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StarOffice 6.0 Beta Available

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the for-small-values-of-available dept.

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.

4 of 465 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Office XP by dsb3 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Whatever happened to it having been released open source?

    See OpenOffice.org for that one.

    --

    Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
  2. Mirror up by rveety · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here it is:
    Star office 6.0 beta, linux x86, english

  3. Re:Office XP by Steve+Luzynski · · Score: 5, Informative

    Scant amounts of ram?

    Someone mod this +1, Funny, please.

    I'm running Office XP right now. Outlook is currently using 23M of RAM. Word is using 28M. (Windows 2000 + Office XP)

    Word doesn't even have a file open, not even a blank file.

    I don't count that as 'scant amounts'.

    And it loads quick because that "Microsoft Office" icon in your startup menu preloads most of the thing during your boot/login process where you think it's normal for your disk to be thrashing itself apart.

  4. Re:My first question by corky6921 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Have they gotten rid of that "integrated desktop"?

    Yes. I think that was everyone's single biggest complaint about StarOffice. They have also gotten rid of the "memory hog" problem with 5.2, which was that it loaded all five applications into memory and used up about 64MB of physical RAM whenever you wanted to load it.

    Their big new feature is using an open XML format for documents. I also believe they have killed the problem where StarOffice took over all of your email clients, other text editors, etc.

    I think this version of StarOffice is honestly the first one that will be a real competitor to MS Office, but I think it will really only be used by small businesses and individuals. Large corporations are already dependent on Outlook/Exchange/macros to do their work, and I don't see any large corporations switching off of those anytime soon (especially since there is no real groupware solution that Sun offers that compares with Exchange.)