Slashdot Mirror
StarOffice 5.2 Preview
A few people over the last couple of days have pointed out that Sun has made StarOffice 5.2 available for preview. It's a big download, clocking in at 100+ megs for Solaris. There's also Linux (x86 only) and Win32 versions available.
It's a company trying to do a bug-for-bug copy of microsoft bloatware, and (surprise!) produced bloatware while mimicing.
I'll keep whith scalc3 when possible.
You'll get a limited time license. At a certain date the program will refuse to start until you download another 100 meg update. Secondly, the improvements are restricted to linking everything to Sun's portal not functional improvements.
Are there any Experts on Sunology in the house ? Do any Slaashdot readers understand why Sun would choose to forcibly time limit and expire a product that it's giving away for free ?
Yep. The SO preview has a limit and will stop working in a few months. What's so bad about allowing someone to keep using a free BETA rather than the equally free final product if it works for them ?
Hewing to fill out a lengthy application form just to download this baby isn't such a good thing either.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
If I roll it out, it will be thin-client for most users. We will be using combo ICA/XWindow terminals, and presumably running StarOffice on a big Linux or Solaris box (~4 CPUs, 1GB RAM), serving out sessions to the 20 or so people on the terminals. In other words, low-end, diskless machines on desks and a big fat server or two behind the scenes. You don't save the money on hardware (or software, necessarily). You save on downtime and maintenance. As long as the server is humming along, desktop maintenance consists of throwing terminals away when they break and zero prep time required for a new one.
By the way, those P133s, as long as they have a 2MB video card, make darn good X or ICA terminals. Throw on a nice pared-down install of Linux, point 'em at a *nix box running XDM, and you're in business.
> I'm half suprised SO hasn't become it's own complete windowmanager :) :) It does its own mouse cursor, and manages all its windows internally, using a Windows-like look.
It has.
Again, this is probably for ease of cross-platform interoperability, but _damn_, does it look bad on my GNOME Aqua-themed desktop.
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
i've started the process of making a mirror
t a/
of the 5.2beta release available in australia
for those who want to try and get it locally
and/or quicker
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/staroffice/5.2be
i'll be trying to mirror the english versions of
linux, SPARC and win32 in that order..
-jason
Well in fact their desktop also exist in the windows version, which is just plain stupid.
Why did Sun feel it necessary to tar the single install file? It only makes the file slightly larger. Does anyone else think this is totally stupid?
It's not stupid at all.
Tar preserves the file attributes. Most of us don't mind chmod +x'ing a downloaded binary but most regular people won't be too keen on it, and that's if they even *knew* that they had to do that to get the damn thing to run...
My major beef with staroffice and using it on a large NFS server shared by thousands of machines is that star office is just plain dumb about multi-user-ness.
/net" - when is a unix install not multiuser? When in unix do you use a "/" for an option flag?
.staroffice . Versioned app directories are lame. app directories without a dot in front of them are even lamer.
1- "setup
2- what good app requires user to run setup after sysadmin has installed it? This is a complaint of mine with WindowMaker as well. Here's how it should work: user runs soffice, it notices that ~/$OFFICEDIR doesn't exist. It creates it. It populates it with default info taken from $PREFIX/etc/$DEFAULT.cfg
3- no console-only install script or method. I can't say it enough. GUI-only installs are inflexible, inefficient, screen-monopolizing, unwanted, slow... give me a "sh install" or similar text-based script. PLEASE!!!
4- change staroffice user directory to
Now the FAQ says Mac support is under investigation and that FreeBSD won't be supported. Of coursen that's not new, but what a pity. And don't even ask about BeOS.
But don't take me wrong, I'm a big StarOffice supporter (I use it on Solaris@work, and linux@home), I just wish Sun made StarOffice a bit more multi-platform, as it used to be in the past...
What? They even included fdisk int it ?!
I test software for a living and one of the most problomatic things that I encounter is users calling me up at all houres of the night complaning about bugs that they just found on my copmonys software. And I'll spend 5-10 minuts waking up only to dicover that this user is reporting a well documented issue with his v0.081b If we had been smart enough to put an experation date on it the user would have uploaded the new version (one that is not beta) a year ago. S/He would be having no problems and I would be asleap.
so 5.1 does take advantage of the true type fonts.
It's only that someone told StarWriter
that it can't print ttf on linux
(but it can),
so it doesn't show
them. you have to type
the font names in manually
to use them. you
can probably fix
that weirdness, but I try to avoid SO anyway. Just why exactly
is it so damn unresponsive?
(In my opinion,
a K6-266 should be enough to write a letter.
Really.)
and now for something completely different
Disclaimer: I have not looked StarOffice5.2 yet.
However, based on what I'd heard, I (tentatively)recommended SO to a client of mine. After a month or two of dealing with a buggy, crashy, poorly documented, (no, screw that--effectively undocumented, and I can't get any of the 3rd party books locally) and SLOW program that stores all of its config and data files in binary formats, I'm beginning to regret my decision.
It pains me greatly to say it, but StarOffice 5.1a is a big, bloated, nonstandard, immature program. God knows I WANT to like it--I really want to be able to do all of my work on Solaris/Linux, and want a package that my clients can use to integrate mail, browsing, and word processing. Unfortunately, this ain't it yet, and based on some of the fundamental design decisions (mail stored locally is in WHAT format??!?!), I don't think it ever will be.
*sigh*
If 5.2 is actually stable and faster (as it's rumoured to be), then maybe I'll be able to overlook the other faults. Maybe I'll be able to ignore the ugly interface and the stupid file formats, but I'm still not sure it's going to be a _good_ product--merely the best (?) one out there, in an almost nonexistent market.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Agreed, although hstorically, it was Betas that required surrendering the most information. Of course, that was when 'beta' meant 'beta test product' (and having trackable testers was important) as opposed to 'buggy unfinished pre-release' (where bug reports are not required and occasionally read)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Is it just me, or does StarOffice seem to be suffering from a MS Office case of bloatware. I realize a majority of the new features listed are there simply for MS Office compatibility (which is a good thing), but it seems like Sun is making StarOffice into a MS Office "Me too" package, adding new features just because they can.
What ever happened to the days where there's a link to a supposed "free" download, and you go there and there's a link that links to the file. What's up with this registering and asking me about the size of my mother's army boots just so I can get SO5.2 BETA!!! I didn't download it because I'm getting seriously ticked off with the registration crap just to download something I might not even use! I'm going back to vi and LaTeX. :P
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
that the whole GUI glop that surrounds the StarOffice apps is the easy way out to cross-platform compatibility, documentation, and support.
If you did it the other way, where the apps adhered to the UI of the base system, you'd go nutt having to map all of the functionailty to different gestures on the native platforms. You couldn't really seel StarOffice as an app that makes the underlying system moot. You Windows-centric person who sat down at a Mac to use StarOffice would still have a learning curve to figure out how to do and find common things.
Ditto for support. You'd need to have support personnel experienced in every single platform (or break the team down into different, specific platform support teams).
As far as development is concerned, I'm sure it's easier to work on one unified GUI. Ditto for QA. You'd need to change your test plan for every platform otherwise. Ditto for documentation. There's only one GUI you have to guide the user around.
Is it the best solution from the viewpoint of the user, who is already familiar with the platform of his or her choice? Nope. But recall who these apps really get sold to. CIOs, the support and systems folks, etc. That's basically who this was designed for. It's probably a good argument against commercial apps of this sort.
Totally taking over the user experience can be a good thing... take some of the Metacreations tools, such as Bryce and Poser. They basically have their own interface, and take over your entire screen. You either hate them with a passion or love them. In general, I think, they were very successful with the target audience of graphic designers, though.
In this case, StarOffice just went for the lowest-common-denominator: the Microsoft Office interface. Probably a safe bet from a corporate viewpoint. People already using Microsoft apps on Windows (the majority of the potential market for the app, that is, when it was being sold) would be able to adapt easily. And it's already been proven that at the very least, people can muddle along with it. A radical departure would probably not been accepted by the market.
It would be interesting to see what StarOffice would have been, had it not been intended to be sold to a corporate market...
What's up with this registering and asking me about the size of my mother's army boots just so I can get SO5.2 BETA!!!
StarOffice is, unfortunately, in the clutches of an evil corporation. Oh sure, there are far eviler corporations out there (I could name one right now:) but Sun is certainly no angel, especially with respect to LInux which they perceive - correctly - as a threat to Solaris. Course they would be a lot smarter to leverage Linux instead of doing the subtle sandbagging-with-a-smile they engage in now, but what the heck, that's just my opinion.
In the short term, Sun owning StarOffice is good for Linux - it will speed Linux takeup on the desktop. But in the long run, we basically have to kiss StarOffice goodbye as an open-source program. That's probably bad.
Or maybe it's not. Actually, Abiword is really coming along and once it gets fleshed out a little more, I think I'll prefer using it by a ***wide*** margin of some of the other bloatware office products. KOffice is really promising too, and Gnome supplies a few pieces of the puzzle (gnumeric is already darn good and it's getting better every week).
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I downloaded SO5.2b (Linux) a couple of days ago. ITs interface hasnt changed much, but there are some subtle new features, some nice, some not. I was rather hoping that they would jettison the Windows-esque start button, but it is still there. Unfortuantely, some type of security problem causes the application to crash when accessing almost any web page. It does a nice job of sucking in your settings from 5.1 and even your mail and newsgroups from Netscape. Still quite buggy, but beta is beta.
Avoid those slow Sun ftp sites! A mirror have been made available for the linux and solaris versions:
ftp://ftp.c-60.org/pub/soffice/
I know that because we are just finishing our Excel 95/97/2000 filter. The Gnumeric people know this (just look at their source code comments). And your new colleagues over at the StarCalc team surely know this as well.
You probably know this: Do at least the Word specs have some resemblance with reality?
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Also my wv project has a passable word reader that abiword is using as a word importer, and gnumeric has quite a good excel importer
C.
I sometimes write stuff
No, they haven't slimmed it down or made noticeable UI changes. This is a subtle upgrade.
It seems a bit snappier than 5.1. The Win32 version now embeds the IE browser engine if it's present, which improves web browsing from within the app. The IMAP mail support is a bit slicker, roughly on par with Netscape 4.x but with some extra niceties thanks to its integration with the rest of the suite. It ain't Outlook 2000 yet, but then it's also not succeptible to script macros in message bodies.
But the best improvement I've seen is in the MS Office import and export capabilities. It always did a better-than-average job of opening MS Office files, but it wasn't good enough to replace MS Office for shops with lots of Office documents floating around. Now, it's nailed every small to mid-sized Word, Excel and Powerpoint doc I've thrown at it, save for the Microsoft-dialect VBA macros, and it neither runs nor harms those. Based on my use of it over the past two days on Linux and NT, I now feel it's a viable product to roll into mixed MS Office environments for roles where VBA doesn't come into play.
Now that 5.2 plays nicer with MS Office files, I will definitely be evaluating it as a server-based X app for a 20-person call center I'm putting together.