free antivirus
Everest Home - System diagnostics and benchmarking solution
Daemon Tools - CD/DVD emulator
Zone Alarm - The free version is a decent firewall
CWShredder - Removes CoolWeb adware

25 of the top 100 products on the Amazon.com Software sales chart are from Microsoft, with Student Teacher Office 2003 currently in third place. Christmas rebates bringing the price down to $99.

Christmas rebates bring the price of Openoffice down to, um, free :-)

"Student Teacher Office 2003" from Amazon probably doesn't even come close to Openoffice's million downloads a month totalling over 35 million.

A few years ago, before i started using Linux seriously, I started building an almost free/open Windows XP system. Here's the basic breakdown of the so-called free system:
Shell: http://www.bb4win.org/
Burning prog: http://www.burnatonce.com/
DC client: http://gempond.com/odc/
Graphics: http://gempond.com/odc/
IM: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
Browser:
Mail: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Office suite: http://www.openoffice.org/
et cetera...
But then it dawned on me: All these programs are avaliable under GNU/Linux.

That day was the day that i switched to Debian. I haven't looked back.

For full functionality, jdk/jre 1.4.0_02 or newer or jdk/jre 1.4.1_01 or newer is required

I must be new, posting back to my own post :P

After doing the above, running the binary barfed

This page helped me a lot. http://installation.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMs g?list=dev&msgNo=610

Now it works. and well. Comes with a built in media player? WTF?

Unfortunately that file format hasn't been reverse engineered yet. We're not focusing on doing the reverse file format engineering ourselves. We just don't have the resources (two programmers!) to focus on the old Mac file formats, or even the new Mac file formats like Keynote. I wrote some design specs to get developers started if you're curious, but I haven't had the time to do engineering for those features.

The only "old school" Mac app that has had its format engineered is the old Mac WordPerfect, thanks to the OOo WordPerfect filter team. They integrated their code into NeoOffice/J and now we can sort of open the old Novell/Corel WordPerfect 3.5 formatted files. Note this still doesn't give you "show codes", just the files. I think the old MacLink Plus may have had a Word 5.1 to WP translator, though, so that might be a way to get at your legacy docs even if it is convoluted as all hell.

ed