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OpenOffice Coder On StarOffice 6.0's Beta Release

kevin@ank.com was there last night when "Max Lanfranconi of the OpenOffice project spoke to the Silicon Valley Linux User Group on Wednesday morning's release 6.0 of the LGPL'd office suite. When the project was opened two years ago, it was missing online help, spell-checking, and printing which had been based on proprietary commercial libraries. With release 6 the open source community has replaced these missing features." Read on for some more information on the new release, courtesy of Kevin.Update: 10/04 22:11 GMT by T : Several readers have pointed out that the 6.0 release is actually the beta of StarOffice 6.0. Though StarOffice is based on OpenOffice code, there's not actually a new build of OpenOffice yet. OpenOffice's is currently at build 638.

"Release 6 also gets rid of the old Star Office desktop of version 5 which was generally disliked for its annoying tendency to cover up all of the other windows you were working with and make it difficult to interact with your X Window Manager.

The application suite has programable APIs for each of the applications, exposed through a custom object request broker named UNO. In an impressive demonstration, Max showed live update of a spreadsheet with real-time stock data, all under the control of a small Java application. Changed data were reflected throughout the spreadsheet table with each update as the sheet recalculated each cell based on the new input.

Max freely admits that there are still weaknesses in the code. He pointed to the ten year lifespan of the mostly C++ code base, and hopes to see the code improved with the use of more modern C++ features. In browsing through the source tree I don't find that the code is in nearly as bad shape as Max portrayed it. Admittedly I've only seen a tiny fraction of the code (at 3.7 million lines, OpenOffice is by far the largest open source project in the world), but my random sampling showed very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed. Even with these measures in place however, the full system takes upwards of 15 hours and 1.5GB of disk to build on currently available hardware.

System load time for the office suite has been significantly reduced (about 20s on Max's 500MHz laptop with 128MB memory) by removing several libraries from the link process and instead loading them on demand. Over the next year or more Max hopes to see more modularization of the code base with the eventual goal of seperating the monolithic program into seperate applications linked together through an object request broker.

Q&A went on until we got kicked out of our room, so there is a lot more that is new about OpenOffice than I've described here. If you are interested you can pick up a copy at OpenOffice.org, or at one of its mirrors around the world."

235 comments

  1. Yeah, but... by UserChrisCanter4 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does it have "Clippy"? Otherwise I'm not interested.

    1. Re:Yeah, but... by the_other_one · · Score: 4, Funny

      That would be inVIGORating

      --
      134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
  2. First Post? by SillySlashdotName · · Score: 0, Troll

    All right! Look out M$ Office!

    --
    Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
  3. Office Suite by Cirvam · · Score: 1

    Wow, I hope now linux finally has a less bloated and faster office suite. I know Star Office has come a long way, but I think that this solution is better for the end user because it allows more customization. I.E. You can remove parts that you don't like like autocomplete or other "features". I'll have to try this along side star office, hopefully both have matured greatly.



    Ithumbz: World's Greatest Thumbnails
    1. Re:Office Suite by Water+Paradox · · Score: 1

      So is it safe to assume that if you can delete things you don't, like, LIKE like autocomplete, then, like, can you also get, like, rid of prompts for, like, if you like to double your words like like?

      --
      information is immaterial
    2. Re:Office Suite by Per+Wigren · · Score: 0, Offtopic
      Don't you wish the girl next door looked like this [ithumbz.com]



      No, I don't wish my next door was drinking pee and fucking dogs...

      Maybe if she could take a big fist up her arse though.... :)

      --
      My other account has a 3-digit UID.
    3. Re:Office Suite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey, you're a sorry wannabe Grammar Nazi. He might have put in a comma to make the two likes more readable, but the second like means "such as".

      Just because you haven't been able to talk to people yet that use middle-school grammar or better, doesn't mean they don't exist.

  4. Released?? by Teancom · · Score: 5, Informative

    If it has been, openoffice.org sure doesn't know about it. All that is available for download are some "recent builds" with not "W00t! First Release!" hysteria anywhere. Maybe the title should have been "OpenOffice guy interviewed, betas available". But that might be expecting too much from poor Timothy.. I mean, he'd have to actually follow a link!

    1. Re:Released?? by ekrout · · Score: 2

      Well, check out my .sig and you can get the StarOffice 6.0 beta off of a Linux server on a T3 :-)

      --

      If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
    2. Re:Released?? by Teancom · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes, but as other people keep pointing out, OpenOffice != StarOffice, and even StarOffice 6.0 is still in beta. So no matter how you squint, it still isn't "released" :-)

      But I *will* have to try that beta....

    3. Re:Released?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm sorry but if that's a T3 you have some serious overcrowding problems...less then 10K a second off that and I can get over 100 from a friend on cable, should have kept your brittany spears pictures up.

    4. Re:Released?? by the_2nd_coming · · Score: 2

      I was gettin 270K per sec. last night. it took me 5 min to get the entire package...I love cable access

      --



      I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
  5. The obvious question... by earthforce_1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How does it stack up against Star Office 6.0 Beta?

    A side by side feature comparison would be nice...

    --
    My rights don't need management.
    1. Re:The obvious question... by rb2297 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Staroffice 6.0 beta and Open Office 638C are the same build. Sun simply added some licensed software to it and bundled it. At least that is my understanding.

      Ryan

    2. Re:The obvious question... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ok, I use 638c on Mdk80 and SO60b on WinMe.

      Why is the Win version's spreadsheet much faster?!

      Why can't I get ALL my fonts on Linux version?

    3. Re:The obvious question... by rb2297 · · Score: 1

      As to why its faster i don't know.. You might want to post that to the OpenOffice Mailing list and see what is said. As far as your fonts go, i believe one of the things Sun added were their own fonts, which the OpenOffice version would not have..

  6. Photos? by Wind_Walker · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Maybe I'm just a visually-oriented person, but I would really like to see some photos of this thing in action before I take the time to download the latest version.

    The article states that "Release 6 also gets rid of ... its annoying tendency to cover up all of the other windows you were working", but I can't seem to find any screenshots on their website or anywhere else. I have no doubt that the look & feel is similar to Microsoft's Office suite (also Corel's WordPerfect, but I digress) but I'd like to know if they got rid of their start-button oriented interface.

    Anybody had this working and would be willing to GIMP a screenshot?

    1. Re:Photos? by AKAImBatman · · Score: 2, Informative

      It looks like this. Next time poke around a little bit.

      (Oh, and for those who whine about that's StarOffice and not OpenOffice, let me iterate, THEY ARE THE SAME BUILD OF THE SAME SOFTWARE. Just like Mozilla & Netscape 6)

    2. Re:Photos? by stantron77 · · Score: 1, Informative

      Here you go. It is the Windows version of StarOffice (I am at work), but it should be just about the same look and feel as the linux OpenOffice.

      --
      "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." - Pla
    3. Re:Photos? by Shandon · · Score: 4, Informative

      Here's a screenshot from the prior build 633. It clearly shows that the new version has a program oriented interface rather than the extended desktop with a Napoleon complex that was StarOffice 5.2.

      This new interface is shared with StarOffice 6.0 Beta, and it's pretty clean and functional. I've been playing with both for the last couple of days, and I'm reasonably impressed.

      Note - the document open in the screenshot is an imported 1.5 Meg Word file with 37 images, footnotes, comments, revisioning, styles and formatting and everything else brought in just dandy.

    4. Re:Photos? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The start-button interface is what they got rid of (a long time ago). That's the Star Office Desktop.

    5. Re:Photos? by DoubleD · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I cannot try it on linux right now but it looks and functions pretty well in windows 2000 ( i downloaded it today and have tried it for all of 5 minutes).

      link
      (follow the link on the index page, from what i remember geocites does not like direct image linking.)

      Here is a screenshot of an existing word 2000 document with an embedded excel object opened sucessfully in OpenOffice. Elsewhere in the document (a 42 page technical document) some tables are too wide and some automatic page numbering is right aligned instead of centered. All in all a good translation of a moderatly complex word document. I am impressed.

      --
      "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
    6. Re:Photos? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We plan support for screenshots in Linux 2.6
      -Linus

    7. Re:Photos? by WhyCause · · Score: 2
      Note - the document open in the screenshot is an imported 1.5 Meg Word file with 37 images, footnotes, comments, revisioning, styles and formatting and everything else brought in just dandy.

      I'm curious, how well does it handle equations from Word's equation editor? That's the feature I probably would need most, as I've got a lot of papers with too many equations to retype.

    8. Re:Photos? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...but then you load it into W2K and it crashes, like it did to me yesterday while using Microshit (Doesn't)Works...

      Crashed again while playing Half-Life...

      And KDE takes perfectly fine screenshots, by the way.

    9. Re:Photos? by DoubleD · · Score: 3, Informative

      I was able to import a word 2000 document with equations. They viewed alright but were not editable. OpenOffice brings up a warning that the equation was created with a newer (yeah right) version of equation editor and blanks out the equation. Saving the word document through word to word 95 format did not help. However saving as rich text converted the equation objects to a graphic format that OpenOffice seemed to like just fine. Alright enough charity download it yourself and play with it :).

      DD

      --
      "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
  7. 15 hours on a 500 MHz machine? by maddogsparky · · Score: 1

    I sure hope you can download executables that run without a hitch. That is no small potatoes for most users.

    --
    science is a religion
    1. Re:15 hours on a 500 MHz machine? by Snootch · · Score: 1

      Of course you can - I got the "latest" off their site yesterday, and it came in nice binary form...pity about the huge disk usage though (even for the binaries). I've had to clear out a lot of crud to make enough space.

    2. Re:15 hours on a 500 MHz machine? by z)bandito(_X · · Score: 1

      between 15 hour compile times and 20 second load times the average user isn't going to see a huge advantage to this suite unless they are already in support of the open source movement. i realize that these programs have different aims, but one of the nice things about stickies on the mac or notepad on windows (not that it compares to stickies), aside from being built in, is that it launches in around 1 second. sometimes you just need to get it down. hopefully with further modularization of this program, we can see the option for similar load times for simple text entry by loading all formatting functions on demand.

    3. Re:15 hours on a 500 MHz machine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So what, vi loads in 0.1 seconds.

    4. Re:15 hours on a 500 MHz machine? by oddo · · Score: 0

      science is not a religion.

      if you can't make the distinction, religion is probably how you'd prefer to try (religion isn't as humble as science in admitting it is merely attempting an explanation, or the beginning of one) to explain what is around us.

      --
      give me bongo
    5. Re:15 hours on a 500 MHz machine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How's life in the marketing department?

    6. Re:15 hours on a 500 MHz machine? by Snootch · · Score: 1

      How's life in the marketing department?

      How can one ever achieve more eloquence than the maker of Fawlty Towers - Que?

      What on earth are you talking about? How does a post that confirms that indeed, they do have binaries imply that I'm in marketing (did you mean to imply Sun's marketing dept)? I also criticised the bloat that leads to huge disk-space requirements, which rather puts me out of action for being a minion of Sun...

  8. Mixup???? by FatRatBastard · · Score: 3, Redundant

    As far as I can tell (and I ran to OpenOffice.org) Open Office 6.0 *HAS NOT* been released. I think someone is mixing up the Star Office 6.0 BETA with Open Office (the SO Beta is based on the last OO build)

  9. No ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yours is too small.

  10. 2 Years and Version 6! by AX.25 · · Score: 1

    Wow! And Linux is still at 2.4, windows is so high they stopped counting and started using letters!

    :)

    --
    What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
    1. Re:2 Years and Version 6! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      actually it's fifteen years old

  11. Uhhh.. no. by Majix · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:Uhhh.. no. by kevinank · · Score: 2
      Wow, I certainly didn't intend to cause such a furor. Max referred to the version of OO he was running as version 6 and said it had been built that morning. Not being personally familiar with the project I just quoted him; at least as far as I understood.

      One of the points he kept making was that the open source product won't be QC'd like StarOffice is (it is up to the open source community to use it, test it, and report back bugs), so it seemed quite reasonable to me that when he said version 6 that it really was that version.

      I suppose he may have been using the term loosely, or perhaps I misheard and the dozen or more times I thought he said version six he was actually saying 638c.

      In any case the code is supposed to be feature complete, so I'm sure they would be happy for anyone who is willing to download the package and try to use it.

      One other subject that came up several times in the talk was the poor quality of publicly available fonts. Although one of the audience members tried to convince him to buy the relevant fonts and free them (in the same way as StarOffice was itself), there aren't any plans to solve that particular problem. The fonts look legible to me, but have unusually large intercharacter spacing so the code may be coercing fonts into the bounding box of a commercial font without really checking the font metrics of the real fonts being used.

      --
      LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
    2. Re:Uhhh.. no. by SpringRevolt · · Score: 1

      Fix your crossfire link.

    3. Re:Uhhh.. no. by kevinank · · Score: 1

      thx

      --
      LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
  12. Good load time? by morris57 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can't believe that 20 seconds on a 500 Mhz machine is a good load time for a word processor!

    This is the sort of thing that will be thrown in my face when I try to tell people to give OpenOffice a shot.

    1. Re:Good load time? by ekrout · · Score: 4, Informative

      Unfortunately (actually, it's a good thing), no single company controls the Linux desktop/operating system, so we therefore can't make some `Start-up Wizard' that loads when the OS boots-up and makes start time 4 times faster (think M$FT Windows/Office).

      --

      If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
    2. Re:Good load time? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I know. MS Word XP only takes me 6 seconds to load on my 500 MHz Athlon. Although I do wonder how long it would take if I didn't load parts of it into memory beforehand.

    3. Re:Good load time? by praedor · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Kword starts in seconds. Wordperfect for linux starts in seconds. Lyx starts in seconds. Abiword starts in seconds. StarOffice/OpenOffice starts in many, MANY seconds.


      Sorry, no excuses. There is no inherent reason that a wordprocessor should take that long to startup, regardless of what libs it uses.

      --
      In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
    4. Re:Good load time? by joescrooge · · Score: 1

      Do any of you all know how to read? It's called Star/OpenOffice. It's a bit more than just a wordprocessor...

      --
      never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes
    5. Re:Good load time? by morris57 · · Score: 1

      Well said! Thank you...that was exactly my point.

    6. Re:Good load time? by ch-chuck · · Score: 1

      Just do like Msft - resort to trickery & deception and preload it at boot time. Then your demo will appear in seconds.

      --
      try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
    7. Re:Good load time? by morris57 · · Score: 1

      When I want to use one of the tools from Star/OpenOffice, I usually wnt to use them one at a time. Why should it load the spreadsheet part if all I want to do is type a document?

      Maybe this is why it takes so long to load, which is something that you can't deny and shouldn't excuse.

    8. Re:Good load time? by spectecjr · · Score: 4, Informative

      Unfortunately (actually, it's a good thing), no single company controls the Linux desktop/operating system, so we therefore can't make some `Start-up Wizard' that loads when the OS boots-up and makes start time 4 times faster (think M$FT Windows/Office)

      What the hell are you talking about?

      The only thing that Office has ever done on boot-up (and only the first time you run it) is to run BIND and WALIGN on all of its files -- which takes all of the DLL's entry points and binds them to the other DLLs they use with a timestamp, so if anything changes it can use the older mechanism.

      This kind of thing has been available to all Windows developers for years. I use it myself; it makes your apps load pretty much instantaneously instead of taking forever.

      Of course, this annoys my bosses when they want to insert splash screens... which annoys me when they tell me "put it up for 5 seconds regardless".

      Simon

      --
      Coming soon - pyrogyra
    9. Re:Good load time? by ekrout · · Score: 1

      Well, I don't use Windows, but I'm (99.4 +/- 1.2)% sure that there's an Office Start-up icon (application) in the system tray that greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to load Office. Also, IE loads because of the reason I mentioned in my post above.

      --

      If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
    10. Re:Good load time? by Eccles · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately (actually, it's a good thing), no single company controls the Linux desktop/operating system, so we therefore can't make some `Start-up Wizard' that loads when the OS boots-up and makes start time 4 times faster (think M$FT Windows/Office).

      The Mozilla installer asks about putting a something in your startup group that will reduce load times when you actually start up the app. So if you login and go for coffee, you'll get faster loads once you come back.

      --
      Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
    11. Re:Good load time? by MikeV · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Hmmm, lessee - Word takes, what, 10 seconds or so if portions of MS Office had been pre-loaded on bootup. On a 900Mhz 256Ram machine. Cost? $300+. OO takes 20s on a 500Mhz laptop (not exactly a PC there, nor a muscle machine either). Cost? Free.

      Frankly, I'll take OO and drink my coffee for a few extra seconds knowing at the end of the day I can afford to take my family out to Chili's and a movie... Big deal if it takes a little longer to start up. It does what you need it to do. Edit documents, spreadsheets and all that jaz (hopefully sans Clippy [tm]). It looks fairly decent and feature full. It can open and save a variety of formats. And your cash-flow doesn't dip into the negative when you license the thing...

      I think the average user/company will take that into account too - also the fact that it will only get better and faster as development continues and that you and/or your company won't be ripped off with yearly per seat/per user license fees and forced upgrades... An extra few seconds - that's all? Fella, take another sip of that coffee and enjoy the pace - you've just been given 10 more seconds or so to enjoy life before the grinding stone hits... :)

    12. Re:Good load time? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm not sure about your version, but on XP it's preloaded with the OS and you have no choice (unless you don't install it at all)

    13. Re:Good load time? by nusuth · · Score: 1

      Actually I like preloading libraries of my commonly used programs. If star/open office make that "trickery and deception" an option, I would probably use it. Waiting 15 more seconds while starting x and launching star/open office in 5 seconds is better than the alternative. When I start x, I know I'll have to wait some time, when I'm clicking on an application's icon I'm expecting to see as soon as I click. A better option might be going after opera and noticing that good gui based app. does not require megs of loaded libraries. e.g. opera launches way faster than konqueror.

      --

      Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!

    14. Re:Good load time? by g_bit · · Score: 1

      Okay, first MSOffice only loads a piece of itself if the "Office Startup" link is left in the Startup folder on the Start menu or in the registry.

      I don't have MSOffice preloading itself on my 500Mhz PIII/128Mb machine and Word 2000 opens in 5 seconds.

      Could you people get a clue before you spew your bullshit onto the web?

    15. Re:Good load time? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Okay, first MSOffice only loads a piece of itself if the "Office Startup" link is left in the Startup folder on the Start menu.

      I don't have MSOffice pre-loading itself on my 500Mhz PIII/128Mb machine and Word 2000 opens in 5 seconds.

      Second, I use Linux and Windows and I find Windows to be WAAAAY better in the areas of features and usability in *any* desktop app I've ever used when compared to a similar app for Linux.

      No, I'm not too stupid to use Linux, I just don't have my head stuck up so far up Linus Torvald's ass that I can't see that Windows is far more ready to take care of business.

    16. Re:Good load time? by morris57 · · Score: 1

      You've got a good point and, more importantly, a great attitude. I appreciate that.

      My point is that a 20 second start time is nothing to brag about. Especially if I'm startig the porgram to read a .doc file.

    17. Re:Good load time? by spectecjr · · Score: 2

      Well, I don't use Windows, but I'm (99.4 +/- 1.2)% sure that there's an Office Start-up icon (application) in the system tray that greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to load Office. Also, IE loads because of the reason I mentioned in my post above.

      Actually, having just double-checked, yep, it's there in the Startup folder.

      Apparently, it does this:

      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22microsof t+ office+startup%22

      Damn, that's lame.

      --
      Coming soon - pyrogyra
    18. Re:Good load time? by be-fan · · Score: 2

      First, its really not a problem. Business desktops usually use Office very extensively, and something that makes it start faster isn't bad, its good. Also, I never keep stuff in my startup dir, and Office starts almost instantly on my system (about as fast as Konq on KDE 2.2.1).

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
    19. Re:Good load time? by spectecjr · · Score: 1

      First, its really not a problem. Business desktops usually use Office very extensively, and something that makes it start faster isn't bad, its good. Also, I never keep stuff in my startup dir, and Office starts almost instantly on my system (about as fast as Konq on KDE 2.2.1).

      Yeah, but the fact that it's there at all is still lame. The app should be able to load within 5 seconds or *less* without having to have something running in the background. All the apps I work on do. And I've worked on some pretty big ones.

      Simon

      --
      Coming soon - pyrogyra
    20. Re:Good load time? by damiam · · Score: 1

      Actually OpenOffice build 638 does include a "Quickstart" load-on-boot feature (Windows only, I think). It cuts my load time (on a 500Mhz K6-2 with 184 megs of RAM) from 15 seconds to about 5.

      --
      It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
    21. Re:Good load time? by ignavus · · Score: 1

      so we therefore can't make some `Start-up Wizard' that loads when the OS boots-up and makes start time 4 times faster (think M$FT Windows/Office).

      Why not?

      Just load a daemon at boot time which keeps most of the required libraries on hand, and then when the user clicks on the StarOffice icon, you just need to load the front end, not the whole damn engine.

      It may or may not be a good idea, but I cannot see how it is difficult, just because no one owns the OS.


      --
      I am anarch of all I survey.
    22. Re:Good load time? by joescrooge · · Score: 1

      So you really are admiting you can't read.

      If you would go back and read all the original material you'll realize they are working on taking openoffice apart. It's not there now, but I've seen little opensource software that is as "user polished" as most commerical software. The companies have to sell something to the average comsumer, and the consumer wants polished software. The opensource community (term used loosely) has a long way to go in this regard.

      --
      never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes
  13. The obvious answer by ekrout · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Here's an SAT-style analogy:

    StarOffice OpenOffice as

    Netscape 6.x Mozilla

    It's as simple as that.

    --

    If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
    1. Re:The obvious answer by jfunk · · Score: 4, Informative

      I don't really think that's accurate, at least in some respects.

      I find that Mozilla is overall more stable and has more (useful) features than Netscape 6.x. OpenOffice has less features than StarOffice, spellchecking being the biggest one.

      You are right, however, about how Sun and Netscape use the projects.

    2. Re:The obvious answer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To set the record straight.

      OpenOffice.Org Buiold 638C uses almost the exact same code base as StarOffice 6.0 Beta.

      And yes, spellchecking (for English) and Thesaurus are now available in OpenOffice.org build OO638C with other dictionaries / languages) in the works.

      Kevin Hendricks
      OpenOffice.Org Volunteer

  14. Why doesn't anyone check the @#$@#$ URLs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Unless it's just my @home service blocking M$ competition, why doesn't anyone check to see if these URLs work?!

    Here's a hint - THEY DON'T!

    *Check* before posting. Please. Don't tease us like this.

    1. Re:Why doesn't anyone check the @#$@#$ URLs? by hublan · · Score: 2, Funny

      Here's a hint - THEY DON'T!

      You're experiencing the magical "Slashdot effect" in action.

      *Check* before posting. Please. Don't tease us like this.

      Same applies to you.

      --
      My spoon is too big.
  15. Different from StarOffice 6.0? by Bilbo · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Sheesh... Just installed the StarOffice 6.0 Beta on my system yesterday!

    Does anyone know specifics on the differences between OpenOffice and StarOffice versions 6.0? I think that StarOffice is actually based on the new OpenOffice source code base. (Or, is it the other way around?) Theu look very similar. Are there significant technical or feature differences?

    --
    Your Servant, B. Baggins
    1. Re:Different from StarOffice 6.0? by ekrout · · Score: 3, Informative

      Read some of the comments above. They're basically the same piece of software (think Netscape 6.x / Mozilla analogy). "Staroffice 6.0 beta and Open Office 638C are the same build. Sun simply added some licensed software to it and bundled it."

      --

      If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
    2. Re:Different from StarOffice 6.0? by praedor · · Score: 1

      How's the load time for SO 6.0? For OpenOffice it is monstrously slow. I uninstalled it due to this and the fact that it has a tendency to crash...a lot...particularly impress. After a lot of work designing a presentation only to have it crash and actually anihilate my presentation completely...out it went with the rest of the garbage.


      --
      In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
    3. Re:Different from StarOffice 6.0? by leperjuice · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You've (and others) have told us that StarOffice is to OpenOffice as Netscape is to Mozilla. But that tells us very little other than the fact that one is a derivative of the other.

      The question is, what does StarOffice provide that is different? What licensed software has been included and how does it affect the suite?

      --

      -- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"

    4. Re:Different from StarOffice 6.0? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see they've copied Microsoft Office a little too well. Oh well, ever try using "Save"?

    5. Re:Different from StarOffice 6.0? by JoshuaDFranklin · · Score: 1

      For example, a 30MB clip art gallery. And the latest java, whether you need it or not (you can choose not to install it, but it downloads anyway). And the BTW, those jpgs and gifs don't compress too well, which is why the StarOffice download is 3x bigger.

  16. Mirror of the mirrors page? by Verteiron · · Score: 1

    I can't hit anything on openoffice.org (already slashdotted?). Anyone have the list of mirror download locations?

    --
    End of lesson. You may press the button.
    1. Re:Mirror of the mirrors page? by Sir_Real · · Score: 4, Informative


      Current Mirror Sites
      Type URL Login Password Source Binaries Solver Maintainer
      FTP ftp://openoffice:@ftp.ists.pwr.wroc.pl/ openoffice 633 (all platforms) 633 (all platforms) Bartek Maruszewski
      FTP ftp://borft.student.utwente.nl/ 633, 627, 625, 617 633 (Linux, Win32), in 5 MB parts Michael Niblett*
      HTTP http://borft.student.utwente.nl/openoffice/ 633, 627, 625, 617 633 (Linux, Win32), in 5 MB parts Michael Niblett*
      HTTP http://sapi.vlsm.org/openoffice/ 633 (ZIP for Win32) Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim
      FTP ftp://sapi.vlsm.org/openoffice/ 633 (ZIP for Win32) Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim
      FTP ftp://sapi.vlsm.org/openoffice/ 633 (ZIP for Win32) in 1440000 byte parts Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim
      HTTP http://sapi.vlsm.org/openoffice/win32split/ 633 (ZIP for Win32) in 1440000 byte parts Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim
      HTTP http://office.qkaka.com/ * localized ZIP H.Z.
      FTP ftp://ftp.3way.com.hk/ All current binaries, solver, and source; files in parts. Nelson Lau
      FTP ftp://mirrors.unam.mx/pub/OpenOffice/ All current binaries and source, all platforms. Alfredo Aguayo.

    2. Re:Mirror of the mirrors page? by Sir_Real · · Score: 2

      erm... yes... well slashdot apparently doesn't like less than greater than signs, which means the username and passwords for the ftp sites got filtered out... I believe that they are all "anonymous" and a blank password... Sorry for the confusion.

      Andrew

    3. Re:Mirror of the mirrors page? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      mirror

      Lameness compression protector XP Take this lameness filter, I'll eat your pipes and kick your gzip !

    4. Re:Mirror of the mirrors page? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      in the future put them as links and you'll be fine.

  17. Re:Propz! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    CM, or Sunken Kursk as he is know today, is dead and has been dead for a long time. Okay, the wheel is turning but the hamster is most definitely dead.

    -- Hemos, AKA Vlad

  18. No,no by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    he's not dead, he's restin' !

  19. Re:Miss? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He's not dead, he's a lesbian.

  20. Promising? :) by SilentChris · · Score: 2, Funny
    "When the project was opened two years ago, it was missing online help, spell-checking, and printing which had been based on proprietary commercial libraries. With release 6 the open source community has replaced these missing features."

    "from the another-promising-one dept."

    *Groan*. Yup, I actually have a version of a file explorer I'm coming out with. It doesn't open files or perform basic file operations, but the icons are there and they look pretty. I expect to have the "missing features" done, but it's GPL'd. That should mean something, right?

    Com'on, it's "promising"!

  21. Sick! by ENOENT · · Score: 1, Troll

    Not to criticize the OpenOffice project, which is only trying to provide a reasonably-priced replacement for MS Office, but what the hell is so compicated about text documents and spreadsheets that it takes such a whomping code base to handle it?

    It strikes me as sick that so much human effort is going into a piece of software that will be used primarily to create email attachments that can't be read by non-Office users, all of which will be essentially plain text but inflated in size by several times by the inefficient document format.

    OK, I'm done ranting now. There's nothing to see here. More along.

    --
    That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
    1. Re:Sick! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you ever written an office suite with the features of either staroffice or ms office? If not, SHUT UP, if so, let's see it so we can judge for ourselves.

    2. Re:Sick! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I dunno, I downloaded SO6beta on whatever day it came out, and I opened a (fairly simple) Word document (just to see it work). The Word document was 32 KB, saved by Word 2000. I hit "Save As...", saved the file in native StarWriter format, and it was 8 KB. One quarter the size for the same document. Now, what were you saying about inefficient file formats?

    3. Re:Sick! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Feel free to use WinWord 2.0 and Excel 2.2 -- 90% of the features of the current version with the exception of the stupid wizards, and it only takes 5MB or so of disk space.

    4. Re:Sick! by ENOENT · · Score: 1

      Didn't your read my post? The issue isn't the difficulty of writing an office suite. The issue is all of the useless crap that goes into an office suite, and the fact that most users have no need (or even awareness) of all of it.

      It's only the MS Marketing department that convinces users that they really can't live without Clippy and all of the other gee-whiz "innovations" since Word 4.0 (which was a pretty decent program that took 20 seconds to load on a Mac Classic).

      --
      That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
    5. Re:Sick! by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 2

      There are a couple of explanations for that. First of all, Word saves thing in Unicode which could double the size right there if StarOffice does not. Also, Word saves all the style information. I don't know what StarWriter actually saves.

      --
      Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
    6. Re:Sick! by Doomdark · · Score: 2
      Well, "right tool for the job". If you create emails, use text editors, if you need simple formatting, use simple word processors. If you need more features, use full-size office suites.
      Not saying that your concern wasn't valid at all (it still kind of is, office suites are hogs), but...


      Thing is, OpenOffice being based on open sourced Star Office code base (after Sun acquired the company that created it) was aimed at "full-featured" Office Suite market. Kind of like SUVs of "productivity" applications (ie. bloated, powerful, ugly). Thus, it wasn't started out from scratch. There are more light-weight word processors (and office suites) around, such as AbiWord, but they might (still) not be as mature as, say, Star/OpenOffice. So, having all the bloat already built-in it's much more difficult to trim the fat, than building a leaner application from scratch. But on the other hand, you do have a usable finished application to work with.


      One thing I'm wondering though is the compilation time. The company I used to work for had a similarly-sized (ie. couple of millions of lines of C++/C-code) application, and it compiled in 5 - 10 minutes on Visual C++ (back then on 350 mhz machines). Much of the code was straight-forward C (not C++), and even C++-code didn't make heavy use of many of C++'s slow-compilable features (templates)... And VC++ has a good compiler plus pre-compiles headers nicely. Still, more than an order of magnitude slower compilation sounds weird; it shouldn't take hours to compile that thing. Fortunately end users need not worry about that. The reason I would worry (as a developer) is that slow compilation is often caused by too many dependencies between classes that shouldn't be dependant on each other, which is usually a sign of problems at architectural level. Encapsulation and insulation should be used to reduce physical dependencies, not just logical ones (book "Large-scale C++ - projects" is a good one for reading more about the problems and solutions).

      --
      I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
    7. Re:Sick! by be-fan · · Score: 2

      Visual C++ compile speed is really, really fast. Also, GCC doesn't support precompiled headers, and tries to be correct rather than fast WRT templates. So its quite plausiple that VC++ is that much faster.

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
    8. Re:Sick! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In my experience, Visual C++ isn't even close to this fast at compiling. The project that I'm on at work has around 140klocs, and takes around 20 minutes to compile on my 1.4Ghz machine. Of course, we do use advanced C++ language features, such as templates extensively, so that could explain some of the difference...

    9. Re:Sick! by Doomdark · · Score: 2
      Yes, I guess YMMV. Thinking back, a sub-project that was completely written in C++ that did use STL was much slower to compile. Its size was in the same order of magnitude as yours (100 - 200kloc), but even that didn't take (AFAIR) more than something like 5 - 10 minutes. Of course that's (considering code size) much slower than the main application's compilation time.


      One more thing about VC++ is that it really makes difference how you design your precompiled headers; usage is not quite as automatic as one would hope, so it's (too) easy not to get anything precompiled/cached.


      ... and of course Mac-heads could start talking about Metrowerks CodeWarrior. It supposedly has even faster compiler (on MacOS, anyways), and it certainly seemed to be able to do partial recompilation much better than VC++ (which sometimes partially compiled project and produced broken binary... ie. failed to really re-compile all it needs to, but nothing more).

      --
      I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
  22. Sun's Java office suites by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A few years back Sun also bought some Java Office Suites. Since they haven't decided to do anything with them, they should release them as open source as well in case anyone would like to work on them/reuse code.

  23. openoffice by andy_from_nc · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've not yet gotten the release but I'd have to say OpenOffice is a big improvement in many ways over StarOffice. Unfortunately, the build I got a month ago didn't allow conversion between html docs and swd (or whatever its called now), which really annoyed me. Its a toss up whether loosing that horrid desktop thing is worth it. (I like to publish everything I document as HTML).

    It does seem to load substantially faster and run a tad more stable than Star Office did.

    All in all I have pretty good luck converting to and from M$ Word. The changes are usually the same types of things that happen when switching the printer settings around on M$ Word.

    Unfortunately, I've less luck with the Spreadsheet piece. It writes XLS files in a really weird format (I looked at it via biff view and via my project sourceforge.net/projects/poi) it doesn't always load properly and sometimes crashes excel.
    (long story on the differences, too boring for here)...

    So can you ditch Office and use OpenOffice -- not if you're a big spreadsheet user that needs to talk to Excel, but for most people -- definately!

    (In open office's defence, they use glibole2 which is some of the nastiest looking C code I've ever seen -- see www.gnome.org. You have to expand about 20 layers of macros to even understand one line of code! Its a miracle they can write anything)

  24. Re:Hello Dolly! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    frist posting makes teh baby jesus cry. :'(

    FREE MUMIA!!

  25. can you say segfault? by Navarre · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    All it does for me is segfault. Very exciting.

    1. Re:can you say segfault? by GeekBoy · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hey Mike!

      Funny, it works for me. I've got the SO6 early access version 3 too if you are interested in trying that. BTW: I think I'm getting layed off so I don't think I'll be finishing that NLUG page any time soon :(

      Sheldon.

  26. 20 second delay isolated! by small_dick · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...
    int main()
    {
    // Performance Mods (B.G.; Microsoft Inc.)
    // openOffice->launch();
    unsigned long launch_time = gettimeofday()+20;
    while(1)
    {
    // spin cpu to look busy
    if( gettimeofday() == launch_time )
    break;
    }
    openOffice->launch();
    }

    --


    Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
    See my user info for links.
  27. Get it from Akamai by TrumpetPower! · · Score: 5, Informative

    First, as others have noted, this is just another beta.

    Having said that, if you want to get the sources, stop Slashdotting openoffice.org and get it from Akamai. At least they've got the bandwidth to deal with the load.

    b&

    --
    All but God can prove this sentence true.
    1. Re:Get it from Akamai by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 1

      Is this cheaper for them? I remember Akamai bandwidth being pretty pricey. As long as someone's picking up the tap.

  28. This article is wrong and misleading by lonenut · · Score: 2, Informative

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

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

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

    Please try to clarify this point in the posted article!

  29. last mirrored Release notes: spell checking, help, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://sapi.vlsm.org/openoffice/

    read last mirrored Release notes: yes it seems to have spell checking, help,etc...

  30. Ecological niches by marm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First of all, excellent to see that OpenOffice is out. The Free software community needs a solid heavyweight office suite with all the bells and whistles, and Open Office is shaping up to be exactly that.

    I think we're also seeing the development of two quite distinct niches for Office software, at least on Linux and other Free *nix. Perhaps a little like the split used to be between MS Works and Office:

    On the one hand, we have OpenOffice, a big heavyweight that has features pouring out of its ears, but which is not tremendously tightly integrated to any desktop, nor perhaps the most intuitive set of programs to use. It's also heavy on system resources and diskspace, but that's the price you pay for having all the bells and whistles.

    On the other hand, there's the younger, lighter suites like KOffice. Leaner, faster, easier, and more tightly integrated with the desktop. At the same time, lacking a few features that may be necessary for some people, but satisfying the needs of an average Joe quite well.

    It seems to me there's a place for both of these in the Linux desktop landscape, and frankly, I think this is great.

    Or rather, it will be great once they can read each other's file formats ;)

  31. open EVERYTHING? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    got kode? you could endeavor to develop/promote your own worthwhile efforts, with this very descriptive set of URLs, due to your ability to follow simple directions.

    fud IS dead. we're almost sure of IT. have you seen these guys? now featuring face scans, of the REAL .commIEs?

  32. Come on... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We both know that yours is microscopic.

    Best wishes with that natural penis enlargement.

    Dolly

  33. No ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Remember the last time it got stuck between my teeth and you jumped around screaming all the time ?

    Won't have happened if yours was a little bigger than 5 millimeters.

    Dolly

  34. WTF... ? by Kayser_Sose · · Score: 0

    Hey slow down! I'm still in the process of /. my harddrive with startoffice 6.0.

    I guess ADSL sucks now.

    --
    hmm..... maybe up ahead.
  35. Re:Propz! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Naaaaah, I told you. I'm getting back up to the 50 mark. Take a look at the harddrive article for an example. One complete bullshit comment, another which actually deserved the +5 (yeah, I'm slipping, I know).

    Anyway, ttyl, Sunken Kursk.

  36. Limerick by 575 · · Score: 2

    There once was a company, Sun
    Star Office, their package, claimed done
    MS changed formats
    So Sun is their doormat
    And the work has only begun!

    1. Re:Limerick by On+Lawn · · Score: 2

      There have been many who have tried
      Herding users with formats and died
      So why do you think
      another program that stinks
      Won't push their own customers aside?

  37. SO is great, I just wish... by uriyan · · Score: 1

    ... that it supported Hebrew. I saw some notice of Bi-Directional text display support, but Hebrew is not supported (neither in the documentation, nor in the released version). I just hope that someone adds at least basic support (even without a spell checker).

    1. Re:SO is great, I just wish... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are you sure? SO6beta includes a lot of fonts that open office doesn't. Maybe you should look at that.

  38. Freedom software for Windows... by Odinson · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Why aren't we bundling too. It is time.


    Is there a freedom software distro for Microsoft Windows. Such a thing would be a great boon. They should be everywhere like AOL cd's.


    Such a thing should include ...


    OpenOffice, Mozilla, Gimp, Apache(not enabled by default), Perl And so on...


    I mean really how many people would buy office XP if they had a shiny "new" cd sitting around with a free compatible equivilent. It is the perfect opportunity to move people to the apps, and then the OS looks much more tempting.


    And no most people don't write vbs scripts in word they have enough trouble with fonts and margins.


    Could some Linuxish orginiztion pick up the tab for the creation or shipping???

    1. Re:Freedom software for Windows... by 4of12 · · Score: 2

      You really hit the nail on the head with the idea of distributing a set of open, multiplatform, useful apps on millions of CDs for people to use.

      No "Linuxish" organization has the wherewithal to make and distribute that many CDs or man the support lines at 1-800-HELPME.

      But AOL does.

      After MS has strongarmed MSN into XP and put AOL and other ISPs at a disadvantage, it would be justdeserts if 30 million CDs of

      AOL 7.0!
      just so happened to include a slew of free apps that walk all and cross integrate out of MS in the same way. Unfortunately, if it were done, I'm sure AwOL would probably just insert themselves with insidious links the same way that MS has (a la, meet the new boss. same as the old boss.)
      --
      "Provided by the management for your protection."
    2. Re:Freedom software for Windows... by g_bit · · Score: 0, Troll
      Why aren't we bundling too. It is time.

      No it's not...

      Is there a freedom software distro for Microsoft Windows. Such a thing would be a great boon. They should be everywhere like AOL cd's.

      There's not, because there's no money in open source...AOL can do it because they make money...lot's of it.

      OpenOffice, Mozilla, Gimp, Apache(not enabled by default), Perl And so on... I mean really how many people would buy office XP if they had a shiny "new" cd sitting around with a free compatible equivilent....

      How dare you say that OpenOffice is the equivilent to MSOffice? It's simply not so! Mozilla the equivilent of IE? Ha!! Gimp to Photoshop!? Don't make me smack you! Apache/Perl to IIS/ASP? Well, you may have something there, but not by much and only in the area of security/speed. (There's a lot to be said for ease of use in the corporate world!).

      And no most people don't write vbs scripts in word they have enough trouble with fonts and margins.

      But what if you did want to? (Obviously *somebody* does otherwise they wouldn't have put it there ;)

      Do you really think that your plan would work? Why haven't you brought this to IBM? They're big Open Source proponents...ya think they might have thought of that and said to themselves "Nah, we're just gonna sit back and let M$ make all the money!"?? No, IBM and other OpenSource backers (Sun, Apple) *know* that M$ products are currently far more superior than anything available for *nix. Why do you think Apple makes a big deal about MSOffice for the Mac being released?

    3. Re:Freedom software for Windows... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      word and stare office compatible ?
      no

      i installed the 6beta and the other day, and tried to load a word document.

      as with all previous versions, the headers, footers, and images were all over the damn page..

      I was so disapointed, I cannot use this to exchange documents with all the other win32 users.

    4. Re:Freedom software for Windows... by elvstone · · Score: 1

      I don't know how related this is, but if you are looking for a Unixish environment under Win32 you can always take a look at Cygwin. It is a collection of GNU console software and a Unix emulation layer (.dll). Get it.

    5. Re:Freedom software for Windows... by mdavids · · Score: 1

      As somebody else said there's http://www.gnusoftware.com. Also, in the last few weeks, I've been putting together a CD of free (as in speech) software for Windows for a volunteer project I'm involved in. You can see the contents list here.

      It's be good to get a proper project together to package this sort of thing well. It's a useful fundraiser for local projects, as well as introducing Windows users to free software, and easing them into migrating to a free OS. My introduction to free software was through Perl for Win32 - as ActiveState's port was known back then. I read the GPL, thought "Wow!", and never looked back. BTW, avoid ActivePerl; the "ActiveState Community License," or whatever it's called sucks.

    6. Re:Freedom software for Windows... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nice troll. A response is qreuired anyway.

      Mozilla the equivilent of IE? Ha!!

      May I offer the slight suggestion that you actually try out Mozilla 0.9.4? The windows version that is. And run it side by side with IE. You'll notice that not only does mozilla load as fast now that it has preloading like IE, it is also easier to use, offers more features, and supports plugins into the interface better. Oh, and to top it off, moz 0.9.4 hasn't crashed (or even glitched) a single time in weeks of use. Not a single time.

      Apache/Perl to IIS/ASP? Well, you may have something there, but not by much and only in the area of security/speed. (There's a lot to be said for ease of use in the corporate world!).

      Oh boy. Have you even installed apache once? You don't have to compile it all by hand you know. On my debian system it's one command to install and setup the default install over the internet. One command! And a simple one at that. And you're not even required to type that command if you don't want to, since there are lots of GUI programs that let you point and click your way into nirvana.
      Do you really think that over 60 percent (and climbing) of the internet sites would run on apache if it was worse than IIS? Just go look at the big ISP's, and see what they're running. If I was a better, I'd make a juicy bet out of this that it's not IIS.

      You're right about openoffice and gimp though. They're not as good as their Windows counterparts. But remember, photoshop is not an MS product. Your point that MS makes better software therefore is diluted even further.

      Basically the only truth you've said to back up your statement of MS being superior in software development to the open source community is that openoffice doesn't do as much as MS office. Well, bravo! Did you discover that all on your own? Newsflash: it doesn't need to offer as much as MS office. MS's own studies have shown most people use only a fraction of the features in Office. To capture a sizeable portion of the market all OpenOffice needs to do is offer the portion of features that most people use. Does openoffice 6 do that? I don't know, I don't think so, but it can't be that far off.

    7. Re:Freedom software for Windows... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you dig around a bit you can find a prepackaged windows version of the gimp. It's pretty decent for a port. And it doesn't reach up to the ankles of photoshop, but it sure beats MS Paint :)

    8. Re:Freedom software for Windows... by Jason+Earl · · Score: 2

      The difference, of course, is that Open Office is Free Software. Meaning, of course, that if AOL were to get too heavy handed their customers could simply get the software from somewhere else.

      The only reason that consumers currently put up with Microsoft (especially other large corporations) is that they have billions of dollars tied up in Microsoft document formats. If Open Office (or Star Office) were to take MS Office's place then your software vendor wouldn't have that kind of leverage. After all, you could get the software from any number of other vendors. All of which would have exactly the same access to the source code, and all of whom would be happy to take your money.

      Microsoft gives us no such choice.

      Star Office is going to become more widely distributed. Either the OEMs are going to give it away with new PCs, or perhaps AOL or someone else will give it away with their CDs like you propose.

      Either way there are simply too many companies that are gunning for a piece of Microsoft for an opportunity like this to go unused.

    9. Re:Freedom software for Windows... by g_bit · · Score: 1
      [Mozilla]...is also easier to use, offers more features, and supports plugins into the interface better

      Umm, how could you possibly say that Moz is easier to use? Yes, I have installed it...


      • My first session of use with it the address bar stopped working, not letting me type anything into it, only allowing me to pick from the list of history items.
      • The wheel button doesn't work to scroll the page when you press it down (it *finally* works when you scroll the wheel though!).
      • Even with the quick launch enabled it still starts up slower than IE.
      • Load times are slower than IE.
      • There's no keyboard shortcut to jump up to the address bar. As a matter of fact the help file has no reference for keyboard shortcuts period (now *that's* ease of use!)
      • On my 3rd use the Flash plugin and the toolbars stopped working.
      • There's no obvious way to customize the tool bars, you can't move them around, there's no fullscreen mode.
      • Shall I go on?

      Oh, and to top it off, moz 0.9.4 hasn't crashed (or even glitched) a single time in weeks of use. Not a single time.

      Well, if that's how you're measuring the success of Mozilla, then you've just conceded that IE is a much better product!



      Oh boy. Have you even installed apache once?

      Yes, I have on Redhat, NT, and Win2k. It sucked hardcore at all times due to crappy documentation, and lack of a standard interface to administer it (I don't enjoy editing numerous text files spread out around the system to control it!). This is what I was talking about with 'ease of use'. I don't want to hunt around to find a 3rd party gui to interface with it either. The only reason it's faster too is because IIS' default install includes a lot of support for things that most people don't use (index server, com+, etc.), and as for security, IIS default install is at fault too. (I happen to be a good administrator keeping up w/ security patches.)



      Basically the only truth you've said to back up your statement of MS being superior in software development to the open source community is that openoffice doesn't do as much as MS office...it doesn't need to offer as much as MS office...most people use only a fraction of the features in Office...Does openoffice 6 do that? I don't know, I don't think so, but it can't be that far off.

      Okay, then let me add to my point...since I've taken the opportunity to install OO6 and you obviously haven't.


      • The MSOffice suite offers more in the way of document formats of all types. This hardly falls under the category of a frilly feature that people don't use.
      • The MSOffice suite opens things a *lot* faster even *without* preloading it.
      • MSOffice comes with *more* AND *better looking* programs.
      • The OO6 install crashed on the first box I installed it on (Not installing that crap on my main workstation!).
      • Calc 6.0 has numerous calculation defects and has much less support for scripting (gee, nobody uses scripting features of Excel do they?)
      • Poor documentation compared with MSOffice.
      • Clipboard support sucks (doesn't work between apps!)
      • There's A LOT less support for OLE in Windows, a standard windows interface mind you.
      • It's ugly.

      Don't be too hard on yourself for being completely wrong, it's only a beta and cannot be compared to a package that's been so tightly integrated into over 60% of the business in the world. I'm sure when the next release comes out it'll be taking over where MSOffice leaves off (snicker ;).

  39. OpenOffice reads MS documents better than MS by ryanvm · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Whether or not OpenOffice 6 has been released (apparently it has not); I can tell you that it is really starting to look good as an MS Office replacement.

    I recently had a user with a corrupted MS Excel spreadsheet that would immediately crash Excel every time it was opened. I tried Excel 2000, Excel 97, Excel Viewer, and nothing worked.

    So, I tried to open it with the Win32 version of OpenOffice build 638. Hmmm, so far so good - it opened with no problems. I saved it as a native OpenOffice document; reopened it in OpenOffice; and exported it as an Excel document. Finally, I tried to open it with Excel and it worked like a charm!

    So if nothing else, OpenOffice makes a nifty file repairer for MS Office documents. ;-)

    1. Re:OpenOffice reads MS documents better than MS by PeterBecker · · Score: 1

      I often used SO5.x to convert old WinWord 2.0 files into a format Office 97 could understand. SO is a quite good conversion tool for other things, too -- turning EMF into EPS, one bitmap format into the other etc.

      Unfortunately it is huge and not easy to use for this, I use different tools for image conversion (mainly IrfanView) but if someone comes up with old text documents from whatever word processor -- give SO/OO a try.

      --
      -- CAUTION: Don't read this posting.
  40. Re:Wow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's sheer programmin' genius, that is. I wunder who ever thought of that.

  41. Coding practices by Earlybird · · Score: 5, Insightful
    • ... sampling showed very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed ...
    Um. Like who doesn't do this? Due to the nature of C++, this is required to avoid redefinitions that would otherwise occur on multiple inclusions. Given this, it has little to do with reducing compile time; for that you use pre-compiled headers (support for which isn't expected in GCC until 3.1 or later).

    To evaluate coding practices, I would look at

    • Consistent coding conventions: syntax, identifiers, directory layout etc.

    • Presence of good comments (German ones don't count ;).

    • Application of good OO principles (which, contrary to a surprising number of people's opinions, apply to all languages, not merely explicitly OO languages like C++), such as encapsulation, modularization, etc.

    • Application of good OO patterns (GangOfFour-style).

    • Use of interfaces ("abstract base classes" in Bjarne terminology) to decouple API interfaces from their implementation.

    • Presence of unit tests.

    • Presence of assertions and other kinds of code guards that contribute to "self-documenting" and "self-testing" code.

    • etc.

    1. Re:Coding practices by nusuth · · Score: 1

      I was happy for a moment for having used very good coding practices since day one. You didn't have to spoil it. I wonder if the excellent coding practice of using ++ instead of +=1 were used in the code too. I would be really impressed if they did.

      --

      Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!

    2. Re:Coding practices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Presence of good comments (German ones don't count ;).

      Unless your fucking German.... sheesh.

    3. Re:Coding practices by SamBeckett · · Score: 1

      The author was, in particular, talking of this kind of behavior:

      foo.h
      -----
      #ifndef _FOO_H
      #define _FOO_H
      class Foo { ... };
      #endif

      foo.cpp
      #ifndef _FOO_H
      #include "foo.h"
      #endif

      Most C++ coders generally leave out the #ifndef/#endif pair in the actual .cpp file.

    4. Re:Coding practices by Phil+Wilkins · · Score: 1

      I thought GCC could spot this particular construct automagically, and didn't open the file the second time.

    5. Re:Coding practices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      ... sampling showed very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed ...

      Um. Like who doesn't do this? Due to the nature of C++, this is required to avoid redefinitions that would otherwise occur on multiple inclusions. Given this, it has little to do with reducing compile time; for that you use pre-compiled headers (support for which isn't expected in GCC until 3.1 or later).


      Though I am not certain since I haven't looked at the OpenOffice code, I think the original poster may have been refering to the difference between putting the ifdefs inside the actual header and putting the ifdefs inside the actual C file, like this:

      #ifdef _FILE_H_
      #include "file.h"
      #endif
      The later approach is actually a little more efficent because the file "file.h" need not even be opened if it has already been include. With the other way, the preprocessor muist open the file before it can know to discard it...
    6. Re:Coding practices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Good coding style goes far further than that.
      Good goding style in the sence of ++ vs +=1 would
      be to always use ++ or always use +=1
      (please not that ++ may very very well not be the
      same as +=1)

    7. Re:Coding practices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You think ?
      Fuck man .... after all these posts on Slashdot you still claim that you can think ...
      Amazing, simply amazing.

  42. Boring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    *yawn* Yeah, no-one ever said that before.

  43. any word as to when this will make it into Debian? by evilned · · Score: 2

    Just kinda wondering when debian packages will start showing up in unstable. I heard awhile ago that it may be sometime before that occurs, but I havent heard any news recently.

    --

    "My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett

  44. damn by tplayford · · Score: 1

    I seem to be having a problem with StarOffice and OpenOffice 6, it all installs fine but when it's run, selecting any of the menus (file edit etc) causes a "internal program error" and crashes!
    Anyone else have a problem like this?

    1. Re:damn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


      I am having this same problem on my machine which has SuSE 7.1 and XFree86 4.1.0

      The menus work just fine, however on another machine running Mandrake 7.1 with XFree86 3.3.6

      Under XFree 4.1, all the fonts are anti-aliased, so documents look beautiful, but the menu crashing thing is a show stopper.

      Maybe 6.0 menus don't like the newer XFree86?

      5.2 runs just fine on the machine. Is there a log file for star office?

    2. Re:damn by tplayford · · Score: 1

      Well I'm using Debian sid (unstable) with xfree 4.1.x etc. But I know several people with the same set up as me and it works fine for them so it may just be missing libraries. I don't think staroffice generates a log file :(

    3. Re:damn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i wonder which libraries are being used on a mouse click in staroffice. maybe one can tell by looking at the code for openoffice (the same thing happens for both star and open office), and finding the menu drawing routine?

    4. Re:damn by tplayford · · Score: 1

      Yes that seems like a good idea although the source is huge! I've been looking at the openoffice mailing lists, it seems that glibc may be the problem, you might try upgarding (it didn't work for me :( )

  45. The largest open-source project in the world by cgreuter · · Score: 4, Insightful


    (at 3.7 million lines, OpenOffice is by far the largest open source project in the world)


    I wasn't sure about this, so I took a look at the linux kernel source:

    $ cd /usr/src/linux
    $ find . -name \*.[ch] -exec cat \{\} \; | wc -l
    3130679

    So OpenOffice is bigger than the Linux kernel, but only by around 15%. I don't know if you can say it's by far the largest.

    Yeah, I know I'm being pedantic.

    dash dash Chris

    1. Re:The largest open-source project in the world by be-fan · · Score: 2

      Of course, a lot (actually a majority) of the Linux kernel is drivers. A lot of drivers look very similar (cut & paste), so a straight linecount probably isn't the best measurement.

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
    2. Re:The largest open-source project in the world by Turmio · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, Linux 2.4.10 is ~3.7 million lines of code, if you measure the way you did. You forgot to include the assembly code (*.S files).

      (07:15:17)(tj@ganga)(/usr/src/linux)$ find . -name \*.[chS] -exec cat \{\} \; | wc -l
      3695460


      And Mozilla isn't very far behind either with its 3515317 lines of code contained in *.{cpp,c,h,idl} of just cvsupped tree.

      Someone want to check how big are the latest glibc, gcc and XFree86? Probably over 1M lines of code each.

      /me is even more pedantic :)

    3. Re:The largest open-source project in the world by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What about emacs? It could be BILLIONS of lines.

  46. Unicode my ass by Moritz+Moeller+-+Her · · Score: 3, Informative

    I guess MS also includes copy of the last document I scanned, an encrypted list of the last 30 URLS you clicked plus what software was installed. Here is what an SO-6 document looks like (hint: unzip it)

    As you can see unicode is used here as well. Also READABLE XML. Looks okay doesn't it?

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE office:document-content PUBLIC "-//OpenOffice.org//DTD OfficeDocument 1.0//EN" "office.dtd">
    <office:document-content xmlns:office="http://openoffice.org/2000/office" xmlns:style="http://openoffice.org/2000/style" xmlns:text="http://openoffice.org/2000/text" xmlns:table="http://openoffice.org/2000/table" xmlns:draw="http://openoffice.org/2000/drawing" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:number="http://openoffice.org/2000/datastyle " xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:chart="http://openoffice.org/2000/chart" xmlns:dr3d="http://openoffice.org/2000/dr3d" xmlns:math="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:form="http://openoffice.org/2000/form" xmlns:script="http://openoffice.org/2000/script" office:class="text" office:version="1.0">
    <office:script/>
    <office:font-decls>
    <style:font-decl style:name="Arial Unicode MS" fo:font-family="&apos;Arial Unicode MS&apos;" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
    <style:font-decl style:name="HG Mincho Light J" fo:font-family="&apos;HG Mincho Light J&apos;" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
    <style:font-decl style:name="Thorndale" fo:font-family="Thorndale" style:font-family-generic="roman" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
    <style:font-decl style:name="Albany" fo:font-family="Albany" style:font-family-generic="swiss" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
    </office:font-decls>
    <office:automatic-styles/>
    <office:body>
    <text:sequence-decls>
    <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Illustration"/>
    <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Table"/>
    <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Text"/>
    <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Drawing"/>
    </text:sequence-decls>
    <text:p text:style-name="Heading">This</text:p>
    <text:h text:style-name="Heading 1" text:level="1">IS</text:h>
    <text:p text:style-name="Text body"/>
    <text:h text:style-name="Heading 10" text:level="10">wetzgdfhdfh</text:h>
    <text:p text:style-name="Marginalia">TITLE</text:p>
    <text:p text:style-name="Marginalia"/>
    <text:p text:style-name="Salutation">My FRIEND</text:p>
    <text:p text:style-name="List Indent">Klar?</text:p>
    <text:p text:style-name="List Indent"/>
    <text:p text:style-name="Signature">Testpeter</text:p>
    </office:body>
    </office:document-content>

    --
    Moritz
    1. Re:Unicode my ass by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 1

      Do you know what Unicode is? It's an encoding that stores two bytes per character. If the whole thing is readable XML, then it is NOT stored in Unicode format, it is stored in ASCII.

      --
      Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
    2. Re:Unicode my ass by ZxCv · · Score: 2

      Whether it is stored as actual Unicode or is encoded Unicode in ASCII format is essentially irrelevant. Yes, the file is ASCII, but that doesn't mean it can't contain Unicode characters-- it just means they would be encoded as ASCII characters, meaning (roughly of course) the same 2-to-1 ratio in size of the content.

      --

      Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
    3. Re:Unicode my ass by jonabbey · · Score: 2

      The documents I've examined by breaking out a .sxw file do include high-bit numbers, so I'm quite certain they are using Unicode. StarOffice writes its XML files out in UTF-8, which uses ASCII-compatible char codes for things which can be expressed in ASCII, then busts out with multiple-byte sequences to express characters from higher in the Unicode range.

    4. Re:Unicode my ass by Moritz+Moeller+-+Her · · Score: 2
      Here is what AskJeeves says about "UTF-8" (which is as you can easily see the character code of the SO-6 XML doc I pasted here.

      UTF-8 encoding:

      UTF-8 is an efficient encoding of Unicode character-strings that recognizes the fact that the majority of text-based communications are in ASCII, and it therefore optimizes the encoding of these characters. ... See also RFC2044 for details.

      It IS unicode.

      --
      Moritz
    5. Re:Unicode my ass by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 2

      UTF-8 is UTF-8, not Unicode. Note that it is an encoding of Unicode character strings, not Unicode character strings.

      I'm not making a judgement on whether one is better than the other, in fact, I like UTF-8 better. But it's an explanation for why Microsoft's files are larger.

      It's also worth pointing out that Microsoft embraced Unicode before UTF-8 became a standard.

      --
      Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
    6. Re:Unicode my ass by vidarh · · Score: 2
      Sigh. Unicode is the character set. The specific encodings of Unicode, including the 16 bit encodings (and the 32 bit encodings) have other names. And the 8 bit encoding is UTF-8.

      If you're going to be pedantic, Microsoft don't store Unicode any more than Star Office does.

    7. Re:Unicode my ass by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 1

      Dump out a Word document. You will see each character takes 16 bits. The original Unicode standard specified 16 bits for each character. For example, here is Unicode version 2.1.8. Note that each character is 16 bits. That's not just another "encoding", that is the official standard. The whole point of Unicode is a unique code for each letter.

      Other standards have cropped up to deal with the PITA of dealing with 16 bit chracters, including UTF-8. But UTF-8 is more of a compression encoding.

      Now, they may have moved to 32 bits, I'm not sure. I haven't paid attention to Unicode for a number of years. According to the unicode.org site, they've recently added a whole slew of new symbols, which brought them up to around 94000 symbols which obviously exceed 16 bits.

      --
      Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
  47. Re:Wow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My God, that's C Programming 101.

  48. It's a notbook by Penguinoflight · · Score: 1

    If you're comparing against MS Office, it's a unfair comparison, because they load up most of it when windows starts. Also, this is a Notebook computer, remember that the hard drives in them are very slow. So, on a desktop with 550mhz desktop with 256mb of ram it ought to be more like 8 seconds... especially if you aren't running kde :-)

    --
    "And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
    1 John 4:14
    1. Re:It's a notbook by morris57 · · Score: 1

      I'm just comparing it to my patience tolerance. In 20 seconds, I could launch soffice, leave my office, take a whiz, come back and wait for it to finish loading.

  49. That was quick... by cluening · · Score: 1

    Wow... The beta was released just two days ago, and the final product is already out. How about we find out if what we post is even realistic before doing so?

    --
    Posted from the wireless couch.
  50. Uninstaller? by Tachys · · Score: 2

    Does the Windows verison of OpenOffice have an uninstaller?

    1. Re:Uninstaller? by ZxCv · · Score: 2

      I'm running Win2k Pro and after installing OpenOffice 638, there's definitely an entry for it in Add/Remove Programs.

      --

      Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
    2. Re:Uninstaller? by serbanp · · Score: 1

      The SO's setup program allows you to uninstall it. But why would you do this?

      Serban

  51. Use Emacs or Vim to jot down ideas while SO loads by yerricde · · Score: 1

    i realize that these programs have different aims, but one of the nice things about stickies on the mac or notepad on windows (not that it compares to stickies)

    The rough Mac equivalent to notepad would be simpletext, although this almost infringes on wordpad's territory, with styled text and all.

    aside from being built in, is that it launches in around 1 second. sometimes you just need to get it down.

    There's no reason you couldn't leave an Emacs instance open or launch Vim to jot down the start of an idea while OpenOffice loads. Both programs run on Windows or Unix. Heck, on my win98 box, Emacs for Windows launches faster than wordpad (I've timed them).

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  52. Re:any word as to when this will make it into Debi by redcliffe · · Score: 0

    I second that. I submitted a request against the package wnpp a while back but still haven't heard anything. Why can't it be released as part of Debian?

    David

  53. On StarOffice complexity and the XML file format by jonabbey · · Score: 3, Informative

    To the poster who was asking why you needed such a huge code base for a text editor, try loading a complex MS Word doc and then save it using StarOffice 6's native file format, 'sxw'. The sxw format is actually a pkzip file which contains a bunch of XML files and the associated image resources.

    If you look at the content.xml file, you'll get an idea of the vast amount of formatting and structural information that is retained in an MS Word style file.

  54. Here by wirefarm · · Score: 2

    I did a little write-up a few weeks ago when I installed it - this page has a small screenshot that shows the button layout and a document that uses anti-aliased, truetype fonts.
    (Yes this is the Linux version, running Gnome...)

    http://mmdc.net/linux/office.shtml

    Cheers,
    Jim in Tokyo

    --
    -- My Weblog.
  55. Native format is pkzipped, is why it's small by jonabbey · · Score: 2

    If you do a 'zipinfo' on the .sxw file, you'll see that it is a pkzip file with all of the data contained in xml files and attendant graphics files.

    The file format isn't so terribly space efficient, it's just compressed. Getting to actually see the contents of the file and understand what the structure of the file really looks like is pretty neat-o.

  56. Re:any word as to when this will make it into Debi by cymen · · Score: 1

    I second that. I submitted a request against the package wnpp a while back but still haven't heard anything. Why can't it be released as part of Debian?

    Apparently OpenOffice relies on jdk > 1.1 (or whatever can be freely redistributed in binary form) for some functionality. See an old thread here. I hope we get something soon...

  57. There already exists such distribution by yerricde · · Score: 2, Informative

    Is there a freedom software distro for Microsoft Windows. Such a thing would be a great boon. They should be everywhere like AOL cd's.

    There exists such a distribution of GNU software compiled for Win32, available in the UK. Too bad cheapbytes doesn't seem to sell anything similar. However, cheapbytes does sell this CD containing DJGPP (a 32-bit DOS C compiler) and "LLC" (LCC?) for Win32.

    What you're really missing is a business model. AOL's model is to give away the bisks and sell the connection.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
    1. Re:There already exists such distribution by Tim+Macinta · · Score: 2
      What you're really missing is a business model. AOL's model is to give away the bisks and sell the connection.

      Maybe that is the business model. What if one of AOL's largest competitors, like Earthlink, started carpet bombing the US with their own CDs? Most people are at the point where they just ignore free ISP CDs, but what if a free CD set itself apart by also offering free software whose equivalent would cost over $1,000? Earthlink could say "get the equivalent of $1,000 in software free with this CD with no catch - and by the way, if you also want free notifications when new versions of this free software comes out, sign up for Earthlink."

      This could be much bigger, actually... Why wouldn't any company that has a Windows service/app to sell entice people to try out their stuff by bundling it on a CD with a lot of great free software? A lot of people would actually want to get the CD in order to get the software, and the company that put it together then has their foot in the door to sell their own stuff. Once one company does it, it will only be a matter of time before every other company does it in order to keep up. This could be huge - somebody should start this snowball rolling.

    2. Re:There already exists such distribution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why wouldn't any company that has a Windows service/app to sell entice people to try out their stuff by bundling it on a CD with a lot of great free software?

      Because Microsoft would open a can of whoop-ass on them. In the windows world there exists only one rule: "you worship MS". If you live by that, you can get by, if you cross it, you're screwed (just ask IBM, Lotus, Netscape and the many others who were bitten by it)

    3. Re:There already exists such distribution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      cd user - I just installed this openoffice software and I don't know how to use it.

      earthlink support - We don't support that software it just comes free on our cd

      cd user - What! Why did you even put it there if you can't help me with it!

      earthlink support - It is just a promo.

      cd user - click!

      This is why AOL / Earthlink won't do this, the support issue. Lusers believe if it comes on your cd then you have to support it. Trust me, we have to support Acrobat because it comes on some of our cds. Tell them that you can't help and they should go take a class or call Adobe and they get upset 90% or the time.

  58. Wait some more time. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    I downloaded staroffice 638C yesterday.

    It takes significant time to load (appox. 1 and a half minutes) to load!!!

    Bet

  59. OS/2 version by os2fan · · Score: 2
    I wonder if they continue to support OS/2, and be truely cross-platform.

    --
    OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
  60. and in return ... by Macka · · Score: 1


    .. you throw them back an invoice (created in OO) showing how much it cost to buy. They can compare your big fat Zero against their 3 figure sum for MS Office at their leasure.

  61. Desktop by AlgUSF · · Score: 1

    Thank God Star Desktop Is Gone!!!
    I don't want a little windoze with my Linux... :-)

    --


    I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
    1. Re:Desktop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One nice thing about it, though... I was playing around with using it as the shell for an elementary school student lab. It provided a pretty good interface that didn't allow too much system control to the student, while providing all the functionality they needed (word processing, surfing the web, etc).

      But it was annoying the way it took over in other in general.

  62. IHATETHESUBJECT by oddo · · Score: 0

    Hm, I think I'll stick to AbiWord. It crashes as much, but it starts much more quickly.

    OpenOffice takes about 25 seconds under normal system load, whilst AbiWord takes no more than 3, and has sufficient functionality (except for utterly worthless font support). OpenOffice crashed immediately when I was to save a presentation.

    --
    give me bongo
  63. Re:OS/2 is dead by os2fan · · Score: 3, Insightful
    To me, it seems that you must be living some sheltered life, using MSN to filter your news or something.

    From Microspeak Universal Translator at www.OS2HQ.com

    Dead
    Microspeak: disappeared; no longer in use.
    Real Meaning: a product that does not have monopoly market share.
    Usage: "It's only a matter of time before Netscape Navigator is *dead*."
    Agenda: To make everyone think that as soon as a Microsoft product is leveraged into a high market share, all the alternatives instantly vaporize.

    IBM pull more profit from OS/2 then RedHat makes revenue. It is better supported, and was the original inspiration that made Linux possible. I mean, TeamOS2 was the first grass-roots movement that showed that people could move an OS by themselves.

    Sure, Linux is based on bits and peices from free UNIX stuff, but there's a lot of OS/2 and TeamOS2 mentality in it.

    OS/2 is the future now. If OS/2 dies now, maybe the whole industry dies in five year's time.

    And, by the way, it's a pretty narrow-minded person who can only spell a word one way.

    --
    OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
  64. Still Ugly by conceptdelta · · Score: 1

    Okay, OpenOffice is better than it was before (i.e. no stupid pseudo-Windows Start button).

    Unfortunately, it is still FUGLY!

    Any idea if/when they might update the user interface so it's as sweet looking as AbiWord?

  65. screenshot and text art by hack0rama · · Score: 1

    I tried the 6.0 beta as well as the Openoffice latest build with some of my .doc and .xls files and most of the things opened fine. Also the export to .doc files worked very well.

    One feature that's missing is the "text-art" facility in Word. They open fine, only without the extra properties defined by text-art. I dont know if Openoffice/Sun has any plans for any text-art kind of feature ( I could not find anything similar in 6.0 beta ).

    Here's a screenshot showing imported .doc and .xls files.

  66. Sure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
    very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include

    Sure, it can't import a tab delimted text file correctly into the spreadsheet, but hey it has preprocessor directives that every C book tells you to do.

  67. Re:Photos? Partially OT... by wirefarm · · Score: 2

    Ok - I know that was flamebait and pretty weak at that, but you are wrong. (On two points.) I am only answering because I hate when people spread misinformation and FUD.

    1 - Open Office Does Run On Windows. Check the web page. It works great on Windows.

    2 - Linux can do screen captures: See below.

    3 - OS coders have big fingers? - probably true, but you know what they say about people with big hands...

    Screen captures:
    I had no trouble at all getting a screen capture of the Linux desktop. The Gimp has a simple utility for doing it that works much like "SnagIT" for capturing screens in windows. I could map it to the 'Print Screen' button if I cared that much...

    You spend an awful lot of time and energy bashing Linux - (221 posts is quite a lot) Unfortunately, they seem to always get modded down to -1, so, as is the case for most readers, they are filtered out and I never see them. (Pity - I love a good flamewar...)
    You seem to have used Linux in the past - did it make you feel inadequate? Go get yourself a copy of Mandrake or another 'Newbie' distros and have someone help you install it. Then at least you can bash Linux with up-to-date information.
    When you complain about the lack of features that were added like 3 years ago, you tend to sound like an idiot. Trust me there are plenty of things in the current versions to bash.
    Don't worry, even if you get to like it, you can still flame people for using Emacs...

    Cheers,
    Jim

    --
    -- My Weblog.
  68. ++ and += 1 are the same by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Any coder who can't tell the difference between "+= 1" and "++" shouldn't be coding. How many lines of code have you actually written in your life? 100?

  69. Like whatever, professor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed ...
    Um. Like who doesn't do this?
    Um. Like me. Like I don't don't do this. Like all C++ compilers from the last 5 years, like, already like do this for me, like, automatically like. Like, I prefer to have fewer lines of code instead of like redundant, like, include guards.

  70. Staroffice would be better if Java were used by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    and much more better quality codes - less line for sure.

  71. Re:YHBT by os2fan · · Score: 2
    I still use OS/2, DOS, Windows, BeOS, and Linux. It's how I got my IT job, actually, and how I choose to record my cdroms. Oh well.

    Spelling came before spelling rules. Truely is not incorrect, it is just not the "correct" spelling. But it has only one meaning, and you truly parsed it, sister.

    I suppose you are an MSCE, who is lockstepped into believing what Redmond tells you. If you don't see what's going on, how else will you see what's coming. I saw all this coming in OS/2 five or six years ago. Like I said, OS/2 is the future now, then as now.

    Proof: IBM supports OS/2 to paying customers and ignores the home user. Isn't that where MS is heading.... Windows NT is just a downgraded version of OS/2 v 1.3.

    --
    OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
  72. Re:YHBT by mali_kurac · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I suppose you are an MSCE

    No, he's a Troll, and you just took his bait hook line and sinker, not once but twice.

    Nice work, fella!

  73. Re:YHBT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Truely is not incorrect, it is just not "correct"...

    Did you really just say that?

    Isn't that where MS is heading

    Umm...no, like them or hate them, they continue to support the home market quite vigorously. The investments in WinME, WinXP Home, DirectX, Encarta, etc. are huge and these are all for the home user.

    Windows NT is just a downgraded version of OS/2 v 1.3

    No, it's not! It was originally based on VMS, you 'tard!

    I just realized that I'm trying to reason with a moron! I'm going to bed...........

  74. Re:any word as to when this will make it into Debi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Blackdown J2SE 1.3 has been in incoming for two weeks now. Let's just hope it gets transferred into the official archives soon. Check this message on the debian-java list.

  75. Re:YHBT by os2fan · · Score: 2
    It was so. Cases in point:

    1. HPFS and NTFS are both partition type 07
    2. NT and OS/2 both write "EA DATA. SF" files in the root directory of FAT partitions on floppies.
    3. MS reccomends deleting the OS/2 subsystem to make the system secure, but not the DOS system. This would only be meaningful if OS/2 bypasses the file system.
    4. The WinNT 3.x boot sector and the OS/2 1.3 boot sector are IDENTICAL, including the OS/2 messages.
    5. Technet has no articles on how to add VMS commands to NT. They do describe how to add OS/2 commands, how to get OS/2 rexx &c to run under NT. These work under Win2K as well. I have run OS/2 commands under NT.
    6. The original working name for Windows NT was OS/2 NT.
    7. Windows NT help, the resource kit &c all speak of a product MS OS/2. There really was a product of this name, it was absorbed into Windows NT, and there were plugins that support the OS/2 1.x PM programs.
    8. The size of the "OS/2" subsystem is mysteriously small, compared even to the DOS one, but this is easily accounted for, if you assume it passes many calls down to the kernel: that is, the kernel is based on OS/2.
    On the other hand, there is relatively little going for the arguement that it is based on VMS, apart from some wishful thinking, or because OS/2 might also be so based.

    I mean, the NAME might be, but then one can make a program "user friendly" by so stamping it.

    --
    OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
  76. No new build? Balooney! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes, there is a new build yet, and for some time at that - OpenOffice.org 638C wich *is* different from 638.

  77. It can. by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 2

    GCC performs that optimization.

  78. It doesn't matter with GCC by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 2

    GCC recognizes the construct, and doesn't open the file the second time.

  79. Emacs by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 2

    Emacs 21 is 359801 lines of C code, and 795987 lines of Lisp code. So it is only about a third the size of OpenOffice or Linux, even though it does so much more.

    Since you asked.

  80. Let's Clear a few things up ... by TheFuzzy · · Score: 1
    Slashdotters:


    As a member of the Project, let me clear a few things up:


    OpenOffice.org is an Open-Source project sponsored by Sun and Collabnet. It is currently Build 638C, and has not even reached version 1.0. This is mostly because we've sepnd a lot of time replacing proprietary componets from StarOffice, such as the spellchecker, fonts, and conversion filters.


    StarOffice is a commerical Sun product, available for free download, which is currently beta-ing its version 6.0. Most of this vesrion is code from OpenOffice.org Build 638 with the addition of the above-mentioned proprietary compnents.


    Recarding all of the compaints on features and slow load time: If there's something you'd like to see different about OpenOffice.org, then join the project and write some code, darn it! This is Open Source.


    We desperately need more coders from the community. Please, sign up and contribute!


    -Josh Berkus
    OpenOffice.Org Marketing Project

  81. Re:YHBT by dbremner · · Score: 1
    Microsoft OS/2 began as a joint project w/IBM.
    In 1988, Microsoft recruited Dave Cutler and his VMS programming team from Digital.
    The internals of Windows NT are quite similar to VMS as a result, Cutler used what he knew. OS/2 1.x was a 16bit OS, and that's when the split occurred.

    Points 1-4 are a result of that, NTFS is a descendant of HPFS with variable clusters size, Unicode support, and other improvements.

    Point 5, of course not, the system design is similar, but not identical. There is also a question of architecture dependence.

    Point 6, it was Microsoft OS/2, the name change came later.

    Point 7. yes os2ss.exe in \winnt\system32, it supports 16-bit OS/2 1.x programs, only a fool (e.g. Netscape) abandons working code. The PM libraries were dropped after 4.0.
    On the other hand, there is relatively little going for the arguement that it is based on VMS, apart from some wishful thinking, or because OS/2 might also be so based.
    You mean aside from the fact that the same man designed both systems, the kernel structure and APIs are similar, and VMS + 1 = WNT?

    --

    Life is a psychology experiment gone awry.
  82. Oh yeah. by g_bit · · Score: 1
    Nice troll. A response is qreuired anyway.

    Oh yeah, but when someone is arguing against M$ they're not a troll? At least I have a f*cking account on /. you Anonymous Coward!


    You can't even spell required you idiot!

  83. Re:Oh my god... by os2fan · · Score: 2
    My views were based on Technet articles, the Windows NT resource kit, and actually seeing NT4 and Win2K in action. Can't get more official than that. :)

    On the other hand, you offer me a MEGO ad.

    --
    OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.