Slashdot Mirror
StarOffice Source Released
mprudhom writes: "According to Yahoo!, Sun has today released the source to StarOffice, as promised.
Go to www.openoffice.org and download it, or just grab it with:
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs login
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs co OpenOffice ". Okay, people can stop submitting this now.
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs login
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs co OpenOffice ". Okay, people can stop submitting this now.
thats a bit norrow minded
Its the 14th here in Darwin Australia
Brother Stallman will lead us in song.
."
All together now:
"GPL, GPL, uber alles . .
hawk, not trolling, but not entirely facetious, either
is that you can change it to do that: You're quite free to take a horrible idea, and turn it into a worse one :)
For heven's sake, someone tell me that the first thing people are doing is creating a version with no desktop and separate *programs* rather than modules . . .
hawk
Or just change the folder name. Check out http://www.panug.org/articles/paperclip.htm for how to remove him from either O97 or O2K
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
What's new here that wasn't in 5.2? XML file formats, woo-hoo, it's not even the default way to save (yeah, I suppose they want to wait for the rest of the world to catch up, but then it will never catch on)!
At least the "Desktop" is gone, but that seems to be about the only big change I noticed. Oh yeah, and Help doesn't work...definitely not a step in the right direction.
"You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve or the ones you create." Mike Murdock
> As a side note, anyone that thinks Open Office currently is feature comparable with MS Office is either kidding themselves or has never used Star Office for non-trivial documents. The same goes for Office compatibility. That said, I do have hope that Open Office will get there, someday.
No offense but, why is that so important? I think there's a lot more to be said for being stable, fast, and cheap. I'm still using a version of Office 95, but I'm not even using half of its functionality. I can't believe Joe Consumer can figure out most of these features anyway. He probably just wants to turn them off (Die, paperclip!)
Sure, there will be power users who desparately need every whiz-bang Office feature crammed in there in the last two versions.
But does Mom really need "improved table drawing","intelligent multilingual support", "collaborative sharing", or any of the other buzzwords on the MS Word site? Does she really need to expend the time wading through all these features?
Getting a free version of Star Office bundled with consumer PCs could be a big boon if it could reliably read and write Office formats. It sure might bring Office prices down...
. .
It's short, but here's a review of Star Office 5.2 on Computerworld
Now I'm not knocking anything here, because I use Star Office 5.2 myself and got our office switched to it, but will the current efforts translate into e.g. a review in Business Week print edition (like MacOs-X got one time ages ago) and the kind of coverage which actually pursuades executives without recourse to code analysis or monopolies debates?
Surely given the adspend Sun places these days, a few more mainstream reviewers could be perusuaded / invited to load a copy and write it up?
Anyone seen a good print or online review out there in the mainstream business press?
== Idle Random Thoughts. Usual Disclaimers Apply ==
It's also a bit strange that collab.net is hosting it and not Sun, after all it's still their baby, right?
-- You ain't seen me, right?
The binaries that are on akamai (look up in this thread) don't depend on anything. They do ask if you have a jre installed, but they seem to work fine with or without the jre (it doesn't recognize my IBM jre- no real surprise there ;) Other than that, the binaries run fine.
/lot/ of ugliness there, at least from what little bit I saw before the site died. Lots of stuff that isn't open source (like some java tools.) I suppose that will be fixed eventually.
As far as building it goes... well, there is a
Oh well- at least they have binaries out, which is something that mozilla was unable to do for quite some time.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Ahem...
Try Tools/Options, then select View.
Look what's in the "Look and Feel" listbox!
Standard
OS/2
XWindows
Macintosh
ALthough, this _is_ 5.1 I'm using since I'm on NetBSD, so OS/2 is probably gone, but still, you _can_ change the look. It's far from perfect though, as maximized windows still have the Windows buttons (why?!), but hey, now you can fix it!
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
If Slashdot is running on Central time, that's two minutes latency for the slashdot effect.
I wish Slashdot posted their logs somewhere. I'd like to see how many hits the main page took during the same time period.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
OS/2 was a joint project. Win NT came out of that but not using the same code. If win NT was based on OS/2 then IBM would be entitled to a chunk of it by law. Microsoft abandoned this for NT to get rid of IBM cause they no longer needed them
Still, Star Office 5 left something to be desired in the area of contact management.
Uses XML I believe
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
> Win2K=32bitDOS
You make gross generalizations like this and you expect people to take you seriously?
> Developing OSS sucks much less than developing MS junk.
BAH. Give me an OSS CodeInsight, give me a small portable (across apps) object model (small -- CORBA is not small), give me ERWin and Rational Rose. At the OS level, how about a kernel debugger (for device drivers), and async I/O.
But hey vi is enough for everyone isn't it? Leading edge of innovation, that.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I remember when Caldera first decided to open up the product formerly known as DR DOS. It turned out that in order to compile, a person needed something like 7 different commercial compilers, at least 4 of which were different assemblers. You'd thinkt that they could stick to one assembler! The worse part was that the whole thing was stuck inside some sort of in-house database source code control system. ugly! It took months and months to get the code into anything resembling a publishable state.
At 20 hours of compilation time, I wonder why they don't use a cross compiler on some insane mulit-cpu Sun box. That reminds me of when IBM used to refuse to compile OS/2 on the SMP enable version even though it cut down compile time from nine hours to forty-minutes.
Of course hopefully, a developer only needs to compile from scratch once and once the majority of object files are created only has to compile in changes to the current module.
have a day,
-l
Just checked my submission time against my watch. Slashdot is either running Central time or they don't observer Daylight Savings.
Two minutes for the slashdot effect to take down a Sun corporate webserver. That's gotta be some kind of record.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
It was, in fact, Conan O'Brien.
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
Oh yeah, like that abi crap, oleo, GNUmeritless, or whathave you could use the bloat in staroffice. You honestly think it would fit in like a jigsaw puzzle?
Why do you bother with gaming on Li
If you don't understand the difference, then I don't think we have much of value to say to each other.
My title is "assistant engineer", by the way.
DNA just wants to be free...
I would have figured the source code would have been larger than that.
And what kind of code starts with "Internal Server Error"? Is that some kind of crazy new Java function?
:)
Finkployd
I would imagine that downloading a gzipped tarball would do a better job of saving bandwidth and server CPU time than any possible CVS method. I don't know CVS, so I don't know if it's possible to use the tarball if you want to do CVS stuff in the future, but it would be dumb if you couldn't. Anyway, just my 2 cents worth :)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I'm talking about anti-aliasing - removing the jaggedness around fonts by using grey-scales. AFAIK StarOffice doesn't do this at the moment, and the results, particularly in the presentation module, are awful.
My apologies.
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
AppleWorks 6 is Carbonized. It was one of the first carbonized applications. I guess it was Apple's test case while developing CarbonLib.
Sig goes here
Hey if IBM really means it, they could open source there speach reconition ;)
New things are always on the horizon
Pathetic! - troll, my arse. It's an opinion, you whore moderator. Microsoft Office is EXACTLY what Star Office is trying hard to become, right down to file compatability. Sun wouldn't even be doing it if wasn't strategically important to shaft Microsoft! You think it's for love of Open Source?
Is anyone going to deny that the lack of Office functionality is the first thing anyone thinks of when someone suggests Linux on the business desktop?
This is exactly the kind of moderation that encourages the parroting of the same old opinions and is turning Slashdot into a very boring place. How about people think before trashing any post that mentions Microsoft without saying how naughty they are?
Same exact problem on Solaris. I installed as `setup -net' however. It seems this install procedure is broken.
Ryan
i found this article over at the register rather interesting. among other things, they report that the OpenOffice 6 code Sun released "...seems to be an alpha version." i couldnt find anything that suggests this is true on openoffice.org...nor in the oo_605_src tarball. so what is this claim based on?
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
You mean it won't include native COBOL support?!
I think lots and lots and lots of people share that concern. I'd expect it to be one of the first things that some enterprising open-sourcer tackles...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
I disagree.. I know you're trolling though. The trouble lately has been large CLOSED SOURCE commercial projects that have decided to be hip and open their source code. Unfortunately, once it is opened it reveals the huge stinking turd pile you talked about. The *commercial* developers are what made this into a piece of shit. Don't blame open source developers for having trouble dealing with what they've worked on. Projects that start from the ground up as open with CVS and online discussion and review of changes work well.
Get it. :-)
They're Akamai links, but when I click on them, I get bounced to the main "our server is swamped, please wait while we fix it" page at OpenOffice. Any other mirrors out there? Jay (=
It's about time the source was released. Maybe some people can go over it and try to make it run faster. On my PII, it crawls...
-MSD.dyndns.org
"Sucks to your ass-mar"
>Its great that we can now take the code and add features that are sadly lacking in StarOffice, such as the MS Office Assistant...
:)
:)
You realize now that I will have to kill you right on the spot, don't you?
On the other hoof - how about making it as annoying as the MICROS~1 one is? and as impossible to get rid of, too...
Damn you - I'll have to kill myself too!!
This is Very Good(tm). Now I can compile out all the crap I don't need and keep the tools I do need.
If I'm judging the open source community correctly, there'll be an entire enclave dedicated to various source hacks popping up very soon.
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
>> No offense but, why is that so important?
No offense to you either, but it is of utmost importance if you have to exchange documents with clients. We (I work at an engineering consulting company) have to exchange tons of documents with our clients, and although we used to be a Word Perfect shop, we were force to turn to the dark side to provide our clients what they want. Most clients are asking for electronic reports in MS Office format. I've tried (well up through 5.1a, haven't checked the supposedly improved filters with 5.2) and SO just doesn't cut it on any files that get too fancy. The biggest problems is macros in spreadsheets. We have lots of them and they almost never work. And forget about presentations!
Also, although our clients don't require this, when you have multiple people working on writing a document, the "track changes" feature of Word is really helpful; and not available in SO.
So yeah, if you are just talking about you mom using it, it is fine. But I think the issue here is businesses using it.
At about 5:45am PST, our web server was brought down by a veritable tsunami of
hits.
We ask your patience while our best people are reconfiguring the server and
bringing her back up; we are working as quickly as possible and we will keep
all openoffice.org community members apprised of the situation via our general
discuss and announce lists.
Screw Micro$oft.
I think you misunderstand the free software business model. Aside from the existence of many companies have managed to profit quite handsomely from various free and open source products and aside from the existence of many successful free software projects, you are asking the wrong questions.
What needs to be explained is not how Sun could develop an open source project on the magnitude of Star Office without other income. What needs to be explained is how open sourcing a product like Star Office is more beneficial to Sun than keeping the product proprietary.
For a hardware company like Sun (or IBM or SGI) certain types of software are necessary but unprofitable. IBM, Sun, and SGI do not make any money off of much of their flagship software (AIX, MVS, Solaris, IRIX, etc.). This flagship software is necessary to sell their hardware. The question one needs to asks is can these companies create better software at a lower cost by using the free software or open source software development models. These companies are already going to lose money on these products. That is simply not the issue.
An excellent example is that IBM is selling many more mainframes because Linux now runs on their S/390 machines. This is not conjecture. The ability for an ISP to run thousands of instances of Linux on one box is incredibly appealing. One S/390 costs less and takes up much less space than tens of thousands of rack mount Linux or NT boxes that would be needed to provide the same service. Like this article mentions:
In the case of Star Office we have a slight difference. Sun's goal with a free office suite is not to sell hardware but to kill off an enemy's product that is both a cash cow (Microsoft Office) and the major means by which the enemy maintains its desktop monopoly. Maybe no one without the resources of Sun could afford to set free a product like Star Office. So what? It doesn't matter. What does matter is whether or not the freeing of Star Office will help or hinder Sun. Will the benfefits of freeing Star Office to Sun outweigh the cost of freeing Star Office to Sun? That is the only question that needs to be answered.
But if you want non-trivial free software success stories that were not started by companies with enourmous cash reserves, there are plenty:
And these are just the ones I can think of from the top of my head. I'm sure that there are many, many more non-trivial free software and open source software projects that were not started or driven by large corporations.
The free software revolution is upon us. I don't really care whether or not you join us because the only person you're hurting by not joining is yourself. While I and others will have the freedom to choose whatever products we want at no cost and with the freedom to change them to suit our needs, you will still be paying too much for a product you have little or no control over.
have a day,
-l
I have found a bug.
KDE killed themselves when they chose to base their work on a not 100% free library. Yes, it's been remedied now, but that's what incited GNOME in the first place, and basically what got all the corporates lined up behind GNOME.
Too bad, though. When i first saw KDE a year an a half or maybe 2 years ago, I thought they were on to something that could be really good. Then gnome appeared on the scene and caught up rather quickly... It's always sad how it's true that the way you can discover the true pioneers is because they're the ones laying face down in the mud with arrows in their backs, as every who was behind them storms ahead...
I will gladly concede that 80% of users only use %20 of the functionality in MS Office. The problem with transitioning away from Microsoft Office is that each user will use a slightly different 20%. Further, far from arcane seldom used features, many of the missing features are no really what I'd consider esoteric.
For example, Star Office 5.1 doesn't handle most formatting in headers and footers. I can't believe that the company I'm onsite at is the only one that has standard sets of documentation with the company logo in the header of almost all of their documents.
That's not the only feature missing, that I would consider to be needed for a non-MS office suite to catch on in the business place. I could be wrong, but my perception is that Windows and Office caught on at home because it caught on in the business world. People want to use at home what they use at work.
I don't know if a reverse-invasion can take place (at most corporations) where people want at work what they have at home. Too many places have standard software packages that are mandated for use for Mom to convince management to allow her to use her whiz-bang free software at work. Of course there are some exceptions to this.
As a collary of this notion, companies that have large numbers of technical documents in .rtf or .doc format will not switch software until a solution exists that reasonably converts the legacy documents. I've spoken to a former manager of the company I'm on site at about reccomending a switch to Star Office once Sun released it as 'free beer.' Her response is that the cost of converting legacy documents to a usable state with new software is too high. She was right. I looked at what Star Office presented some of these documents like and it was pretty ugly. And these weren't incredibly complicated documents.
have a day,
-l
Beware that most of the URIs have a space in them. Remove the space and it works.
Ignite Napalm!
In the professional TM, windows TM, gimme all your money TM, world you've got, Visual Studio, and Borland's OWL and Wattcom's, I mean Sybase's Power Station... wait a minute! You've only got Visual Studio when MS gets finished breaking everyone else.
But I don't know what I'm talking about do I? Think of all the great choices you get within Visual Studio! C, C++, FORTRAN (oops!), JAVA, C sharp, and the ultimate programing language, Visual Beginers All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. All of them with great MS TM extentions that make your life so much easier. What more could you want? Well...
What do you mean, "truly integrated", VB script provided? A perfect fit for MS OS, cause they broke the rest? Where you gonna go when they break the User Kern.. I mean MFC, so that all your code spits chunks? Gotta keep up with the money grind, I mean upgrades till you get that $500,000 offer to cease and dessist. I admit that I liked Wattcom's auto make, but I could see it in text files. If it does not get ported, I'm just going to have to learn make, oh no! Aaaahh, ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha, ha! Then I could port accoss platoforms and flex my new God-Like limbs. Try that with your VS robot code, "DO NOT EDIT THIS," flatulence.
Need a database? Try MySQL or Postgress. Now go away, flaming little troll.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
*Sigh*
As I remmeber, slashdot does run on standard time, and I think it's somewhere in Michigan, which means they might not run on daylight savings time ;)
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
yay
ive been watching *way* too much monty python lately
I'm happy w/ SO on my PPro200, 96Mb. It's the major reason I rarely have to start Windows anymore, but >64Mb is recommended.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I've also been hearing that along with the source being opened, Sun was going to do some major improvements to the suite just before hand. Are we seeing any radical improvement before the community gets their fingers into the development or is it entirely up to us to make an MSOffice killer?
You're forgetting it's all open source.
;)
If it's worth it (haven't looked at the code yet, cvs -z4 co OpenOffice is still running, curse my 64 kBit/s connection!!), you can be sure some of the code will be included in KOffice.
Also, their code is probably pretty much UI independent (because it works on so many different OSes), so it's probably not a lot of work to create a patch to make it KOpenOffice.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Or use xfsft (font quality is better). Of course, you'd only need to use one of those if you aren't running XFree 4 - TrueType font support has been rolled into the source. I've borrowed TT fonts from Windows and replaced some of the PCF and Type 1 fonts in my X installation, and it looks SO much nicer...
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
This is a really funny post, I have to assume you were shooting for humor here, since anyone who has had a look at KDE 2 knows your statements aren't based in any sense or reality. KDE2 looks to stomp gnome back into footprints!
To fail is human, to blue screen MS!
yes, it probably checks for sun jdk onhly on the moment. For one thing, that's the only one that has been tested. So, where are your patches to include support for IBM jre?
www.openoffice.org is running Apache/1.3.13-dev (Unix) mod_ssl/2.6.5 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on Linux
e 605/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/oo_605_src.tar.gz
5 /anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOffic e605/oo_605_src.tar.gz
e 605/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/oo_605_src.tar.gz
e 605/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/solver605_linuxintel.tar.gz
e 605/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/solver605_win32intel.tar.gz
e 605/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/solver605_solarissparc.tar.gz
e 605b/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenO ffice605/linux_install_605.tar.gz
e 605b/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenO ffice605/solaris_install_605.tar.gz
e 605b/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenO ffice605/winnt_install_605.tar.gz
e 605b/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenO ffice605/winnt_install_605.zip
Traceroute Output
FROM www.above.net TO www.openoffice.org.
traceroute to www.openoffice.org (64.208.42.22): 1-30 hops, 38 byte packets
1 gate-96.main.sjc.above.net (207.126.96.189) 0.529/0.574/0.739 (0.59) ms 10/10 pkts (0% loss)
2 core5-main.sjc.above.net (209.133.31.153) 0.525/0.760/0.971 (0.132) ms 10/10 pkts (0% loss)
3 pao-sjc-oc12-2.pao.above.net (207.126.96.65) 1.12/1.29/1.56 (0.152) ms 10/10 pkts (0% loss)
4 globalcenter-pao.above.net (208.185.156.154) 1.17/1.36/1.76 (0.169) ms 10/10 pkts (0% loss)
5 so0-1-0-622M.cr1.pao2.gblx.net (208.48.118.121) 1.19/1.43/1.97 (0.239) ms 10/10 pkts (0% loss)
6 208.50.169.209 (208.50.169.209) 2.18/2.33/2.60 (0.125) ms 10/10 pkts (0% loss)
7 208.50.169.118 (208.50.169.118) 2.17/2.35/2.65 (0.164) ms 10/10 pkts (0% loss)
8 pos1-0-2488M.hr2.SNV3.gblx.net (208.178.255.125) 2.6/2.66/5.14 (0.851) ms 10/10 pkts (0% loss)
9 h12.sny.collab.net (64.208.42.22) * * 2.33/2.58/2.89 (0.182) ms 8/10 pkts (20% loss)
paste these into wget
The way Akamai works you can replace a1388 in the first part of the hostname with any number from 1 to 2047
for example:
http://a2047.g.akamai.net/7/1376/2064/OpenOffic
is the same file as
http://a0.g.akamai.net/7/1376/2064/OpenOffice60
Platform independent source code:
http://a1376.g.akamai.net/7/1376/2064/OpenOffic
Solver[output tree]:
http://a1388.g.akamai.net/7/1388/2064/OpenOffic
http://a1412.g.akamai.net/7/1412/2064/OpenOffic
http://a1400.g.akamai.net/7/1400/2064/OpenOffic
Build instructions:
http://www.openoffice.org/build.html
OpenOffice binary
http://a1484.g.akamai.net/7/1484/2064/OpenOffic
http://a1496.g.akamai.net/7/1496/2064/OpenOffic
http://a1508.g.akamai.net/7/1508/2064/OpenOffic
http://a1520.g.akamai.net/7/1520/2064/OpenOffic
i was lead to believe that StarOffice was a showcase for crossplatform C++, and that was what Stardivision were originally in the business of selling. Only later did they start selling the Office suite as their primary product, and im fairly surethere was no Java at all until Sun paid a small fortune for it (although i suspect an element of humor in your comment).
(of course i could be woefully misinformed, but that would just make me a Karma whore)
Its amazing what those crazy Germans can come up with sometimes.
Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office?
No.
Consider Sun's position. They see everyone moving to Wintel boxes because of Office compatibility and the other slew of productivity software available for the Wintel platform. More and more, they see their own cash cow slipping away as MS takes hold of the network effect once again.
In this case McNealy can do one of two things. He can sit idly by as his company is slowly pushed into irrelevance. Or he can fight with all his might to stop the network effect. The only way to do this is to create your own network that is just as big as the other. The people at Sun realize this, and they also realize that the viral nature of the GPL added to the cost advantage will create a network effect that will dwarf MS.
I for one am ready to help them. Whenever you receive a MS doc that won't display in SO, send a reply tactfully:
1) asking for the document in a standard format
2) explaining that it's not the sender's fault that MS makes gratuitious changes to their file formats in order to foil competitors (not to help them)
3) explaining that you use a Office Suite that doens't cost an arm-n-leg or burden IT with licenscing issues (doing audits is expensive and time consuming)
I've done this and have gotten very positive results from my coworkers.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I had the same problem on RH7. I uninstalled (rm -rf) and reinstalled with no switches just in my user directory. Now it works great. I hope they get the -net option working soon. Multiple user installs of 147 MB a peice is a little hard to justify.
=================
macbert@hcity.net
macbert@hcity.net
http://www.hcity.net/mac
Maybe an explanation :
Look closeley at the displayed message :
"(...) hits.
We ask your patience while our best people are reconfiguring the server and bringing her back up
(...)"
Yes, look closely : nothing strikes you ?!?!
Zoom->in : "bringing _HER_ back"
Sun just leaked yet another ground-breaking technology news : sexed servers. They choosed a female one, because they are so much caring for their users request.
But maybe it's PMS time now. Just imagine a bunch of sysadmin trying to convince the managment that boxes of tampaxes are _mandatory_ to run their web server.
Next dowtime : headaches and baby blues.
(I'still hesitating between flamebait/funny myself)
[Pruneau
That is what StarOffice is. I can bet that Sun wants to spend as few bucks on this unprofitable (for them) product as possible.
Other people explained the reasons in details, so I won't repeat them.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
(just to be fair, and this is supposed to be funny)
that's because the male servers want downtime every sunday afternoon from September through February so that they can sit on the couch and drink beer, scratch themselves and watch a bunch of men in tight pants (ever think about that one) chase, fondle and otherwise play with a non-spherical 'ball'.
And it's easier to get management to believe that the tampaxes are for the server than that the beer is.
In this case, opposite applies. It's better to be able to choose between many systems that work, than it is to work with one system you can't ever fix.
Con artists always expoit the greed of their victims. Pay up sucker!
Aaaaah, ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha, ha!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yeah I'm having the same problem, running installed as a regular user on Debian 2.2. It crashes on startup, just like SO5.2 did. Anyone have any ideas?
./soffice
Slick
slick@LinuxBeast:~/openoffice60$
Application ErrorAborted
slick@LinuxBeast:~/openoffice60$
I really hope everyone can get behind this and recognize just how important it is to linux to have a great (not just good) office suite.
I can't even count the number of times I've had "supposedly" knowledgable people tell me that Linux is doomed unless Microsoft releases office for it. And we've all heard the same thing said about the macintosh.
________
Nuff Said
Best Slashdot Co
Not really. This turd was formed in the bowels of proprietary software. It's only now that it's out in the open.
My personal experience with proprietary software vendors (and I've worked closely with their software engineers in some cases, trying to debug problems with their software that were creating major problems for my employer) has been that most proprietary software is complete shit, from an engineering perspective.
I mean that. There is an amazing lack of accountability for the quality of code in proprietary software.
Before I went to work in the "real world", I would never have imagined that large, well-funded companies would produce software with such egregious bugs and flawed engineering methedologies, much worse than any I have personally ever seen in any serious Open Source project (read: one with at least three active members).
Real world example (Windows), with a major EDA vendor (who will remain nameless):
Another fun (Unix+Windows) example:
I've also seen some other absolutely hair-raising things in network/system call traces, like:
seek(), ftell(), seek(), ftell(), ftell(), read(), seek()[back to same block], read()[same amount this time, but in 512k increments], seek(), ftell(), seek(), seek(), ftell(), read()
There was also the wonderful discovery that an app was using the NT equivalent of access() (GetSecurityInfo() + GetEffectiveRightsFromAcl(), which means about 40 lines of support code each time) instead of checking for failure on various operations (open file, etc) ... why?
...because the lack of error handling in the application was so pervasive, they decided to cut their losses and just anticipate all possible errors by explicitly checking for the conditions that might cause them beforehand (never mind race conditions or incomplete coverage, or the fact that it broke some things...). Things were so bad that that was actually less work and less code.
I can go on and on with these real-world accounts if you like. I've come to believe that only with Open Source comes real software engineering accountablity.
Actually my experience has been that those disagrements really fuck up a software project. The Open Source projects I've been involved with, if the disagreements are really serious they usually result in a fork which often means two healthy projects rather than just one. Or the old bastard leaders are deposed and go on to other things.
Very democratic, and usually works nicely.
Only as long as you try to treat a service industry like a manufacturing industry.
Pretty simple: buy the rights to a proprietary product from someone else and release the source code to that. Which is what they did, actually.
(Well, they actually bought the company, as I recall, but same thing)
Now, as far as your description of what you see as the "real world", I do software support for a Fortune 500 company, and have been involved with (and contributed code to) several major Open Source projects. What experience do you have?
DNA just wants to be free...
Some day in elementary school kids will have to memorize the GPL. And they'll have huge picture of RMS on the walls.
And everyone will crowd around the 14' tall bronze statue of RMS and sing the 'Free Software Song'.
Brings a tear to my eye and a rumbling to my bowel.
--K
Come with me and share the software...
---
Star Office already has truetype font support. You just need to have xfstt (I think that's the name) running, and then you map Staroffice fonts to truetype fonts. Then when you write a document you get truetype fonts!
Hilarious! Open Source produces another gigantic, stinking turd of a project.
...the thing about most big projects is that they are NOT fun, NOT particularly maintainable and WELL beyond the understanding of any one coder. That's why it is necessary to PAY programmers to work (with people they might not necessarily like) IN GROUPS under the direction of others (with whom they might not necessarily agree). And the necessity of income to pay those programmers dictates that the product must be sold and that IP laws must be used to protect that income.
The death of Open Source is inevitable. It will be caused by complexity and simple economics. In fact in the real world, outside the insular hive mind of Slashdot, it never really lived. And if you anyone doesn't agree with that, explain how Sun could develop an Open Source Star Office without a thriving business based on proprietary hardware.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was a feature of the binaries that are online. Guess I'll see when the download is done. They open office pages mentioned that the integrated system was going the way of the dodo
treke
Today's Friday the 13th. You're doomed?
Banu
I don't think it was actually a troll.
Also W2k is based on OS2 not on DOS. In W2k DOS programs run under emulation.
I found out the hard way that (1) you need admin priveledges on NT to remove the office assistants from MS Office once they've been installed and (2) I don't have admin privs on my workstation at work.
So I did some poking around and I noticed the .act files (or whatever extension they were) in the office assistant directory of MSOFFICE. So I deleted them.
No more Clippy.
Ever.
have a day,
-l
//BTW, Sun, StarOffice - a coincidence?!?!
Yup--it was StarOffice before Sun bought it. =)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
It's funny to watch the yahoo guys try to find some way of saying that this must suck in some way.
Obviously they haven't read the GPL because it really doesn't suck at all.
In fact it's one of the greater pieces of literature of the 80's.
Some day in elementary school kids will have to memorize the GPL. And they'll have huge picture of RMS on the walls.
:P
Just ask google: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:openoffice.or g/+&hl=en
Oh, you'd like that though.
Well stop it anyway, some people want to read serious/relevant/insightful stuff here.
off the top of my head, gnumeric and dia do that as well...
soup, the dragon.
dna.h:include "std_disclaimer.h"
you site suck. and so do you.
What's there and what's not
The source code available at Openoffice.org is the majority of the current source code under development for StarOffice 6.0. Not available are certain 3rd party source code (for example: printing, spell checking); we will explain this situation further in the week following the launch, please bear with us. The source code is pre Alpha code and is undergoing extensive development and change.
So, no, it's not alpa, it's pre-Alpha. :) And that also explains why you can't print or spell check.
Gimmie, Gimmmie, Gimmie. It's all take and no give, huh? Want something? Make it, nothing is hidden here. All con artists take advantage of their victim's greed, and no con works without it.
Borland. I've got a soft spot in my heart for them, but MS has them by the balls. Now go pay your MS tax.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Mozilla should not have been a single project of tightly integrated GUI code and other bits and pieces. It really ought to have been five or six independent open source projects with a few, simple, well-defined interfaces.
The same is true for StarOffice: word processing, spread sheet, presentation, and other bits and pieces should really be stand-alone parts.
In addition to breaking projects up into smaller pieces, they should also use languages and tools that keep them small. If it becomes a 400kloc project in C++, rather than suffering through that, pick some better language that turns it into a 40kloc project.
Could someone please clue me in on what these are?
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
the ONE thing I absolutely hated about star office was the unified desktop.
and it's now GONE!
Each app is it's own window now, just like it should be. Now, if the just allow each to be started independantly, it will be excellent.
I'd put star, er oops, openoffice at least equal to KDE and Gnome to the success of Linux on the desktop. This is one application we need to hang our hats on, and now that it's GPL'd, it's safe to do it.
Whatever your feelings for sun are, buying SO, and GPL'ing it were hugely beneficial to the linux community, and I'd like to thank them for it.
________
The ZDNet story mentions that the code is licensed under the GPL and the Sun Industry Standard Source License (SISSL). They stated that compliance to both licenses is necessary. They may be smoking crack and completely off (I haven't checked - there wasn't anything obvious at openoffice.org), but if not there are problems with this. IIRC the GPL forbids the addition of restrictions of any kind, so while it's possible to allow alternate license terms it is not possible to apply the GPL and another license simultaneously if the second license adds any restrictions. Also, according to the GNU license list page the SISSL is not GPL compatible.
Please, please mod it down until I get my copy ;)
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
...of a crappy office suite, just look what the "open source" fairy did for netscape... now we have another bloated piece of shit.
You are confusing two totally sepatarate things: a) port to a certain processor b) port to a certain OS there already is PPC specific code (to support MacOS/X). calling linux/ppc port ppc port is just being utterly stupid.
Never been so high with a /.ted download site...
-z3 should be perfectly ok if you're on a slow link (say, over in Europe).
The faster your link is the lower your compression setting should be. That been said, there's not much use going over -z3 though, and if you go to the highest rate you will load the server quite a bit for little or no gain. Morale: Stay at -z3 or lower, and if you're on a fast link go for -z1 or no compression.
TA
Both used really jagged fonts and looked horrible, particularly the second one which was unreadable in places. The display that was being used definitly had the resolution, as some bitmaps were very clear. Smooth fonts would have made it a lot better. When using Windows for Work I always ensure that this option is enabled.
May be a good time for someone to add anti-alias support. Maybe I'll give it a go once I can pull it down!
It looks like this troll used the automatic complaint letter generator. It gives different results every time. When I put in Sun, I got this:
This is an open letter, which you are welcome to use as you wish. I want as many people as possible to know that Sun is unable to see any issue in a broad perspective or from more than one side. Read on, gentle reader, and hear what I have to say. Sun not only lies, but it brags about its lying to its spokesmen. When the war against reason is backed by a large cadre of uneducated protestors, the results are even more loathsome. Now that that's cleared up, I'll continue with what I was saying before, that its prank phone calls serve only to safeguard its own power and privilege. If, after hearing facts like that, you still believe that without its superior guidance, we will go nowhere, then there is decidedly no hope for you.
To say otherwise would be oppressive. Is it not positively the distinguishing feature of Sun's activities to descend to character assassination and name calling? There is no inconsistency here; a central fault line runs through each of Sun's statements. Specifically, the law is not just a moral stance. It is the consensus of society on our minimum standards of behavior. I find Sun's policies rather immature, don't you? Of all of Sun's exaggerations and incorrect comparisons, one in particular stands out: "Nonrepresentationalism is a noble goal." I don't know where it came up with this, but its statement is dead wrong.
According to the laws of probability, we were put on this planet to be active, to struggle, and to justify condemnation, constructive criticism, and ridicule of Sun and its huffy reinterpretations of historic events. We were not put here to excoriate attempts to bring questions of emotionalism into the (essentially apolitical) realm of pedagogy in language and writing, as Sun might feel. Words fail me in describing my pure distaste for Sun's positions and abhorrent assertions. I put that observation into this letter just to let you see that Sun should think about how its double standards lead uncompromising vexatious provocateurs to pander to our worst fears. If Sun doesn't want to think that hard, perhaps it should just keep quiet. Sun has stated that the sky is falling. That's just pure hooliganism. Well, in Sun's case, it might be pure ignorance, seeing that Sun frequently avers its support of democracy and its love of freedom. But one need only look at what Sun is doing -- as opposed to what it is saying -- to understand its true aims. I'd like to finish with a quote from a private e-mail message sent to me by a close friend of mine: "Sun believes that everyone and everything discriminates against it -- including the writing on the bathroom stalls -- only because it has a need to believe that".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Either they upgraded the server or someone downloaded it before and it's in my ISP's proxy. I'm downloading it with 160 kb/s this moment.
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
Maybe (in a couple of years) when it does get re-written, they can remove the definite "Windows" feel to it and make it look like the OS it's actually running under (on, in?).
-----
Ignore reality - there's nothing you can do about it.
Yep, tell everyone to use gzip and peg the processor. Real great idea there.
If they haven't jumped all over Linux at this point, what exactly would they be using as an office suite (and on which OS) that already gives them the feature of being open source? As it is, I'm not sure how a company can justify to its stockholders the fact that they spent hundreds of dollars on Windows/Office software, when free (beer) alternatives existed-- the free (speech) status of said alternatives really being tangential (not that I'm complaining, freedom of speech is important to me, and that's what the GPL is about).
I do not have a signature
Especially when 1.3.14 is out
You can download the source tarball from this address:0 5/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/oo_605_src.tar.gz
http://a1376.g.akamai.net/7/1376/2064/OpenOffice6
Enjoy
And kill a lot on their cpu. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to use -z, it depends on their setup.. But z3 is going to kill a lot of cpu time, 2 or 1 are probably better for most setups.
It's ironic how Sun released the source code one day after I got MS word 2000 to work using the latest nightly wine. Anyway, cheers to Sun for freeing their software. :))
Agreed. I'm personally going to start on a PPC port, if only to run StarOffice on the school's lab computers, which run OS-X. It'd be nice to see an Alpha port sometime in the future (no rush, patience is one of my strong points) because the lab's also going to (in a few months) start getting into Alpha for the computer architecture classes.
Damn, I love open source.
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
I've heard, but don't know for a fact, that Sun does not allow M$ Office in their operations. All of their employee's were already using StarOffice. So, they have a strong incentive to see it improve. I don't see them getting "bored", as this isn't just an academic exercise.
I also don't know what kind of bulk discount M$ gives on Office licenses, but it is quite possible that Sun has considerably less invested in OpenOffice than they would pay to legally license Office2000 for all of their employees. I'm pretty sure that the ongoing costs of running OpenOffice, even with several dozen programmers assigned to it, would be less than paying M$ for upgrades every couple of years.
I think this just might be a testament to how greedy M$ licensing practices are. It's quite possible that it's cheaper for Sun to write their own office suite than it is to license M$'s "mass market" office suite.
When Microsoft and IBM "divorced" in the early 90s, they both got full rights to jointly developed technology - DOS, Windows, OS/2, early NT work.
So Microsoft doesn't have to pay IBM for OS/2 tech, and IBM doesn't have to pay MS for, uhh, Windows 3.0 tech.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Are you sure ? I use a light version of windows 98 without IE (98lite) and I know I dont't have the IE DLL's on my system but Staroffice 5.1 browser stil works. How does it uses IE then ? And why is it so slow nad pathetic rendering html ?
Wow, I'm glad I reread your comment prior to responding to it because I read overestimate. I'd have called you an insane man but I thankfully spared being knighted as an "Ass." Then again, something like that coming from you would have deserved rereading ;-)
That being said ... I obviously agree with you!
Never before has a large corporation invested much money in a piece of software only to allow others in on the investment! This piece of software is, IMHO, a major contribution to the advancement of Open Source and the users. Because of the large scale of this project, I imagine SUN forsees great economical value in releasing the sou----
Wait, why am I telling you this?
---as I run away to the pen and paper to compose a post to Technocrat.net -- then again: you've probably gotten yours already written .. but I guess competition is good .. ;-)
Portions of NT Server are actually old MS Lan Server, which, IIRC did have chunks of OS/2 code in it. Big whoopee. I'm not privy to MS agreement with IBM so I can't tell you whether or not they have to legally pay royalties to use bits and pieces of a joint project in NT. Just because OS/2 was at one point a joint project does not mean that NT has to be encumbered if it includes any OS/2 code.
At least until NT 4.0, NT contained an OS/2 compatibility layer that undoubtedly contained portions of the OS/2 code base. Again, this means diddley-squat unless you know the actual agreement between IBM and MS.
More interesting is that many of the features that made OS/2 so popular with techies (such as the HPFS file system) were actually designed and coded by the code monkeys at Microsoft. Funny, no?
Also largely unknown is that at one point MS Office was ported to OS/2.
Lastly, given that MS has licensed so many different third party bits of code to pack into NT and W2K, why would it be any different to pay IBM for bits and pieces of OS/2 if that was the case?
Personally, I'm still holding out for IBM to bring the Workplace Shell to Linux. Perhaps with everyone and their brother jumping on the Gnome bandwagon it will start to happen.
have a day,
-l
I recommend using wget The way Akamai works you can replace a1388 in the first part of the hostname with any number from 1 to 2047 for example: http://a2047.g.akamai.net/7/1376/2064/OpenOffice60 5/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/oo_605_src.tar.gz
is the same file asa noncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOffic e605/oo_605_src.tar.gz
0 5/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/oo_605_src.tar.gz
0 5/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/solver605_win32intel.tar.gz
http://a1400.g.akamai.net/7/1400/2064/OpenOffice60 5/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenOf fice605/solver605_solarissparc.tar.gz
0 5b/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenO ffice605/linux_install_605.tar.gz
http://a1496.g.akamai.net/7/1496/2064/OpenOffice60 5b/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenO ffice605/solaris_install_605.tar.gz
http://a1508.g.akamai.net/7/1508/2064/OpenOffice60 5b/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenO ffice605/winnt_install_605.tar.gz
http://a1520.g.akamai.net/7/1520/2064/OpenOffice60 5b/anoncvs.openoffice.org/download/OpenO ffice605/winnt_install_605.zip
http://a0.g.akamai.net/7/1376/2064/OpenOffice605/
Platform independent source code: http://a1376.g.akamai.net/7/1376/2064/OpenOffice6
Solver[output tree]: http://a1412.g.akamai.net/7/1412/2064/OpenOffice6
Build instructions: http://www.openoffice.org/build.html
OpenOffice binaries: http://a1484.g.akamai.net/7/1484/2064/OpenOffice6
In http://www.openoffice.org/white_papers/tech_overvi ew/tech_overview.html the cross-platform design is discussed. Quite impressive in the number of abstraction layser, but our Unix-running friends will probably see it all as 'bloat' and 'not a native application'.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
<XML>
...meaningless gibberish follows...
<OBJECT TYPE="Word Document">
</OBJECT>
Not the most useful thing, is it?
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Well, I think (in bringing in collab.net) Sun was basically saying "we don't know jackshit about handling a project like this" and sub-contracting the management stuff to someone who does (like collab.net). I think, personally, that they should have gone out and re-hired jwz to manage it, and learn from the mozilla experience. That's the only thing comparable to this, and so I don't really think that collab.net has the same level of relevant experience that mozilla does. Oh well...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
I've put up a local mirror of the binaries and source for people in AU/NZ (only.. sorry)
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/openoffice/6.0/
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/openoffice/6.0/
-jason
has anyone else noticed that the mail for openoffice.org seems misconfigured:
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. The following address(es) failed: discuss-subscribe@openoffice.org: all relevant MX records point to non-existent hosts: it appears that the DNS operator for this domain has installed an invalid MX +record with an IP address instead of a domain name on the right hand sideI'd mail them and tell them... except obviously I can't.
Then it cut to a word processing screen, with the cartoon paperclip in the corner. A hand holding a revolver came in on the other side of the screen, and blew Clippy to bloody gibs.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Anyway, the code doesn't contain the browser, mail and news. Sun's waiting for the community's opinions on including them as Mozilla is available.
:P
Actually, StarOffice's browser really isn't anything in and of itself. On *NIX, it uses the Netscape 4.x engine; on Win*, it uses IE.
So you're really not missing anything.
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
OpenOffice 6.05 takes a good 18 hours to compile on a 500Mhz win32 box, according to openoffice.org. Yikes :)
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
When you compare that to the more substantial movement and growth in OSS, MS has been standing still. Linux has half a dozen solid file systems to choose from and MS types, and has been ported to almost every concievable platform.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But that and some pointers to the download site comes up fast, though.
I checked the site thanks to a link from LinuxToday. It looked nice and it did have a source download plus you could log on to mailing lists.
Anyway, the code doesn't contain the browser, mail and news. Sun's waiting for the community's opinions on including them as Mozilla is available. I also remember reading how all the commits will go through the project leaders aka Sun's employees. Unless Sun'll do as good a job as Netscape, I doubt that OpenOffice will remain the center of StarOffice development.
oo_605_src.tar.gz
linux_install_605.tar.gz
winnt_install_605.zip
solaris_install_605.tar.gz
solver605_linuxintel.tar.gz ;
solver605_solarissparc.tar.gz
solver605_win32intel.tar.gz ;
I believe MS Office was the first Office suite to use XML for file formats.
:)
Wow, XML tags wrapped around COM objects. That must interoperate really well with the non-Windows world.
(BTW, that's sarcasm, in case you hadn't guessed
deus does not exist but if he does
Its great that we can now take the code and add features that are sadly lacking in StarOffice, such as the MS Office Assistant...
We could have a little popup Tux penguin.
"It looks like you're writing a letter slagging off Microsoft. Would you like me to make it anonymous for you?"
--
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
> That's also one of the reasons it's not as bloated and buggy as M$'s stuff.
HAHAHAH no comment.
I think it's really stupid to expect community assistance when the source code comments are in German, though. I looked at the source and can confirm this. It's bad almost by definition, at least in the free software world, to comment code in a non-English language.
Performance does seem to have improved significantly with this newer release.
treke
I think this project is going to be the biggest, most-observed failure in the history of open-source computing. Let's take a moment to thank Sun, who may destroy everything that programmers have worked hard to succeed at. Imagine who will avoid open source software because StarOffice (OpenOffice) turns out to be a flop. I won't jump ship, but it will help people from boarding the ship in the first place. Maybe it was intentional, to either debunk Microsoft's office suite dominance, or try to debunk Linux's rising dominance if the first goal should fail. Sun can't lose. Either they look good with StarOffice and make MS look bad, or they don't hurt MS and make Linux (the masthead of the open-source world) look bad. More copies of Solaris to everybody.
Let me tell you why it will fail, or probably will. First there's the sheer size. 80MB of gzipped source? It says a requirement for building is 400MB of disk space, just to unpack the source. Not much of the computing world can download 80MB of source in a reasonable amount of time. Furthermore, I can only imagine how long it will take to compile. I'm downloading binaries now, and if they look good, I'll make a go at compilation. 80MB should set me back about 45 minutes of download time. Then the compilation starts. Most people won't tolerate this.
Now look at Mozilla. As bloated, buggy, and just plain lousy as Netscape 4 is on Linux, Mozilla is a thousand times worse. It's bloated, amazingly slow, buggy, and far from complete. How long has it taken them to get to this point? Too long.
Developers hate debugging. It's difficult, frustrating, and tedious. You already written the code; why would you want to inspect it again? You know what it says. Why does that damn segfault occur whenever I mouse over the Print icon? The code looks fine to me...
It's much more fun to add new code, since it's refreshing, and you see real progress. That's the problem with Mozilla. Rather than slim things down, speed them up, and make sure everything is well-written and fully functional, we see Mozilla get more bloated as time goes on. I just want a browser.
This will also happen with OpenOffice. People are going to bloat it, bog it down with extraneous features that nobody really wants. A few people will try to optimize it, but it's too large to be optimized by anyone but the original programmers. Ever try reading somebody else's code? It's a joke. But why would the original developers want to trim it down? They were paid to do their original work. I doubt they'll spend their free time fixing it.
Well, I've lost my chain of thought. All I can say is that OpenOffice is going to become far more bloated, buggy and slow than StarOffice is now, just like Mozilla is worse than Netscape. The only thing it has going for it now, is that it doesn't use that stupid Windows-desktop look that it had before. And yet the install is still the same size. I'm going to get the source, and waste some time compiling. Maybe it will speed up. We need some rogue programmer to separate each of the modules into a stand-along application, and maybe port it to GTK so that it is visually compatible with other GTK programs. Oh, and maybe a QT port wouldn't be bad, either. But I'm not the guy, because I don't really give a damn. Things aren't going to get better, they'll only get worse. Grab OpenOffice605 now, before they have a chance to modify the source too much.
Thank you.
I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.
now we can all get started on out PowerPC, Alpha, and Itsy ports. Open Source. Ahhh.
Downloaded the beta and it while it certainly is very bloated I see it as a major improvement from version 5 and just about the best (only) think around for presentations and stuff like that. I am an anti-gnome bigot. As much as I detest the current widget set, I would hate to have to install all of Gnome's libraries to open a PowerPoint file every now an then. Will openoffice be ported to Gtk, and will it require Gnome?
Because the ultralinux community needs to open .docs sometimes too. But 18 hours to compile it on a 500mhz win32 machine? Damn! Well this is a 166 so I figure what? 22 hours?...groan ....Put out the lights on the age of reason
Vaughn "Its always darkest before it goes pitch black."
However, all I get with this version is a"Application ErrorAbort" message. I'm running it on Debian potato. Has anyone had better luck?
The great thing is that the source code is now out there to help track this kind of problem down. Thanks, Sun!
Of course, source kept for so long in captivity is quite unable to fend for itself once released. It may appear domesticated and timid, but do not treat it lightly! It needs to learn to survive in the real world. It is entering a harsh, peer-reviewed environment that it is not familiar with. Approach it fearlessly and improve it.
BTW, Sun, StarOffice - a coincidence?!?!
Well...yes, probably.
so we can make it suck less.
Now that StarOffice has been open-sourced, will anybody split up all the apps into discrete applications ? Meaning, I like the SO spreadsheet and word processsor but I hate that open-the-whole-stupid-desktop just to run either. I'd like to be able to run JUST the spreadsheet or JUST the word processor, not that whole foofy desktop. PS - I use Applixware, I'm just wondering if this concern is shared by anybody else. JB
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
> OpenOffice 6.05 takes a good 18 hours to compile :)
> on a 500Mhz win32 box, according to
> openoffice.org. Yikes
Yup. Thanks to the joint efforts of OpenOffice, Mozilla, and a few others, Emacs officially entered the category of lightweight utilities.
My personal feeling is that the reason most people havn't jumped all over Linux yet is due to the fact that some tools aren't yet as refined. Star Office is one of the programs that can lead into more widespread Linux use. Now that the source is available, I bet that more companies might be willing to experiment with it. The more companies use it -- the more developers might be interested in working with it...and so on.
I can't wait 'til that day.
hmm, NO!
Just because it uses DOS emulation doesn't mean it's OS/2. Besides, if it was based on OS/2, IBM would get a chuck of the market and microsoft would have to share. Windows NT and 9x were made instead of OS/2 so that they did not have to shre with IBM.
Emulation yes. OS/2, NO.
I expect that "Open Office" isn't quite so challenging, but I sure it does depend on some stuff. Does it need Lesstif? How about other such stuff?
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
ftp://ftp.thesilicondragon.com/pub/oo_605.src.tar. gz
I will be mirroring the binary distibution soon if people take interest.
If you have problems, don't e-mail me at that box because that probably means it's been /.ed. Instead, email me at silicon@compsci.duq.edu.
Enjoy!
I believe MS Office was the first Office suite to use XML for file formats. This is especially true if you count the alpha/beta period.. Remember KOffice isn't even officially released yet.
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Wow, the site is down already. I will just have to wait a few weeks for it to come up again ;-) I would think that Sun would have enough brains (whicht they do) to know that of course this would happen.
Okay, people can stop submitting this now.
If more submissions are coming in, Hemos may be the one editing it.
Censorship on Slashdot
Is Sun trying to say that this is something that they do not really believe in or do they just have one or more project managers with a black sense of humor?
I hope its the latter, but it would not altogether surprise me if the former was the case.
Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office? Sun spent buckets and scads and tons of money on buying StarOffice, giving it away for free and then hiring CollabNet to clean up the code and modularize the CVS tree. I don't think that Sun is making enough on its SunRay thin clients to justify the expense. OTOH, a high quality, multi-platform, free Office suite might take away Microsoft's ability to subsidize W2K development with Office revenues. The question with this strategy is whether or not ms.net will be available and functional to make the desktop office suite irrelevant before a working and spectacular Star Office 6.0 for Windows is ready and available.
Hmm. Are any of the developers for this project are going to make Star Office into the free equivalent of .net? That would be funny. Hmm. Maybe the MS investment in Corel is an attempt to come up with an alternative to a free Star Office.
The most encouraging thing for me is that, to a certain extent, it seems that Sun has learned from AOL/Netscape's mistakes with Mozilla:
They made things organized and pretty and split things up into well defined sub-projects. This will make it much easier to (1) part out the useful parts of Star Office for other projects, (2) graft in new systems to fix Star Office's deficiencies, (3) keep the ball rolling, and (4) get new people involved.
Maybe after a few days and the CVS server comes back to life I'll download the code and look at it out of curiosity. I've always wondered how much of Star Office was written in Java. It's certainly slow enough at times for the whole thing to have been.
One thing is for certain, this will be an adventure....
have a day,
-l
In case you didn't know, 1.3.13 was rolled earlier this week, and then dumped and replaced by 1.3.14 when some build problems on NetWare were found. So it's not like there's all that much difference between the two versions.
I just got the binaries, and pre aplha 6.0 is looking good. Importing word files works particulary well. If they can get this thing up to a stable build in a couple of months, it might start giving office some competition. It was pretty stable, but some work needs to be done still.
Happy to see that they will start using XML for their file formats. Up to now (at least as far as I know), only Abiword has done this.
"Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request."
Submitted respectfully.
SB
Bruce- :| We'll see, I guess, but if we have learned anything from the Mozilla example, there is still a long ways to go before this has the kind of impact we'd all like.
I think the problem is that it will not be a big deal as soon as people expect. I've been playing with it all day, and it is pretty solid, but it will still take a long, long time before it is really on par with Office. And by then Office will have voice recognition.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
I'd say something here about the irony that a long-time closed source, cathedral-style project is the one being raided for this source to help the OSS projects, but that wouldn't be politically correct, would it? I wouldn't want to start the whole "OSS just plays catch up" argument all over again...
> And forget about presentations!
Um, while really neato transition effects might not work perfectly, SO's presentation software is so much less bloated than Powerpoint its unbelievable. Try converting a presentation to html in powerpoint, then convert it to html in SO. You'll notice a *huge* difference in design appeal and bloat. Also, a client of mine handed me a 90MB powerpoint presentation that SO cut down to around 5MB with very little loss of quality (none to the untrained eye).
I'd rather think that they want to end the MS dominance on document standards. No one else has been able to get around all of the coppies of Office that MS dumped on every new computer that got sold with that forced MS OS. By putting this out as free they can rest assured that someone will be able to match every little twist and turn MS tries to put into their nasty specs. This way StarOffice users can follow MS faster than MS Office users! What a burn. More than that, with enough users reasonable and open document standards can be implimented to provide not just a compatible product but a better product. The hold will be broken. No commercial software has been able to compete, and none can do what this will.
Why is this a survival move? It will keep MS's dirty hands out of the server market that Sun serves so well. You don't need that Win2k server when your workers can communicate with the rest of the world without it. Sun has learned that market forces and dumping can be more important than superior technology. If they sat back, they would have watched MS leverage their desktop hold. They've gone to the root cause and faught back better.
MS's other cash cow, OS sales is down too. This is in part due to PC sales slow downs, but it might also have something to do with "naked PC's" getting a better OS stuck on them.
If this product is even close to stable, I can't imagine recomending MS to any student. As the students go, so goes the future. Sun will keep it's place in it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs co OpenOffice
Note the -z3
This will save a little on bandwidth...
I'd vote for black humor. .3%, Linux .5%, NT 1.9%) is any indication, the state of the art for reliable 24/7 eBusiness, which is orders of magnitude more complicated, is not here yet.
There's optimists, pessimists, and realists. In that order.
The real money will be in eBusiness, particularly business-to-business. If the c't 32 day test of downtime averages (Solaris
Yes, look closely : nothing strikes you ?!?!
Zoom->in : "bringing _HER_ back"
Simpler explanation:
When something goes down, men wish it were a woman.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I got ahold of the Linux binary and had to try it. The good news: the download is quite a lot smaller (52.4MB, vs. something like 80.8MB for version 5.2). Evidently the web browser and mail features were taking up a lot of space. The memory footprint is also smaller: about 40MB, 30MB shared after opening several Word docs, an Excel spreadsheet, and a PowerPoint file. That horrible desktop is GONE. Separate documents open in separate windows which you can move around like they're supposed to. Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems a bit faster. Whatever toolkit-within-a-toolkit wrapper it's using still accounts for a lot of fat though. I opened a Word document that failed with 5.2, and it looks pretty damn good. Excel also. PowerPoint rendered the presentation acceptably, though the headlines were consistently kerned all bunched up together. Conclusion: didn't play with it long enough to see how much it crashes, but this seems to be headed in the right direction. A GTK version will be a killer app.
The message on the ex-site now reads:
Please Excuse Our Technical Difficulties
At about 5:45am PST, our web server was brought down by a veritable tsunami of hits.
I was kind of hoping that SUN should be able to keep a webserver up and running, after all that's their business isn't it?
Does anyone know if the box was a sun box before it died?
-- You ain't seen me, right?
Projected events over the next two years: Oct 2000 - Source released Mar 2001 - Complete rewrite from ground up started Oct 2001 - JZW leaves project Jan 2002 - MS-Office2002ASP.net released Oct 2003 - OpenOffice reached build OO17 Oct 2003 - Sun release Staroffice v6 preview 3 Nov 2003 - KDE5 released with KOffice 3 Dec 2003 - OpenOffice version 1.0 released as a completely different product incorporating XML, SOAP, XUL, HTML, XHTML, Themes, Skins, Java, Bonobo, KParts, CORBA, OLE, GnomeBasic, PHP scripting and the kitchen sink.
"Please Excuse Our Technical Difficulties
;)]"
At about 5:45am PST, our web server was brought down by a veritable tsunami of hits. [translation: "we were slashdotted into oblivion"]
We ask your patience while our best people are reconfiguring the server and bringing her back up; we are working as quickly as possible and we will keep all openoffice.org community members apprised of the situation via our general discuss and announce lists. [they are (or WERE) running the newest development version of Apache. I wonder if they will release the logs so we can see what kind of punishment this new version of Apache can take
Of course, this could have all been averted if people had been using that <a href="http://www.opera.com">OTHER</a> browser and disabled the loading of pictures, like I did. I found the site quite snappy and responsive up until the time they finally took it down.
Oh, well. You live, you learn.
-inq
Usually those kinds of servers have more processing power than they have transmission capability.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Why is there so much software on MS platforms? Because developing for MS once sucked less than developing for Apple, or IBM etc. MS dumped OSes and tools once upon a time, and there was some gain to be had in using their tools. This made for a flood of developers. In other words there's more user level software for MS because there were move devolopers working on it.
What's wrong with this picture? First, it ignores the stagnation at other software levels for MS. Win2K=32bitDOS. MS innovation is close to zero these days, and some people would aregue that it always has been. Second, it's a static picture. OSS does have some user level catch up to do, but that's what happens when you have to cut out all the propriatary stuff and start from scratch. This does not preclude developers from leapfrogging MS and other commercial houses. It's happened before, (sendmail, and apatche come to mind) and it's going to happen much more.
Developing OSS sucks much less than developing MS junk. The tools are free for the most part, and you can share your work. The strength of a platform is geometric to the number of developers and the amount of code available.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In case the transfer speed is slow for you, you can try downloading the source from my box which is at the end of a 100mbit/s pipe. Here:
g z (80MB)
http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/oo_605_src.tar.
make it look like the OS it's actually running under (on, in?).
So what you're saying is make one dialog use Motif-look widgets, another use Windows-look, another use MacOS-look, another use Xt-look, and another use GTK flavor-of-the-day, no?
Sounds like it'd look right at home on any Linux desktop!
--K
It's funny. Laugh.
---
http://www.thesilicondragon.co m/o o_605_src.tar.gz
*smacks forehead* I might have FTP working later.
have a day,
-l
Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office?
Have you heard the rhetoric coming out of Redmond lately? It's Sun this, Sun that, Sun Sun Sun Sun Sun. Microsoft doesn't seem to have a care in the world about Mac or Linux or any other Unix or mainframes or anything, except for Sun. They just rolled out some 32 proc boxes running Windows which is a pretty naked attempt to kill off Sun's cash cow.
So, if you are Sun, and you've got money to spare, what do you do? They know that Others have just sat there and taken it while Microsoft came and "got the loot". No, if they are coming at your cash cow, the smart thing to do is go back at their cash cow, even if it's just a minor distraction to them.
So what becomes of this when Sun gets bored and stops dumping resources into StarOffice? Well, at the very least the OSS guys got a fairly decent office suite just gifted to them, and when it's finally decided if people want hosted rent-a-application, that will be out there also as open source, as opposed to pay Microsoft.
I'll be interested to see what the code looks like Star has been ported from OS/2 to Windows to Unix to Java and then back to OS/2. Apparently (like NS4.x), it has a big ugly cross-platform runtime engine. We'll see if this makes the Unix programmers out there totally sick, or if a Mozilla-like "total rewrite" is necessary, or if everyone can live with the current state of the beast.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I looked through openoffice.org yesterday and read through the build faq. They're trying to use tradidional open source build tools where possible, but many of the build tools they use are proprietary. The code base has 60,000 files, and 9,000,000 lines of mostly C++ code. A full build takes 20 hours on a p3 with 256 mb of ram.
Eh, it's just that people have been submitting it for the past two weeks. "Just wanted to remind you that in two weeks StarOffice is going to be released." Okay, so?
Crotchety Michael, at your service.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
On the other hand, when star office came first out a couple of years ago, it was regarded as quite a software engineering feat, because they published it on all operating systems at the same time. Everything is in C++ and they went out of their way to make sure star office had a very clean and abstract design that would be easily portable to other platforms. That's also one of the reasons it's not as bloated and buggy as M$'s stuff. I'm really looking forward to have a peek at the code. This is finally an open source project where the quality of the code is not on a hobbyist's level.
It's almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.