Slashdot Mirror

Remember when Wordperfect existed for many platforms, even the Amiga?

For Unix, best you can get is get the source code to Open Office and then try a GCC compiler on it. it should work with most MS-Office file formats.

I'm excited about several potentially significant projects that may have their first "stable" releases next year. Everyone knows about OpenOffice, Apache 2 and Mozilla (I'm surprised that neither article mentioned the last two). Here are a few others:

• Subversion version control rethought, could replace CVS as free software tool of choice
• E capability secure programming
• Reptile reputation-based content aggregator

...

Dumbass.

XML is great for content,

Perhaps some type of style-sheets over XML?

You mean something like XSL/XSLT? Why not just get MS to switch to the open file format of OpenOffice?Good luck trying, anyway.

XML is great for content,

Perhaps some type of style-sheets over XML?

You mean something like XSL/XSLT? Why not just get MS to switch to the open file format of OpenOffice?Good luck trying, anyway.

I wonder why they're focusing on educational institutions for illegal software users? If the sheer number of such users are more readily collected in such places, it makes me wonder about the environment. It's true that certain elements only survive under certain conditions. Is necessity a factor? Is the outrageous price for tuition and books driving the minds of our youth to justify downloading a cracked version of Microsft Word to finish a 400-page college paper due yesterday?
<side thought>
Oh wait, nobody worth their weight in RAM uses Word, what was I thinking? Open Office is so much better.
</side thought>
Anyhow, continuing with my rant: it seems to me that there is a consPIRACY going on.

Open file formats are important, but I'd argue the more important feature is maturity. MS Office has been around a while, and for all the whining people do about MS in general, Office for the most part kicks a lot of ass and deserves it's seat at the top of the productivity suite kingdom.

Alternative suites are no where near as mature, and I doubt they ever will be, given the fact that Office is MS's cash cow, and they'd be stupid to let it slip. I mean while the latest Office sports speech recognition/dictation, the "alternative" suites are just now getting spell checking! While Office is available in 35 languages, others are just now thinking about considering getting started. And I'm not even going to go into usability (how many open-source applications do you know of that have the resources to conduct and utilize novice useability tests?)

If you're using Windows, do me a favor: using IE, find a web page with a table in it, highlight the table, copy it, and paste it into Word or Excel. See what happens? The contents are interpreted correctly, and a Table appears in Word, and the contents of the table appear in seperate cells in Excel. Now ask yourself if that's anywhere near a possibility in ANY "alternative" office suite.

Open file formats or not, I'd be happy with Office for linux, as I'm tired of having to settle for immature, poorly designed suites.

Rather than force Microsoft to develop bloated software for linux, which will probably only work with a single distribution anyway, why not force them to open their file formats? Projects like OpenOffice and AppleWorks could then really compete. MS wouldn't have quite the same stranglehold that they currently enjoy with opened file formats. This would include, of course, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and interchange capabilities with Outlook. I suppose you could add Access into that, but it's such worthless crap anyway, why bother?

And make them open every aspect of the file formats, not just make them compatible. My understanding is that the way things currently are, most non-MS Office Suites can still read MOST MS office files, but not ALL MS Office files, which keeps a lot of shops from converting. Especially those that rely on specialized macros and whatnot.

• GCC for C/C++/FORTRAN coding. It's free, it's not the fastest in the world but it's competent.
• Octave is a great, free replacement for Matlab. For general data manipulation it seems fine, where it really lacks relative to Matlab is in the GUI.
• Gnuplot is a great all-round, all-purpose, scriptable plotting tool that can also do fitting. For general everyday tasks gnuplot gets used a lot in our lab.
• SciGraphica is a great 2d/3d/vector/polar/ plotting and analysis package. It is a little like an Origin clone so is pretty easy to pick up, and can be extended with Python plugins. I am one of the developers ;0) (although far too busy atm to contribute, anyone want to help?). More suitable for publication-quality plots and still heavily in development. A new release is imminent. Plug ;0).
• teTeX is the main (La)TeX distribution for Linux and you'll most probably have it in Debian anyway but for writing reports, articles, books, theses, even letters you shouldn't need to use anything else. Really.
• OpenOffice if you have to deal with mad, crazy, annoying .doc using people.

There's plenty more where they came from. Most distrbutions come with a lot of these things anyway. These are mainly analysis or document tools, there's plenty of other things for both these areas and any other which plenty of other posters have shown. I've written a little guide for my local group. Some of it's out of date (and some of it's wrong but I have better things to fix) but it does have a list of common tools we use. And, of course, SAL is a pretty comprehensive database of unix tools. HTH.

Actually, I think Office X is a Carbonized app, making it near impossible, even if you had the code, to make it run, as is, on Linux or BSD. Cocoa and Carbon are API layers, not widget sets, with Carbon being the "cleaned up" version of the Classic Macintosh API that will run without the emulation layer on OS X.

Quartz is the display engine built around Display PDF, a superset of Display Postscript. Considering that Display Ghostscript is basically done, I don't know if the GNUStep guys are thinking about expanding it to encompass the new API's and functions exposed through Display PDF.

So my theory is no way, no day, not anytime soon. And really, except for Access, what is there that OpenOffice doesn't offer you that MS Office might?

I guess the (small) difference I'm seeing is the difference between "to create an entirely free desktop environment for free systems" and "to support the principle of software freedom". One of these seems practical, the other political.

Currently the only disagreement that I'm aware of between RMS and the GNOME foundation is the mentioning of the (non-free, but free software related) Star Office application suite some time back. This caused RMS to ask for a policy decision to never mention non-free software. (Does this mean that it would be no longer possible to announce that Sun have released GNOME packages for non-free Solaris?) Does this help in any way the goal of creating an entirely free desktop environment for free systems? I sincerely doubt it.

The GNOME Foundation board should focus on facilitating interested parties (individual or corporate) create free software for the GNOME desktop. They should not be making it more onerous for these interested parties by creating policy for the sake of policy.

In StarOffice 5.2, idiot and nerd have no synonyms in the thesaurus. Fool has: mark, tool, victim, butt, dupe and gull. In OpenOffice build 638, fool, idiot and nerd each have 0 synonyms, but I think that is because the "Lingucomponent Project" is still in it's infancy (it may work better in build 638c). Kwrite, Kword, and AbiWord have no built in thesaurus. So, uhh... what Open Source product should we be proselytizing?

The WinME side of my laptop has slowly been declining with every patch I install, be it from Microsoft or Acer. Having fscked the sound I decided to try and roll the config back a week, which promptly deleted the boot files for WinME. So I'm now booting into Linux primarily at last, using OpenOffice build 638, which seems to read Office2K files happily, and running NT4 in VMware 3.0 beta to use Ameol until I find time to start my Cix OLR project. I will not be going anywhere near XP and I'd like to thank Microsoft for improving my computing experience immensely.

From a business point of view: Use "Linux Terminal Server". Yes, get a fat machine to serve all the applications to your users. This way, to modify/update/change/configure.... all the clients means working in a single machine: the fat server.

This is that the city of Largo has done. This is what Linux at schools project is doing.

Actualy, any distribution will do. But I will recommend you to look for a
"support contract" from RedHat, SuSE, Mandarke...

Some links:

Linux Terminal Server Project. You will see that they have packages for any distribution

Linux in Schools. Although it is oriented for schools, school needs are the same as Your Big Comany or Government.

The City of Largo uses Linux as desktop. So it is possible for plain clerks and secretaries to learn and be productive on Linux Desktops.

A worker just needs a working desktop, so he/she can use a word processor and an spreadsheet program. The "configuration and control" must be done byt he Support Team.

And my mom is unable to properly use Windows98. She's not a moronic mom. She is smart. But she has never been trained as computer specialist. But she can use word processing and spreadsheets. Yes, she uses or has used AmiPro, Office, WordPerfect... they are all the same in the end. No FUD about "difficult StarOffice". But when Windows crashes, she enters in panic mode. delete Windows, add Linux and you get no panic mode.

Do not extend FUD.

Use OpenOffice. Fairly soon should be available as a non-beta product.

Easy to use stuff? Try KDE and make it pretty with themes.

Use KDE as the desktop. Easy transition from any user. Install the "Acqua" or "Acqua-Graphite" Theme & "MacOS Loon'n'feel" with top desktop menu for your MacOS users.

Install the Win2000 Theme & "Win2000 Look'n'Feel for your Windows users.

My 2 cents

You contact the authors at openoffice.org, report a bug and tell them that this behaviour is crap and that it should be corrected.

Bring it to their attention! I also reported some bugs to them and the Stardivision/Sun folks are nice and responsive.

There are two ways:

• Register with openoffice and report a bug!
  
• Go to the staroffice betatest news group.
  

I was looking at the what still needs to be done page for Mac OS X One thing it talked about was getting the setup program to work. I have a simple solution for that, don't have the setup program on the Mac.

Mac users HATE installers, so what do you do instead? Well I download the file unstuff it. What is unstuffed is an OpenOffice folder with all the OpenOffice programs in it ready to go. It is in effect installed I can move that folder anywhere I want. Uninstalling? I just grab that folder and throw it in the trash can and empty trash. There it is uninstalled. I can do this with the Mac version of MS Office.

I am not a programmer but one thing I could do is create the OpenOffice interface on Mac OS X using the Apple's Interface Builder would this help the porting effort at all?

Wow! Open Office has a Marketing project too!

Even though open source projects don't try to make money, there is still a marketing function. Marketing is creating communication between the project and prospective users. Most projects ignore this requirement; some die as a result of not communicating.


Secrecy corrupts democracy: What should be the Response to Violence?

What was the reason for dropping mac support, does anyone know?

I, for one was looking forward to Star/Open Office 6 for the mac. (drooling for it more like it).

It just seems a trifle silly, really, if you think about it.
Everyone that wants an alternative to Microsoft's Office products, but still need the compatability with it.
I'll concede that the Mac has a smaller market share, but, you gotta admit that it has a more "vocal minority" (kind of reminds me of /. in a way).

Add to the above thought, that, it is NO secret that Sun's CEO released S.O. free to tweak Microsoft's CEO's nose. (figurativly, of course).

So, If you see where I am coming from it does not make sense.

heck, I platform hop enough not only to keep up with the tech, but sometimes the politics of distros, tools and apps.

Look at the screenshots and tell me that this would not look good under aqua, and run under osX.1 really nice.

I suppose I understood a little in the 10.0.X days becuse a lot of developers and programmers were griping (rightfully so) about the APIs not being coherent and up to spec/snuff.

But now, seems silly.

Help me understand.

Moose.

Agreed. It looks like some of the work has been done, but large chunks have not been ported yet. More information here.

Things that beat any Microsoft offering are:

here
here
here
here
here
and here

And if you want to delve deeper into Answer #1:

Included when you buy a Mac:
iTunes
iMovie
Mac OS X
Quicktime

Things worth paying for (if they're your can of soup):
Final Cut Pro
FileMaker
AppleWorks

I hear complaints that the cheapest Mac is still more expensive than the cheap PC's. So what? You get what you pay for. Does the PC include a Unix-based OS that's fast and slick as hell (KDE & Gnome are neither.)? No. Does it come with a full-fledged MP3 manager/player/ripper? No. Gotta pay the Microsoft Tax if you actually want to legally convert your CD's into a digital format. Do they come with a real movie editing program? Nope, don't have that either. MS Movie Maker is a poor excuse for anything. And best of all, I don't need Microsoft ANYTHING to use my Mac! Or use my Sun workstation, either!

Here are just a few of the tools that are considered traditionally in UNIX/Linux/BSD territory that are available for Win32. In all actuality, there's enough out there to get as much of Linux running on Win32 as Win32 running under WINE.
XFree86: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/xfree/
KDE: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
GTK/PHP/Libglade: http://gtk.php.net/download.php

Apache: http://www.apache.org
PHP: http://www.php.net
PHPTriad: http://www.phpgeek.com
Perl: http://www.activestate.com
Ruby: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ ruby-install.html
Python: http://www.python.org/download/download_windows.ht ml
TCL/TK: http://www.pconline.com/%7Eerc/tclwin.htm

MySQL: http://www.mysql.com
MySQL ODBC: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc.html
PostgreSQL: Included in cygwin (only works on NT)

ATT's U/WIN* Unix for Windows: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
Cygwin: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/
DJGPP: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
Native UNIX command-line binaries: http://www.wzw.tu-muenchen.de/~syring/win32/UnxUti ls.html

vi: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
Emacs: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs .html
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org

Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org
GIMP: http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/

List of GNU software for Windows: http://www.gnusoftware.com/
And so on . . .

There's a list over at DMOZ.org of a lot of this.

StarOffice 6.0 beta is based on OpenOffice the GPL release from StarOffice 5.2

This way, we can assure that for Sun is very difficult to get some money for StarOffice without a very good product (dictionaries, help, templates...) nor a very good support.

So, if StarOffice will earn money for this, the quality of the product would be lot of times better than M$ crap office suite

What really f***k people is still keeping paying for nothing but a standard with no quality

It does work.

It's only slightly offtopic... OpenOffice 638c (latest build) is probably pretty close to StarOffice 6beta.

The other day, I downloaded OpenOffice build 638C for Linux and for Windows. I use Red Hat Linux (7.1) at home, and I already use StarOffice (5.2) for my regular office needs. It works great. I think my main complaint with OpenOffice is the silly desktop. Other than that, I consider it a fully functional office suite that can replace my MS Office needs anytime.

I didn't see any cool OpenOffice screenshots, so I made my own of the text document program. I didn't do any (yet?) of the spreadsheet program, or presentation software. These were really captured for the benefit of my brother, but I'm posting them here so that others can see them.

The author of the StarOffice article is a bit off base about how the XML works. Basically, the document consists of SEVERAL XML documents, images, and fonts all packed into a JAR file (a ZIP file with a maifest file). After you extract these files, you then find that each of these XML documents contains so much info that it makes them nearly impossible to be read by humans! (No VI or EMACS, sorry)

The upshot of this is that KOffice or some other suite could support these documents very easily. On top of that, the compression makes these files tremendously small. I took a 700K Word document (500 pages!) and converted it to a 100K StarOffice file. Now if that isn't cool, I dunno what is!

You can find more info at http://xml.openoffice.org/.

Star Office has released version 6.0 beta.
See the banner on Sun's homepage

OpenOffice is currently offering release 638
See www.openoffice.org for details.

Are they related? Yes. Are they the same? Certainly not!

Please try to clarify this point in the posted article!

Open Office 6 was not released on wednesday. They released a build called Open Office 6 beta 638c. It's more like a milestone release on the way to a proper version 6. Sort of like what mozilla does. The final version isn't scheduled for some time yet, see the roadmap.

I've spent the last couple of days trying to build snapshot 638 (it definitely is not a build that you can just kick off). I'd just like to know which is the most recent source.

Check out the OpenOffice community page, especially the diagram showing builds and releases of OO and SO. If I'm reading it right, this beta should be based on the same code that went into OO build 638c, branched from the main source around a month ago.

By the way, I know this has no relevance to someone who is actually compiling the code on *nix, but build 638 has been pretty nifty for me on Win98.

The Open Office org people are working on that with the PHPGroupware people. Links are here (Check the mail archives), here and here. Keep in mind that the SO 5.2 groupware features couldn't be open sourced, so these guys are starting from scratch and a long way behind.

The PHPGroupware project has pretty much finished creating an open XML-RPC (and SOAP soon) groupware protocol specification and server implementation. The Open Office people plan on a quick port of the Mozilla calendar project to this protocol, and later on build a native Star Office groupware client. Hopefully the Evolution people will pull their heads out and start looking at this for the server back end.

The intention is that one day any groupware client that follows this protocol will talk to any groupware server, and give the ability to mix and match every layer of the solution. This would let you choose a web interface or an integrated client (eg Outlook/Evolution) or seperate mail and calendaring clients. And on the backend, choose your storage (eg filesystem or SQL database), choose you IMAP server, your directory, your iCal server etc etc.

It is ambitious, but a sorely needed to break the IT world out of MS lock-in. I'd love to see future groupware built on open standards rather than the proprietry Exchange/Notes/Groupwise ones.

• Spell checking
  
• Certain fonts (including, especially, Asian language fonts)
  
• Help
  
• The database component (Adabas D)
  
• Templates
  
• Extensive Clip Art Gallery
  
• Some sorting functionality (Asian versions)
  
• Certain file filters
  

The source is at OpenOffice. StarOffice isn't open source, per se. Sun takes the code from openoffice, adds in fonts and other 3rd party licensed software they pay for, and distributes it for free to eat into Microsoft's market.

The integrated desktop was the first thing to go. You can read a lot about what has gone on with Star Office at openoffice.org. There you'll find the source, etc.

For those of us that remember how to use ftp. instructions are on the sites on how to download. Have Fun

See OpenOffice.org for that one.

1) please don't say star office. just don't. this whole shell thing that takes over my desktop just to view a document. t-h-e v-e-r-y s-l-o-w i-n-t-e-r-f-a-c-e.

If you want lightweight, try AbiWord. It's fast, reliable and easy to use. Come to think of it, it's alot easier than Word (which in my opinion is one of the most difficult programs ever invented).
And the KOffice package is quite cool, and after a few versions it might become excellent. If you think StarOffice is slow, you might want to try out OpenOffice.org, which is the new open source version of StarOffice (might be faster, haven't tried it out yet).

...i can schedule a meeting with 8 people all ot once by just checking their diary availability...

Ever heard of Netscape Calendar? That's the same thing, you can schedule meeting in others calendars, etc.

And the most beautiful thing is that if you don't like something in a product, you can always edit the code and recompile. Think about how many lives (or nerves) one could have saved if Outlook was open source. You don't like viruses? Here's a nice little patch that disables all the nasty security holes in your Outlook.

Lemme see:

Full open source projects:

OpenOffice

Netbeans

Tomcat (The source was gifted from Sun)

NFS (gifted to the Linux community)

They also have source that free for research and internal use at:

http://www.sun.com/software/communitysource/index. html

They also have given financial and programming support to:

Gnome

Mozilla

And I'm just scratching the surface! And for the record, Lutris was perfectly able to create a fully open source, J2EE branded server. The catch 22 was that they couldn't open source Sun's code so they would have to write their own. Did they? No.

Geez, you people could at least TRY to understand the issue before shooting off at the mouth.

Disclaimer: This post does not meet established Slashdot doctrine. Go ahead, mod me down. I dare you. Be a censor just like the news media. The truth? You can't handle the truth!

They all lack many essential features. They all have web-based GUIs that are tighly coupled with the back-end logic; that is, they have no back ends. Thus the default GUI is the only GUI you can ever realistically put on top of it. A lot of people are missing out on the MVC model these days. What you need is a programmable back end accessible through a cross-platform API (based on CORBA, SOAP, XML-RPC, UNO, anything that strikes your fancy). Then you can leverage the back-end support for clients. One can be a powerful reporting tool with graphing capabilities. Another one can be a wxWindows-based portable GUI for modern desktops. Another one can be a common-denominator HTML-based GUI for browsers. Etc.

Current GUIs are all crude and cluttered and obviously designed by programmers with no interface design background (and by that I don't mean graphical design, but functional design). Many are ad-hoc systems thrown together using PHP. Presumably the poor devils think that by slapping it on SourceForge or Freshmeat it will magically bloom into a usable product. Nuh-uh.

Another common problem with these systems is that they're fundamentally bug-tracking systems. When you get to a certain point in development, you realize that a better all-embracing concept is the idea of issues -- a generalization of problems that aren't specifically related to code. There is a popular fork of Bugzilla, for example, called IssueZilla.

The only system that was mildly interesting was Keystone, which provides some interesting form-based extensibility -- basically, if I remember correctly, the schema is malleable, so you can add stuff like time estimation numbers, completion progress, or other metadata that would be useful in your project. Also Keystone supports the notion of subtasks: any bug "slip" can have another slip as its parent. This is more elegant than Bugzilla's dependency system. Unfortunately, Keystone sports a GUI from hell. (Applying CSS to it might sound fun, but it isn't; their HTML isn't very CSS-friendly, so to do anything radical you have to delve into their HTML generation code).

We currently use Bugzilla. It's currently the best system out there, but that doesn't say much. We are pretty excited about Scarab -- this is a project where the developers actually sat down and designed it beforehand (wowee).

From openoffice.org



Mostly C++


This is not
Lame at all
Why is the lameness filter so lame?

Technically it isn't under the GPL. From this page :

OpenOffice.org uses a dual license strategy for the source code. These licenses are the GNU Lesser General Public License(LGPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).

FREEDOM.

Freedom is the reason you should check out OpenOffice, K Office, Evolution, Gnumeric etc.. Remember: Sun has GPL'd Star Office's source code. That means that everyone can peek at it and change it -- that means you don't have to worry that the next version of the product will fuck with you because if it will, enough developers will be pissed off enough to fork and fix it. You don't have to worry about Passport, .NET, talking paperclips, proprietary file formats or "Smart Tags", or whatever Microsoft's current strategy of becoming Big Brother is.

This is relevant not only for individuals and for corporations. Choosing OpenOffice now is reasonable long term thinking, something most individuals seem incapable of. Yes, Sun would behave just as badly as Microsoft in Microsoft's shoes, but with OpenOffice under the GPL, there's not really much that can go wrong. The file format is also open, XML-based and documented and can be legally implemented by anyone.

Freedom is not just an ideological point. If you trust all your critical documents to a closed source software corporation, you are dependent on them and on their decisions, which will hurt your bottom line -- and, in the long term, hurt you much more than training your personnel to use an alternative.

The bottom line is that if you care about freedom, you shouldn't have to go to China -- you have to look at the alternatives. If you don't do that, you have no right whatsoever to complain that you have none later.

Maybe you should check out Open Office, the next version of Star Office? Since it's under the GPL, you might find it quite nice for the Free Software side of you, and it really is nicer than Star Office.

I should also point out that the link to the "StarOffice source code" is a link to a very old verison of OpenOffice.org. Those seeking StarOffice source code should go here to get the latest build.

Please i am waiting for these feature for a long time!
Will include mysql driver for accesing Mysql databases directly using StarOffice Base.
It has been for a long time in TODO list, in Openoffice homepage:
"You can connect indirectly to a MySQL database using the existing ODBC and JDBC database drivers. This project could benefit from an driver that accesses a MySQL database directly"
Come on MySQL, Openoffice developers give us a good notice, It will be great.

There won't be a StarOffice, per se, but there is an OpenOffice port in the works, info at openoffice.org.

Unfortunately, the current port is very primitive (i.e. no printer support yet) and it doesn't appear that any work has been done since April. I wouldn't hold my breath.

that would be very goodopenoffice builds have got good and building has beome alot saner

as far as I can tell the openoffice file format is XML like Koffice for text and a modified SVG for graphics

SVG really rocks for graphics checked out Sodipodi for a cool SVG editor

regards

john jones

Will KOffice support OpenOffice's XML-based file format for saving and loading documents? Besides supporting DOC, it seems like establishing an OS-wide open standard for formatted documents would go a long way to make Linux-based office tools more popular. As more and more apps use it, eventually, Word would have to provide an import filter, too.

It's a big hurdle though. Every bit helps.

If Openoffice gets up to speed, the transition will be even easier.

I've found that OpenOffice is getting really good at this... of course, soon MS will probably introduce new intracacies into their Office formats that will have to be hacked again.... But still, my MS office use is rapidly approaching 0. It's also great to have a good format that can be shared across platforms. Give openoffice a try (openoffice.org), I think you'll like it.

You would think that java would be another thing that would be very portable but Debian still does not include Open Office because none of the Free java compilers can run the java parts of it.

I was under the impression that no one included OpenOffice because it wasn't ready yet; I seem to recall an editorial in a magazine that criticzed Sun for giving us an "open-source office suite" that lacked basic print functionality, for one.

Now, to be fair, the editorial pointed out that Sun had to strip out all of the code that they had licensed from others, but the point is, OpenOffice on it's "debut" was much like the Netscape 5 codebase; barely usable without major work.

Granted, this was many months ago, and I'm sure much work has been done to clean up the OpenOffice code. But how come I can't find anyone talking about OpenOffice besides their own website? Does no one care about the "MS Office-killer" any more?

Jay (=

Suppose you could get Acme Office (100% similar product) for free

People would just go to OpenOffice.org and download it. That's what the Dutch are doing.