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StarOffice 6.0 Beta Available
Lumpish Scholar and 753 other people wrote in to let us know that Sun has released its beta of Star Office 6. CNET has a blurb about the release as well. I was hoping that Sun's site might be unclogged enough to try it out myself, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards today.
Before it was even announced on /.! Hate to think of the /. effect on top of that.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Shelled out a myriad of cash for Microsoft's Office XP, a few weeks ago.
Despite how much you might hate the company, this is one hell of a product. Launches in seconds, takes up scant amounts of ram, hasn't crashed yet. It's going to be a tough one to beat... especially since every area where it excels (no pun intended), Staroffice falls behind (what a hog!).
Whatever happened to it having been released open source? Where is GStarOffice with GTK+ widgets and Gnome integration? At least KOffice works well with the rest of the KDE apps...
Uh, anyone have any mirrors or is it Sun or Nothing day?
StarOffice kicks ass apart from some file interoperability problems. But that just might be me. I think I'll wait awhile before I try 6.0.
Now that StarOffice is going to be released soon, I feel that we truly have a competitor against MS Office.
I am happy they rid StarOffice of the terrible interface from 5.2 and are focusing on the applications themselves, which all look fantastic!
My only wish is that they would have anti-aliased fonts, and maybe something like FrontPage, but those aren't as important as having a professional office suite on Linux. Now the WAR against Microsoft can be won.
You die too easily.
from the article: The new version of StarOffice is simplified to make file exchange easier. The software has support for XML file formats; more robust Microsoft Office import and export filters, including support for Office XP; and redesigned dialog boxes, new templates and graphics.
:)
:)
will the "more robust support" actually be decent enough for serious transfers between my Word documents? Also an important feature would be importing WordPerfect8 files. I have 100's of papers written in WP8 and for me to switch over would require filters for that. Anyone know anything about that?
I am going to try it as soon as I see some more information (the website was lacking what I really wanted to know).
I really hope I can ditch WP8 (although it is still the best for what I need) and run something more up-to-date
Enjoy the download
Well, the problems faced by many is the ability to read/write to Word 2000/XP format. Some companies tried to make the switch but couldn't share documents very well with other departments/companies. Best they did in StarOffice 5 was Word 97. It would be a lot more successful if it could do that. It's not Word or Office by a longshot but is Office really worth $400 when you can get this for nothing? It's still pretty good.
People complain when Microsoft releases a browser for free and undercuts Netscape. However, Sun releases an office suite for free (obviously to undercut Microsoft) and people applaud this showing of "choice".
Why the double standard?
The problem with StarOffice is that it hasn't completely worked to import/export word/excel documents. Until that day people will never truly be able to switch to it. I would LOVE the company I work for to switch to this software. But until it's completely MSOffice complient nobody can use it.
.. not our typical "MS Just Sucks".
And just as it gets good at opening MSOffice 97 docs. They change their document just enough to screw everyone over with the release of Office2000. And just as that starts to work they screw it up enough to not work with XP.
How hard is it REALLY to parse out Word Documents and have it work???? I haven't been involved in the project, but I would really like to hear some feedback to why nobody can open freaking word documents. The TRUTH
Have they gotten rid of that "integrated desktop"? That was my single biggest grip about previous versions.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
...but it may be my fault.
Granted I'm talking about the previous release, but my fonts all still looked like crap (blocky and hard to read) and the text area just wasn't as smooth as Office.
I kinda wish everyone would stop trying to make Unix a desktop machine when windows and mac do it so much better already. That's the one thing they do very well. There's nothing wrong with having unix servers and win/mac clients.
I have yet to see an OS do both (server and client) very well. Maybe it has something to do with the basic design concepts?
One thing I couldn't see -- and I can't get at the downloads to check -- is to see if their Presentation software, Impress, can play movies in slides now. This is actually a big thing; in the hard sciences, where a lot of people use non-Windows and give presentations, one of the major problems for people who want to switch to Linux is that if you have results you want to show in movie form, you're pretty much stuck with using PowerPoint, or exiting your presentation and starting up xanim or something...
To all those who say 'Staroffice isn't 100% compatable, so we can't switch our office'. Well.. I understand the logistics and all.. but.
To switch to staroffice, you have to instruct your staff to learn to use it, and adapt the workflow to staroffice, not the other way around. The same goes for switching to any product.
The financial benefits of using staroffice in many cases outweigh the use of OFficeXP
All of the screenshots on the Sun site are of the Windows version. What does it look like under X Windows?
I'm sorry, but WHAT THE FUCK IS A WEBTOP? Can someone please explain this to me in plain English? Thanks.
When I first tried StarOffice my intent was to use it for a week to see if it was a viable alternative to MS Office. I didn't make it through the day. Kudos to Sun for finally taking the hint and creating a product that any Office user can use with little to no relearning curve. With Microsoft's new subscription licensing program, this couldn't have come at a better time. Hopefully 6.0 will prove to be a competitive product.
Here it is:
Star office 6.0 beta, linux x86, english
Is everyone as glad as I am that they ditched the pseudo-desktop?
Is StarOffice not Open Source anymore? Anyway I'm sticking with KOffice and MS Office on my boxes.
I really don't get it, where's the Source?
Has anybody that has used Star Office done a comparison review between the new Star Office and the newest KOffice? KOffice looked pretty good, but I don't use office programs much anymore, so I didn't get a chance to work with it for long.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Seriously, there are few things that annoy me more than receiving a Word document from someone. Rarely, if ever, is there any justification for not simply using a plain old ASCII text file. They are smaller, platform independant and if formatted correctly, no harder to read.
Any idea of we'll be seeing a compatible implementation of something that can do everything Outlook can do (including connecting to an Exchange server)? I don't mean just email, but I mean Calendar, Tasks, Contacts booking meetings etc.
As soon as I can get something that would replace this one last piece, then I can switch away from Windows in my company (as I have at home). Unfortunately, the company relies very much on Outlook's functionality, and will not move away from Exchange server, so if I want to move it's up to me to find and install a compatible alternative, but so compatible that the REST of the users can stay on Outlook if they choose to.
In my opinion, this is one thing that any true Office suite needs before MS-Office can be truly replaced. As buggy and insecure as Outlook is, it organizes the company that I work for, and it can not be removed from my desktop until a fully compatible replacement is available. It's the one last thing that ties me to Windows.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I noticed in SO v5.2, some of my fonts, spaces, and tabs are not correctly formatted (like my resume). Is this still the same issue with v6.0 beta?
:)
Thank you in advance for a reply.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
StarOffice could be a strong competitor to Office if for nothing other than the price. At $479.00 a head, this adds up awfully quickly. Not to mention saving on upgrade fees in the future.
We shall see if corporations are ready to give up some functionality (admittedly, MS Office is still the one to beat there) to save on costs.
With MS raising the price, it might come to pass.
I like fire ants. They are very spicy!
I'm with another poster. KOffice is far preferred right now.
The TRUTH .. not our typical "MS Just Sucks".
Sorry to rain on your ant parade but:
The truth is MS Just Sucks. You answered your own question. Besides that, it is in MS interest to make it hard for anyone to interoperate. So, they not only suck, but they suck for a purpose, namely to pick your pockets.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
They actually had a specification for it on their website a couple years ago. But it was one of the messiest, most convoluted thing I've ever seen.
Have they removed the scheduler/calendar option? I don't see it in the list of features. The only reason my office went through the trouble of switching to Star Office was that they supported all the office software including, especially, calendars and scheduling.
My name fits again.
Now, not only does it contain the basic file filters, but it sensibly starts utilizing things like the default Outlook address book. Will all of this stuff work? It's questionable. But one of my best arguments for the Mac was "and this program can read Word files". Now, hopefully, I can say the same thing for Linux.
Once a man up in Washington state
His competitors, how he did hate
A new Office contender
Useless it was rendered
"Change Word formats, make it obsolete!"
For those of us that remember how to use ftp. instructions are on the sites on how to download. Have Fun
"Get them before they get....
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.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
What is exactly the difference (technically speaking) between staroffice and openoffice. Are there real differences or is staroffice iddentical to openoffice with some commercial features (like netscape mozilla) ?
A lot of what was in it was already offered in Office 2000 (an underrated application suite) without the messy product activation. I recommend if you can get a copy of Office 2000, do so. It's very stable and runs like a champ.
Does this one still require 2 1Gig processors and 768 megs to run?
The only reason I even installed 5.2 is for the few times I have to interoperate with MS products.... and most of the time it crashes when trying to read those.
Word format not only is a complex binary format requiring documentation at multiple levels, it has significant undocumented portions. Worse yet, it allows executable content which can call on a lot of Windows-specific facilities. MS Word format really does suck, and that's not an accident: Microsoft likes it that way. The implications for users aren't good, though: vendor lock-in, viruses, and data that becomes inaccessible in a few years are only some of the problems resulting from the way MS Word stores its documents.
The source is there minus small name changes (a la mozilla --> netscape6).
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
$479 for Office XP!?!?! remember that's in US dollars well. the price is just insane. it's funny that a company that produces unstable bloatware 'suites' think that they are just as good as the hardware designers. because it looks like it's even more expensive than a bloody computer processor!
each year they add a few clicks here, move the menus around, change the file format a bit so no one could parse it properly and then they would sell it for sky high. well if they quality of the software justifies the cost, that's fine. but obviously but unfortunately it's not the case. now that's the cost for one person if he/she wants to buy it. if he makes (let's say) $30 an hour. it would take him 16 hours = 2 days of salary just to be wasted on this.... minus tax, minus food/shelter/money to be spent on car/insurances... that's about 3-4 days of salary just to get something like that...oh man....!
now imagine the whole company wanting to upgrade for whatever reason (yes.. it's true... just look around the labs in your college/university campus. they ALL want to spend so much money for the upgrade for whatever reason...)...
BUT afterall, i never bought a copy of office. my windows is a pirated version. so it's still free for me.... unfortunately it takes at least one person to buy it before i can burn myself a CD copy...
hope the new version of staroffice is not as bloat and can actually keep consistant formats so i can write my engeering docs and paper on it day in and day out!
my blog
You can connect into a MS Exchange addressbook with any LDAP client. I use Balsa, but Netscape/Mozilla and Evolution seem to work well also.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Try Bynari Software, at http://www.bynari.com; IIRC, they have at least partial work-alikes for Exchange client and server, some of which code is GPL and some not-free-but-reasonably-priced. I myself use a standard SMTP/POP3 mail client rather than Outlook to access my company Exchange server's SMTP interface. Look, Ma, no viruses! Of course, I also don't use the calendar/planner cruft, a Dayrunner never crashes...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
That product was designed to do everything that Outlook
can do, from what I understand.
Writing a parser for Word's undocumented binary file format, and keeping it up to date, is a battle that you cannot win with Microsoft. So don't try.
One alternative is to use Word for performing the translation. Word has commands for saving documents in RTF format, which is also a bit of a moving target, but at least it is readable text. So write a tool that fires up Word, causes Word to read the document and save it as RTF, then quit. The tool then reads the RTF and spits out XML (StarOffice XML or some other DTD).
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
The Register has also noted StarOffice new version here.
They also go on to say that they find Abiword the best of the free Office suite pack.
Also, best of all, they are very resistant to virii. Really, the only virii than can infect them are co-workers who can't keep thier hands off things, who should really be fired anyway.
They are also very easy to find. In fact, just about any shopping center of mall will carry them.
Good luck!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Where did you read that from? I'm sure any third party process viewer would show whatever is loaded. Something like prcview or wintop.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Just last week, I reinstalled to put RedHat 7.1 on a new hard drive. On the old install, I had Star Office 5.2, mostly for the kids to do homework, but have thrown away the download file.
So now to get access to their old data, I have to re-fetch *something*, either 5.2 or the 6.0 beta. Most people will not be in this precise situation, but I'm sure many will want to know about the interoperability and quality of the beta.
So before I get started on either/any big download, should I just skip 5.2 and go for 6.0?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
For instance, if I give someone a M$ Word document created on the Macintosh, the opening of that document will sometimes crash a windows machine. There is no reason for this as I am simply transferring a document from MS Word to MS Word. I suppose that such problems are tolerated because it limit the appeal of MacOS machines, and may indicate that I need to upgrade to the latest Office.
So, naive folks, do not wait for the day when MS Office documents will seamlessly integrate with Star Office. And do not blame Star Office for the problems. History provides nearly 20 years of evidence, all the way back to incomplete specifications for system calls in DOS, that M$ will do whatever it can to insure that integration does not occur.
Here's Microsoft's Plans for XML. I think it's very interesting how they word things:
m /xmloffice.htm
.. People have been able to export Access & Excel documents to tab deliminated files for years now. Thats why they're not worried about XLM for those apps. People can already do whatever they want to spreadsheet files, etc..
Customers need to be more pissed off at Microsoft so they force Word to use XML.
http://www.microsoft.com/Office/developer/platfor
Because of the many benefits associated with the use of XML, customers have demanded easy, robust support for XML, and Microsoft has answered them. Currently, Microsoft is concentrating on Microsoft Access and Excel--the applications in which XML can have the biggest impact.
Access and EXCEL? They just want to keep Word as proprietary as possible. Word is the one people can't get in or out of. Of course they don't want to focus on XML for Word. Jeash
Ximian is coming out with Evolution, which is essentially an open source Outlook replacement. It's still in beta but should be reaching 1.0 before the end of the year (I think).
So far, Evolution's main shortcoming is it doesn't understand Exchange protocols, so Linux clients can't use it to talk to Exchange for shared calendaring. I realize that is one of the main points you need. I believe it is a fatal flaw for evolution, but Ximian apparently doesn't think it's such a big deal, saying that such support will come "eventually, but not high priority". Nonetheless, it can do IMAP, POP, LDAP, and a bunch of other open protocols.
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
> ...here, move the menus around, change...
They can actually move around on their own if you don't disable this... er... feature.
Sort of like the paperclip: it's fun to see the most frequently used items float to the top the first time. Once you look for something that has been silently demoted in the menu hierarchy, it'll drive you nuts and you'll curse the whole idea.
It uses the same amount of RAM, eh? And how do you judge this? I'm betting with the task manager, right? You do realize that WinNT/2000/XP all pre-allocate about 2/3s of the memory don't you? That's why you can have 512MB of RAM and see 300 used on boot. To be perfectly honest, taskman is not really useful for tracking memory usage because of this and the fact that it does not show preloaded DLLs. Can you see a list of DLLs from taskman? No, you can't. You need special tools to do that.
Previous versions of Office (Office 97) were pretty obvious due to the "office quickstart" icon that it places in the "startup" group. Later versions of Windows however, have a DLL cache which allows DLLs to be stored for preloading on bootup. That of course is why Windows machines take so *$%^#$ long to boot to a usable state and why 70% of a program's memory usage is not reported. Now to be fair, Unix TOP isn't much better. In order to get a reasonable view, you NEED some form of kernel hooks.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Even if StarOffice and MS Office can both store documents in (valid) XML, that doesn't mean they the two formats are compatible. They could be (and no doubt are) using two entirely different schemas.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
The newest versions of StarOffice/OpenOffice come with a small program the starts when your machine boots. This program preloads all the necessary DLLs into memory to decrease load time. You should see launch times similar to those of MS Office with it installed.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
At least give a +1 funny point for the visuals of an ant parade. It may be a flame, but not a flamebait. The flamebait belongs to the parent post, where he specifies what answers would be acceptable to his rhetorical question. That's just a huge invitation for a snide comment.
I was the baitee, not the baiter.
Anyways, I don't care, I've got karma to burn. But this is definitely proof that there is no such thing as a slashdot-moderators-love-linux-and-hate-MS conspiracy. It is rather the other way round. A bunch of MS zealots with moderator points to burn.
Their only problem is that there isn't enough moderator points in the universe to defend MS.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Our Exchange admins have rigged outlooks web access for home users to get at their outlook via a browser. You don't need IE to get to it either.
n .com
a in .com/exchange
Theoretically you could be using a mac and still get to your outlook via the web interface...and I know we have folks here that use only NIX boxen and get to outlook this way.
check it out.
try http://exchange.yourmailserver.yourcompany'sdomai
or
http://exchange.yourmailserver.yourcompany'sdom
or something similar to that. Or ask someone who knows at your company.
bynari is a real pain to deal with. they offer no evaluation copy and very little in the way of seeing what the real functionality is on their web site.
many posts and e-mails on linuxtoday.com have discussed this but they seem to be more interested in the corperate market.
it might be good for that, but for the home consumer they do make it tough.
Will 6 have grammerchecking? This is the only beef I ever had with SO. Well, that and I never really enjoyed waiting for the SO desktop to load just so I could start working on one of my documents. Other than that, I love StarOffice.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Does anyone know if they have expanded the dimensions of the spreadsheet? Problem with M$O XP also... 65536 Rows is usually enough, but I have hit the 256th Column more times than I can count. There really isn't a good program out there (that I know of) for working with very large data sets. If they wanted to put themselves ahead of M$, here is an opportunity. There is no reason that the worksheet can't be re-dimensionalized by the user if s/he needs increased space. I realize this would disallow full compatibility with M$ Excel, but I'd be more than happy with less than 100% compatibility if it is due to shortcomings in M$ and I have to "opt-in" to the incompatibility.
-Rothfuss
but they seem to be more interested in the corperate market
Keep in mind that my original post WAS about the corporate environment. That being said, a downloadable evaluation version would be nice. I don't use Outlook at home.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Their new file format ROCKS :)
Basicly its a pkzip encoded directory tree with a pictures folder, XML metadata and content, really looks nice !
I humbly agree.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
When will "the other 7%" get to run this? Sad that M$ will beat them there.
yes - but, it is a lot easier to justify a $60 expense on a few clients here and there for a few linux desktops with a solid evaluation from a developer than without
Yeah, yeah, this restriction probably won't be in the 6.0 final release, but for now I've got to stick with 5.2 and its annoying desktop. Bah.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
I understand the advantages of a company-wide messaging system...
Sheesh...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I don't understand why the makers of Office-like applications haven't done like the CAD-business. They created the OpenDWG alliance in order to reverse-engineer Autodesk's proprietary .dwg-format for storing CAD-drawings and succeeded with the task. Mabye an OpenDOC (no pun intended, Apple) alliance would speed up the acceptance and usability of open alternatives to MS-Office.
Mikael
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
.wma, .asf and .ram are also very well documented. Doesn't mean you are allowed to write a program that can read them. So what use are they to me?
You can use Outlook Web Access, which comes with MS Exchange. It's like Outlook, only it is web based. So in the company that I used to work for, I could access all the features (email, directory server, calendar, scheduling, etc...) from Mozilla under Linux. Do a google search, or use this sort of useful link.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
Let's just hope that the guys over at StarOffice don't end up like these guys. :)
take a look at ppower4 and texpower. They're both ways of postprocessing latex and then using acroread to generate a presentation that's as good as powerpoint, but with much better equation handling.
$ strings WordFile.doc > WordFile.txt
$ less WordFile.txt
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
It's nice to see some reasonable competition for MS Office. I alternate between Office2K and Openoffice (633) with reasonable success, but there are a few things left to complete the puzzle:
1. Where's the Mac OSX version? OS10.1 is getting great reviews, but this is even more critical from a general marketing standpoint than from a Mac-head view. Why? Cross-platform compatibility is a great marketing lever, not because of a possible massive platform shift (unlikely) but because of uncertainty about platforms and compatiblity over the long term. (See #4 below.)
2. Some major features are not quite there: imho outlining is the biggest hole; people who write large documents or like structure really need it. Instead of just copying the MS interface, perhaps the existing SO/Navigator tool could be extended to provide a killer structure interface similar to Framemaker+SGML. That would be pretty compelling. Likewise, a quickstart feature (as just implemented in Mozilla) would help to silence the yelps about quick startup ( after long preload) of MS Office XP.
3. Sun/OpenOffice needs migration documentation & tools. For example, it would be nice to have a short whitepaper from Sun that describes (or better yet, provides a one-click tool) that reconfigures MS Office to save in known cross-compatible formats. Word files should be saved in RTF or a reasonably-documented
4. Marketing!! Star/OpenOffice has such potential, and if handled properly, can deliver a very compelling message. I'm no marketing guru, but imagine turning some heads with these advert leaders:
Jon (insertmyslashdotname@jetcity.com)
I think not...(*poof*)
Oh, don't you just hate it:
/. effect.
* Day 1 - You must register to download product, but server overloaded due to demand and
* Day 2 - You must still register to download product, but server takes ages to allow you to download. Give up.
* Day 3 - You've forgotten your password, re-register, to find that server's been misconfigured by some Sun intern SA who doesn't know his apache rewrites from his linux rawrite.
* Day 4 - You get registered, get the software, and find the file got corrupted in the download.
* Day 5 - Internet connection down, so nothing to do but work.
* Day 6 - Internet connection up, remembered password, downloaded product, ran of out of disk space.
* Day 7 - Having mentioned the product was out to your colleagues, a week ago now (without having seen it), you are ridiculed when they realise
you're still using MS-Office on the sly.
* Day 8 - Hurrah! Downloaded, installed and running. Success. Treat yourself to visit a conference that's on in town. Some bloke hands you a "special edition CD", featuring beta of staroffice 6. Go home to weep.
*WHY* is there this damn registration. *WHY* aren't there loads of mirrors (sunsite!!!!). You know they'll be dishing out the damn CD's eventually.
And they say the network is the computer....
and after all that, my downloads working, on day one.
strange things are afoot at the circle-k.
(no, i don't work weekends these days)
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
StarOffice6b comes from openoffice.org.
Does anyone have any info on what source they used? Which snapshot (627, 632, 633, 638?), if any, did Sun use?
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.
Why is it that Star/Open Office wants to be installed on a per user basis, instead of a system wide location where everyone can use it. I've never had any luck getting it to work unless I installed it in my home directory. Does anyone know of a way that I can make it available to everyone?
Why bother.
You go and download Open Office (same friggin thing, almost) from www.openoffice.org and be off with it.
NO SIG
It may not be open source, it may not have originally come from Linux ... it's Gobe Productive 3.0 and I think it deserves a little advertising here.
Productive 1.0 started as a product of the team who created ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks), but for BeOS. With it's wonderful interface, and the backing of the great but now dwindling BeOS community, Gobe stayed alive and released a 2.0 version a year or two before Be began to go under.
Productive is a great product, and I suggest you all look here to find a great alternative to Microsoft Office and Sun StarOffice. Now for both Windows, Linux and BeOS.
I think it is great. I just downloaded the OpenOffice flavor and gave each app a quick whirrel. While it did crash several times(only during the startup of two of the apps - writer and impress) it looked great and read my office2k files just fine (and printed them very quickly). I seriously think that managers will give this decision carefull consideration given the current industry downturn. I could even see my company keeping outlook but dumping the rest of msoffice. Sun (and community) has done an incredible job. It is nice to see MS getting a taste of their own medicine.
You copycat fuckhole. I did that this morning and you just fucking copied me. At least think of your own way to circumvent the system, and don't copy mine.
And at least I have the courage to log in. Not only are you a fucking copycat, but you're not man enough to put this up to your name.
You goddamn jackass.
Which is interesting, becasue I exchange docs with these people and some of them have cutezy graphics and I still have not trouble. MS replaceable? Definitely!
Thanks to the OpenOffice team and the PPC porting team we have Open Office 633b for PPC.
I downloaded the beta just minutes ago. Here I was expecting the 50-70 MB file as before, but the file is 118+ MB! I haven't installed it yet - I was going to install it on my laptop to replace the EXTREMELY buggy and EXTREMELY slow OpenOffice (OpenOffice is certainly not broken into individual apps, or if it is, then they have done something horribly wrong. It takes WAY longer than standard StarOffice 5.2 to startup and crashes with every blink of an eye). I don't have the room on my laptop for this monster. I will have to transfer it to my desktop system and give it a shot there.
HUGE!
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Just installed it and took it for a spin. Don't tell Sun, but I might have even paid for this. I opened a large presentation and only 2 slides were in need of repair. It does do slideshows just like powerpoint, but without the crashing. Word-XP and Excel-XP docs open great, including spreadsheets with calculations. I really like the absence of the "desktop" that dominated 5.2. Now I need to reinstall Mandrake and load this puppy up at home!
I thought it was a good idea
STILL it is ONLY Lyx that can handle professional research paper, scientific paper writing. Not a single other suite in existence or planned for linux can do citations or references. None of them even allow for 3rd party apps to deal with this (ala endNote with Word or Wordperfect for Windoze). ONLY Lyx has this capability, only lyx has the pipeline that allows apps like pybliographic or sixpack or kbib (defunct) and a few others to do what EndNote does for windoze users of Office or Wordperfect - add painless citations/attribution to your serious research documents.
All these suites permit are letter writing and other simple crap that doesn't require proper attribution. When will SOMEONE get a clue and actually realize that EVERY highschool kid, EVERY college kid, EVERY scientist MUST cite references in their documents/research papers and that this is NOT a job to be done by hand like the days of the typewriter. Nay, you either HAVE to use Word and EndNote (and the like windoze apps) or Lyx if you use unix/linux. That's it. Sheesh.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
ok so microsoft will not allow compatability, how hard can it be to type information into a different recepticle? If people cannot handle that or hire someone intelligent enough to convert formats then all is lost to the powers that be.
Most of the threads that've been modded up have been bitching about Star Office not importing/exporting Microsoft Office documents well. How many have really tried this?
I replaced Microsoft Office 2000 (on Win98SE) with Open Office build 638 about two months ago at work. So far, I haven't had one co-worker have a problem with files I've created or edited. I imagine this release of Star Office would be better than Open Office build 638 at this.
Open Office is really a nice productivity suite that's getting stronger. And while it's not at Microsoft Office's level yet, it is doing the job for me at home and at work. It's also Open Source and I really like that.
I don't think it's going to work real well at this time for Joe Administrative Assistant, but the techies here on Slashdot should try replacing their copies of Office with it, and see if any one even notices.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I completely agree with you ...
and is this not enough a good reason to "upgrade" your system to StarOffice?
Choose Open Standards... they are winner horses.
The difference is that the pre-allocation is redistributed to programs as they need them. If this memory is used by preloaded DLLs, then the memory cannot be reallocated.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
My post was a rebuttal to Hadean.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
When I started using Linux, I first used LyX for a couple of projects. Fortunately I tried out 'pure' LaTeX (itself a set of macros for TeX) and found it so much better.
There are several GUI frontends to LaTeX, one being LyX, and you can only harness so much power of the actual system via those interfaces. It's like coding C++ via a point n' click interface. You will only realize the point of LaTeX when using it natively.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I think this is a fair comparison: everyone knows that OpenOffice is even less efficient than OXP with memory, so people whine about how slowly it runs on their machines. Well, you can get 8 Gigabytes of ram for the price of MS Office. You'll need less than 1/100th of that to achieve performance parity.
The only way to ever have a corporation get away from using
Microsoft software is to go out of business.
The only way to ensure that a business uses free and open-source
software is if they start using them from the beginning of the business' existence. I know that eventually the
corporations who use open-source and free software
will edge past their competitors using MS software. It is going to take years and years for such a change. That is the only way to ever
get rid of MS.
Originally MS made a deal with Spyglass Software for spyglass mosaic, kind of like netscape a branch of mosaic. Spyglass got screwed because they got 1 million dollars and some kind of royalty but the royalty was a percentage of the profits but of course MS made it free. Spyglass and netscape disappeared and now MS is polluting the internet with nonstandard page standards.
I downloaded and installed it on my test box at work this afternoon. I had high hopes after hearing the hype about it being "faster" and "more compatible". What a dissappointment. It's slow. It took almost 5 minutes to open an Excell spreadscheet with complex macros and still didn't display it correctly. Opeing a simple word document with tables, photos, headers and footers was fast, but no faster or better than in version 5.2 which is also installed on the same box. I hate to say it, but Microsoft has nothing to fear from this new version.
Why is it hard to justify $60 for a try of insight when it costs that much (and so much more) to try outlook?
Or does MS offer a free copy of outlook for non-MS operating systems?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
30 seconds? amazing! OTOH, my craputer @ home is a shitty k6-2 450 with 128 megs, and it boots linux + X + gnome in about the same time (including the console login and typing "gnome" ;-)
One funny thing about windoze "preloading" happened to me in the elder times when I used NT4. It simply became slow as hell to boot after I instaled some pirate CorelDraw for my sister to use. Corel itself is no big deal, so I started some research, and found out that the slow boot was due to NT preloading (or doing some crap with) all of that 89742387478364 fancy fonts that I installed with Corel. Had to remove them all, since the machine had to boot a lot.
I still wonder why the hell NT had to mess with the fonts at boot time. Anyone knows?
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
In other words, YES, there is a double standard, and yes, it still makes sense.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
it's at the end of the "supported" phase -
don't know if it's actually "open,"
but
what of HP's "OpenMail?"
supposedly does Calandaring & Scheduling, supports clients on different platforms, etc.
(there's also Domino, which runs on all sorts of *nixes ... not 'open' by any stretch, but pretty powerful)
Clarisworks, MS Office, MS works, Abiword, Star Office, millions of others all use RTF.
You can't go wrong with RTF if you need nice formating, but can't use HTML. I've used Unix/Win/Mac systems for a while -- RTF is the only option -- and no worries about VBAs or platform dependence.
It seems to me that one of the big problems with suites competing with MS Office is the problem of importing MS file formats, particually MS Word, in that they are very complex and need to be reverse engineered.
.doc files. When it finds one, it makes a copy and then automatically opens MS Word and uses an Office VisualBasic macro to parse the document and convert it to the OpenOffice XML format. This copy is then returned to the users hard-disk and the .doc version removed. Users can retrieve the backup version of the original .doc file if they wish.
Would it not be more easier and more effective to create a tool for those companies doing the transition from MS Office which exploits MS Office itself? I envisage something like this:
A server-based tool which scans through a company network over night, looking for
Of course, there will be instances when this process doesn't completely work, but it should cover 90% of cases. If all old documents in a company are converted like this then it will help everyone to forget about MS products and make the transition go more smoothly.
I registered a long time ago so I can't remember the questions, but with the registration they can get a good idea of what their users are like, and thus the financial feasibility of their product.
If everyone is a greasy haired, penniless bum, then they won't put quite so many workers on the job as if everyone had a 10K+ seat corporate LAN to install StarOFfice on and was willing to pay.
My question: can StarWriter read ABI Word files?
ABI Word uses XML for its storage, however attempting to read it in anything (Mozilla, StarOffice 5.2) caused an embedded picture (stored as CDATA in a 'L' tag) to be displayed in nice MIME encoding below the document.
- Clean GUI. Sun pulled out the retarded desktop interface.
- The screen fonts look amazing. My documents are very easy to read.
- Launches quickly. I am up ready to start typing in 3 seconds.
- Is significantly cheaper than MSOffice.
- Runs on Linux and Windows.
- XML
The only thing I didn't check was the[sysinternals.com] provides some very usefull tools, both CL and GUI. Amongst them is ListDLLs, a tool to examine DLL's in use by a specific processes and to find out which processes use a specific DLL. Output is in clean and formatted text. A script jockey (no, thast's not me) could easily create a script to list the DLL's in use by an Office application. This list can be used this list of dll's to find out whether or not they are preloaded before the invokation of an office application and how office specific this DLL is (I mean: WinWord uses Kernell.dll, but that's not a very specific Office DLL).
You can also use their GUI tool Process Explorer. But becaus of the recursive character of this job and the huge amount of DLL's involved it will be a time consuming and RSI stimulating job to do.
Arleo
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quote "StarOffice software costs about 86% less than Microsoft's office suite, without costly upgrades, and offers twice as many applications . You can find StarOffice software on Amazon's or FatBrain's Web sites; you can buy it at retail computer stores; you can even download it from our download page...."
I do not mind paying, just want a confirmation. Any comments on this?
I've had to work with OWA (Outlook web access), and it's not all that great (as of exchange server 5.5 anyway). Being the webmaster at my last base for a while, I had to take care of the OWA machine as well and it was a pain in the ass.
First of all, you have to run it on IIS. This may or may not be a problem - if you're already using IIS for your webserver, then it's not a bad thing (you don't want your OWA server to be anything else, BTW - don't put OWA on your main webserver). However, if you use apache or iPlanet for your webserver, that's one more platform you have to support.
Second, it likes to do nasty things like quit talking to your mail server for no reason. If you have multiple mail servers, it's pretty easy to fix (a couple registry changes to point to another web server - you can flop back and forth between two servers just fine, it's the change that fixes it) except that you'll most likely have to go on site to fix it, and it has a nasty habit of doing it at 2am when some bigwig is trying to access their mail. Again, may or may not be a problem depending on your setup.
Third, it requires the systemroot directory to be WORLD WRITABLE. Microsoft says that it's not a vulnerability - you can believe them you if wish, I don't.
Fourth, because it does nasty little things to the IIS code, patching IIS could break things. Watch out for that - you know how fast microsoft comes out with patches.
A lot of companies use OWA, but if it were up to me I wouldn't have it available out on the internet. For intranet use it's fine. YMMV, of course.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Does any one try to run new version on FreeBSD?
Is StarOffice6 beta just the latest build of OpenOffice?
OpenOffice is free software, so if you are a programmer, you can help with #1 and #2.
Since you obviously can write, you can help help with #3 as well.
I guess you are already helping with #4.
The latest version of Abiword 0.9.4 has experimental wp import (and export) support.
Since these officesuites now work together on their import/export filters it should become available for staroffice/openoffice too.
So we are being heard!
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Exactly who do I have to fuck and/or kill to get this code bundle?
It's Free Software, dummy!
Register register register register register.
Is there any other information you'd like like cocksize or eyecolor or the number of blades of grass in my lawn?
You can't accept the address I use which is fine for the USPS - why is that?
And then the download doesn't kick off - hangs hangs hangs hangs.
Great PR for the "The Company that runs the Internet" - assholes !
So far I've just told people to ask after compatible formats. In practice they call the sender and say "please use Word95 doc format".
If they use XP or something that can't save in original Word95 format then tough titty: "send it over as txt or else!"
There are a lot of people who have been relying on Star Schedule Server, and a lot of people who would like to see an open source groupware tool. The only component really missing is a calendar server (LDAP serves well as a source of shared contacts), but a single protocol would be better.
The openoffice groupware whiteboard project is attempting to implement this, but we don't really have any coders (we are mainly admins and users!). If you really want to see open source groupware that you can bet your business on, yo need to jump in a start coding! Any language that can do xml-rpc is sufficient. If you can hacl Mozilla's Zulu calendar client so it compiles, even better!
You know, microsoft put up a box for people to attack when Windows 2000 came out. You'd think if Sun wanted to keep up the air of "We're better than NT" they'd make sure their download centers worked.
Anyone mirrored the installation pdf? Cheers
Nuff sed
/. say "Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted" when I try to use the bold tag, which is listed under the "Allowed HTML" comment below? HMMM?
BTW... why does
AntiChristX
Daring to remain below 5 karma indefinitely
Anyone know of a woking mirror
OK. I gave up downloading StarOffice... Went and downloaded Mozilla 0.9.4. I wanted to run _something_ new.
Man, I didn't even do that. I took my backpack with me to the local electronics superstore and got 50 blanks with a five finger discount.
Also, all of my hardware is stolen even the wireless NIC which i use to steal bandwith from my nextdoor neighbor, so that i can go the warez sites and pirate the latest and greatest M$ bloatware.
BTW, I live with my mommie so i dont even pay rent or work for that matter.
Now if i could just find a way to get hookers for free I'd be all set.
hey... i used Hancom Office on Linux. Seems pretty neat and fast... atleast the word is better than MS....
Microsoft has no choice but to cripple XML in the same way that they have to cripple HTML. If they made standards compliant XML translators for all their Office documents then ditching Office for an alternative would be relatively easy.
What would happen is that a horde of Office Suites would crop up. Because a lot|most|all of the cost in switching from Office to Koffice, StarOffice, or whatever is in getting those docs translated.
Worse still, you could have different people in the same company using whatever they want.
So my bold prediction is that Microsoft will break XML in any way they can. If you though MS-HTML was bad, just you wait....
ftp://planetmirror.com/pub/staroffice/6.0beta/
...
Currently leeching
/* Linus is The One
I have a novel. I started writing it a couple of years back in Office 98 or 97. It was then imported into office 2000. Then I changed jobs and lost my right-to-use MS office so I imported it into Star Office 5.1. When I save it in the native format of OpenOffice 6.x (the XML based format) when I reopen it I can not scroll to the last page.
I think it has something to do with the page renumbering (makeing the first page of chapter one, which is after the index etc, be "page one"). This guess is likely because there is three pages of preamble and I can only scroll within three pages of the end of the document.
What is one supposed to do with *that* kind of a problem?
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Actually there is a Mac OSX port underway, under the OpenOffice projects. It's not there yet, but hopefully when SO is feature-complete, the OSX port will be in hand. My statement assumed such a fruitful end. Currently you're right, MS holds the interop crown.
OTOH, MS Office XP does not support Windows 95, which is still a major (~10-15%) portion of desktop users. (There's your stealth forced-upgrade...) That severely limits their coverage. Between this and the online-activation BS that essentially kills the Office-compatibility growth undercurrent thru illicit home installs, it opens an opportunity for actual major traction of SO/OO in the home-user market.
I think not...(*poof*)
>No. The documentation has been around for a while (years). You can see here: http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?s=text [wotsit.org] that there are
>references to the Word 6 format as well.
I think part of the problem here is that I see Word6 and Word8 (Word97) formats documented, but we're having to cope with Word2000 and soon WordXP. At any rate, I've downloade both Word8 zip files, and want to at least take a look at them. I should proabably grab the Word6 zip files too, to see the nature/need of the changes.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If anyone cares, the linux .bin file installed without a hitch on my FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE machine (which has linux compatibility enabled).