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Sizing Up StarOffice 6.0
The installation was dead simple, and therefore better than most software: I popped in the CD, and with about 10 minutes of point-click-whirrring, the software was installed. The only notable aspect of this process is that the CD included (and popped onto my hard drive, with prompting) a new Java runtime environment (Sun's standard JRE, version 1.3.1). The helpful timer that accompanies the install is conservative, which is nice -- it started out estimating 14 minutes for the "transferring files" portion, but quickly dropped down to less than five.
Having not touched StarOffice for a while, it's nice to see the features in OpenOffice trickle in -- most importantly, getting rid of the monolithic desktop makes it actually usable to those of us who hate screen-hijacking software. And at least on this 1 GHz, 256MB laptop, even "bloatware" features like auto-correction are snappy enough not to be bothersome.
Two small notes on Roblimo's review for anyone curious about using SO under Windows: The Windows version does claim to open "WordPerfect (Win) 6.0-7.0" documents, which is at least a start toward WordPerfect compatibility. And under Windows, the nice X-Window style one-click text transfer isn't an option. One more note for 6.0 Beta testers: you can download a patch from Sun to extend the life of the beta from March 31 to June 3 2002.
I never had any problems at all with 6.0 beta... In fact, I'm still using it! Not a single crash, and much better than 5.2
Just because I AM paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get me.
"The much anticipated StarOffice 6.0 for Linux is now available for download to Mandrake Linux Club Members. We are proud to announce that Club members will be among the first Linux users to have the privilege of using the newest version of this premiere Linux Office Sui
te. Since StarOffice 6.0 has a new licensing model (it is no longer free as were previous versions), MandrakeSoft is currently offering the download service to MandrakeClub "Silver" members (and above). To provide Mandrake Club members the opportunity to reach Silver status, MandrakeSoft has set up a simple upgrade procedure.
StarOffice 6.0 is comprised of five distinct components:
StarOffice Writer is a professional wordprocessor; StarOffice Calc is a spreadsheet application; StarOffice Impress is a multimedia presentation tool; StarOffice Draw is a 3D graphics and special effects designer; StarOffice Adabas is a user-friendly database.
The new features include a new XML-based document format that results in dramatically reduced filesizes (compared to StarOffice 5.2), improved file filters and support for OLE objects that provides excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office documents, new font rendering, an improved user interface that makes StarOffice 6.0 more intuitive and friendly than ever, better system integration with other applications that allows, for instance, the ability to send office documents with an email client directly from StarOffice, and more!
StarOffice 6.0 is supported under the following Mandrake Linux versions (x86 only): Mandrake Linux 8.0, Mandrake Linux 8.1 and Mandrake Linux 8.2."
There should be a story on Slashdot soon since it mentions the recent controversy about the Mandrake Club Silver membership...
Is StarOffice 6.0 on Mandrake8.2 ISO Disk 3?
under Windows, the nice X-Window style one-click text transfer isn't an option
Don't you mean X-Windows?
I am afriad that StarOffice won't work seemlessly with Word, both opening a word document and then saving it so word can later read it. I work with others on some things and need to have this back and forth between programs. How does StarOffice do? I have played with it some but havn't yet felt like fully testing it out. What other programs does it work with in this new version?
Since "office apps" are coming up, I want to point out a friendly issue to fellow linux lovers:
Linux is not totally mainstream yet, because:
A) No adobe photoshop yet. GIMP is inferior, don't even try..
B) StarOffice is very slow, and not 100% compatible with MSOffice. Microsoft word is still the preferred word processor and such.
~shrug~
PayPal $$ if you sign up for free offers (eBay, cred cards, e
Which Toshiba? I have the 5005-S504, which is a 1.1GHz, 512MB laptop. How does Mandrake fare on it (have you installed it on there yet?). I run Mandrake 8.1 on my desktop at home, but my laptop runs XP Pro for now. Any results?
DrPascal: Not the language, the mathematician.
If I installed MS Office and found that it also installed Visual Studio without even warning, I'd start leaving horse heads in Gates' bed. So WTF is the above doing in the "good" part of the review?
Did I miss something? Is that it?
Seriously, on the monolithic desktop aspect: if they got rid of that MDI interface, that would make the tool WAY better.
Just upgrade to Silver membership, it's worth $60 ;-)
I've been running OO 641C since it was released. My machine is a PII-266 with 224 MB of RAM, so it tends to lag at times. However, SO 5.2 was never usable on this box. OO has replaced 5.1a.
.doc. I don't know if this is a good thing, a bad thing, and whether it's a reflection on the OO programmers or MS and its moving-target document formats.
.docs in case things look screwy, but I hear fewer complaints than in the past.
I'll add my voice to those cheering the death of the SO 'desktop'. What a worthless feature, a waste of everyone's time. Now I get right to the good stuff... after about 20 seconds of startup.
MS document compatibility seems much improved. Strangely, I recently had more trouble with Word users opening a 95-formatted file as opposed to a 2000/XP-formatted
Font detection seems *greatly* improved under X. OO appears to use X's own fonts as well as its internal fonts, meaning no more headaches and hacks to install TrueType fonts under SO. Printing hasn't been a problem at all, although North American users (guilty) may want to make sure the page size is set to "Letter" before printing; A4 seems to be the default.
Spell-checking is a bit loosy-goosy in detecting misspelled words, as it will sometimes stop at words with double quotes on one side or the other, but it works.
I still tend to warn people when I send them
I'm eagerly awaiting the next release of OO. I'm not sure if I'll buy Sun's StarOffice 6.0, since I'm not sure the value-add will be there, but I'm satisfied with the program the OO team has produced.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
CDW just sent me a catalog full of Sun hardware. Thats all that was in it. On page 16 and 17 there's StarOffice 5.2, $446.67 for a 10 user license.
This is an anecdote about installing it. There was no mention of how it handles Office200/XP document importing and exporting. There was no mention on how stable it was. There was no mention of how well it integrates with the KDE or Gnome desktops, cut and paste, drag and drop. There was no mention on how it's usability has evolved.
There are MUCH bigger issues with Start Office than does it install quickly or does it hog the screen. How about, can it gracefully replace MS Office for a MS Office user and if not why not?
The big three apps are Outlook, IE, and Office. We have Evolution, Mozilla and ???? A contender for the missing piece of the desktop puzzle deserves a better review than this.
So, for the time being, I'm using MSWord2k in VMware. If SO/OO can reproduce most of the functionality I need (which, for the most part, it does... I was using SO6b happily until I discovered articles going to print with typos because Word's spellchecker ignored them) then I'll happily switch.
For me, the only substantial difference between SO6 and OO641C (last time I checked) was fonts... SO6 came bundled with a few extra fonts that made it easier to interact with MSWord users. If that's the only major difference, I'm happy to use OO and rip my own fonts...
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
In a stunning upset, a Linux user that never uses MS Office thinks that OpenOffice is perfectly adequate.
That never happens. Certainly not on Slashdot.
Gimme some reviews from people whose opinions actually matter and you'll start changing mindshare. Articles like this are just preaching to the choir.
(And if you're going to compare StarOffice and OpenOffice, at least a rudimentary review of the additional features that come with StarOffice would be beneficial. Like, instead of just mentioning the database features are there, how about saying if they're any good?)
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
What I find amusing is the quote that he proofreads legal documents for his legal friends. Hey, why not do the same for stories on Slashdot?
I'm just waiting for the cost of the software to present to mgt. I've been using StarOffice6.0beta and have had no problems. The only odd thing is when saving a document to M$ .DOC it left justifies everything.
Cost to Join Mandrake Club at Silver Level to download StarOffice 6: $120.00
Cost to upgrade initial membership to Silver Level to get StarOffice 6: $60.00
Cost of a copy of StarOffice 6, Deluxe Version with documentation from local retailer: $40.00
And I should join or upgrade my membership why?
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
This link over at CNet talks about the Mandrake Club members feeling jilted.
Basically Mandrake is offering the download to the Silver members of the club. Those who joined under a lower level because "members would receive the same benefits" feel this is unfair, as they should.
'Same speed C but faster'
Is this sarcasm, or is Roblimo actually implying that Smart Tags are a good thing??
In a comparison between MS Office, this should be a huge +5 for Sun. Smart tags are idiotic and intrusive, and should not be supported in Open/Star Office ever!
Because according to the article American Tourists will find paying the Silver level membership is a good bargain. And eventually the developers at Sun can afford great luxuries they dont have now and still get the open source community to support and help them with bugs without the backlash that is felt by Microsoft.
Because you want to support Mandrake? If it was all about StarOffice, it would be called "Buy StarOffice from the Mandrake store" not "Join Mandrake Club"
sic transit gloria mundi
it's a Satellite 1005-S157, the cheap-oh model :)
;) Try explaning even to a retired engineer where to find the 2nd and 3rd ISOs after he's closed the browser sometime! I'll be back there later in the week to grab the other ISOs and burn the CDs.
It has 256 megs of RAM, 1.06GHz celeron, NiCD battery (oh well), 15GB hard drive (eh, I can't complain much, my hard drives are all mostly empty anyhow).
For 900 bucks (800 after mail-in rebate), I am pretty pleased with it, but the Linux aspect is the only sticky thing -- the chipset in here is the i830M. That means it's supported in XF86 4.2, but not earlier. I'd like to do a clean Mandrake install, though, and since I want 8.2 anyhow, I'm downloading that. Rather, I started the download at my dad's place 30 miles from here on his cable modem
I'm told that this model works great under 8.2, though. Should, anyhow -- XF86 is the hangup with 8.1, which otherwise goes on fine. Lovely unless you want to use the GIMP, KWord, etc.
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I wrote an entire term paper at home on SO 6.0beta, and then brought it to school and opened it with MS Office and printed it. The .doc file worked perfect, so I have absolutely no complaints on SO 6.0beta.
When SO 6.0 comes out in retail stores, I will purchase it.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
I have been using SO for about a year now. I've been running the 6.0 beta since it became available on my SUSE box and on my NT box.
I do a lot of volunteer work and whenever it comes time to shoot documents to different folks- some have office, some have works, some don't know.
I'd tell people - "Get Star Office. It is a free office suite from Sun Microsystems."
95% of them wouldn't even consider it. I think they were afraid of something free.
If I can tell them "Yeah- you can go buy it for a 10th of what you would pay for office" I think they will be more apt to go for it.
As a side note. I've never been able to get ADABAS to work on my NT box. And my attempts have just been out of curiousity as just reading the docs tells me that it cannot come even remotely come close to Access.
I cannot tell you how many small companies I work with that use Access. I work with a collection agency that has up to 100 people working of a single access database.
The price of Access looks small when you compare it to a real database. I'm not advocating this- but it is reality.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
No, I don't want to subsidize these clowns with handouts so they can buy ferraris and mercedes.
If these clowns want handouts, they need to visit their local VCs.
TANX but NO TANX.
The biggest surprise for me was that Sun will be selling this software for $49 or $99 per seat. This could be the legitimatization of Linux software. When someone can charge money successfully for a widely used peice of software, it will seem much more legit to many businesses and consumers, expecially if the quality is there too. I was waiting to dl it for free, but now I will be purchasing it when it's available and telling some of my contacts about it.
Here's keeping our fingers crossed that this is successfull. Of course, there are plenty of free/free alternatives for those who choose them.
I dont follow the licensing of the whole StarOffice thing, but since Sun is now charging does that get the user some type of support? Or is it for the manuals, CD, and pretty box only?
If a company or person starts charging for software then in my opinion they now have a responsibility that it works for whoever that chooses to pay, even on that PII 233 that seems to be the standard minimal req. Which is why M$ always gets flak. But if they charge and dont provide support then its just as bad as M$ IMO.
I see many formerly free software companies now starting this subscription or 1 time fee thing and many companies and customers are jumping aboard, looks to me like late adopters of the M$ model or finally realizing M$ had the right model to begin with. So when do people start pirating copies of StarOffice or pieces of Linux distro's that are only available to subscribers? Because truthfully most pirates just dont want to pay to play, but in the past it wasnt a concern for the Linux area till now. And isnt the reason opensource was a big hit because it was free ?
Please someone stamp out my ignorance if I am totally off.
Actually, Sun is also apparently going to be charging for Star Office 6. (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-865257.html) - The News.com article points out that they are going to have a hard time going after MS's market, especially when MS only charges $48 for an academic license to schools.
Who is John Galt?
Yeah, the Macintosh issue. Still no support for OS X, and last time I checked they were asking for people to help complete the partial port to X.
Which sucks, because I recently got an iBook and love OS X (this is my first Mac and so I don't have a bunch of OS 9 apps to worry about) but really really really want StarOffice/Openoffice file compatibility. I've installed Linux, but it's not quite as polished as OS X on that hardware.
As other people said, because you might want to support MandrakeSoft, because it's not the only 'freebie' you get with the silver membership, because you actually *don't know* how much is StarOffice gonna cost in stores. quake74
WordPerfect kept essentially the same format from v6 (~1994) to now (v10). It's odd for SO to say they're only compatible with v6 and v7.
d perfect/
WP introduced a 'compund document' format ~v8 which was not backward compatible, but hardly anyone uses it that I've seen (and yes I see a few WP users).
Completely OT: Wouldn't WP's tagged formatting code method make it an ideal way to create low-end XML? It already has great word-processing features, and claims an XML format. WP could output SGML 8 yrs ago or more. Re: WP and XML, search google or see, for example:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/05/31/wor
I'm using a 641 build of OO. It claims to have done away with the monolithic interface. But when I start calc and writer as seperate apps, if I exit one, it exits all of the office apps. So it looks to me as if they have only removed the single startup. How about removing the single exit feature as well?
FreeSpeech.org
Roblimo mentions something about creating and editing pdf files, and appears to implie this is included in Word and Wordperfect. To my knowledge it is not, it requires the purchase of a $200 piece of software from Adobe.
Roblimo then goes off apparently comparing the price of retail editions of Office to Staroffice. Keep in mind, most companies already have Office from Microsoft, so they'd be paying upgrade prices. There are also various discounts available, especially on the Select license agreements, OEM bundles, etc. XP Standard is more like $200 and XP Professional around $300.
But then he makes a claim that this substantial savings($100-200 per desktop) would prove you were "a company that respects its stockholders (or a government agency that respects taxpayers)". But what justification does he give for this? I don't see it.
$100-200 per machine is really quite a small amount of money in the big picture. If I have staff that already knows how to use MS Office, sending them to a $500 training course to learn how to use Staroffice negates any cost savings from software licensing. Even if only half my staff needs training, that's still substantial. Then what about productivity gains? Will I be able to do the same work in Staroffice as MSOffice in the same amount of time? Will it take more time, less time, etc?
If I give a project to someone and it takes them an extra day to complete because they used Staroffice, once again we've completely lost the $100 cost savings.
Those are factors that come into play when making corporate buying decisions, and it is something that Roblimo clearly doesn't grasp or understand. The review he gives of StarOffice does not go into near enough detail to prove that it is a viable product.
"I've got the Sparc version of both binaries. Doing a diff of them in a hex editor shows only two bytes differ between these executables. It should be fairly easy to extend the beta's lifetime longer by fiddling with these bytes...
/. about the possibility to "extend the betas lifetime".
...bastard... me included...
...and they're at 0x16e1a and 0x16e1b in hex."
Great! now i'm actually beginnig to think most of linux users(me included) are realy cheap bastards. Sun has given us a office suite(mostly) "compatible" with MS-Office for free fore some time. then when they start charging for it (little compared to MSO), somebody posts somethig to
-starts to hum the warez song-
if you don't want to pay for StarOffice use OpenOffice...
RTF might be the closest thing we have to a cross-app, cross-platform file format, but it sure isn't perfect, or even adequately reliable. I use StarOffice for Windows and Linux, and save in RTF. I try to get others to send their Word docs in RTF. I try to keep my formatting as simple as possible, to avoid problems. But still, maybe 30% of the time, a document created in Staroffice loses its formatting when opened in Word, or vice-versa.
The psychology of pricing is interesting. Sun may be better off going with $99 than $49. Many years ago, in Guadalajara, Mexico, my grandmother met a street artist selling paintings for a dollar or two each. My grandmother told him to include nice frames (that he could buy for less than one dollar apiece from fellow half-starved locals) and up his prices to $50 or more. He thought she was nuts, because no one he knew could afford to pay that much for a small painting. Annie (my grandmother) fronted him money for a dozen frames and helped him with the repricing, and sales soon took off -- not to locals, but to American tourists who thought $50 to $100 was a great value for an original painting of a pastoral Mexican scene enclosed in an attractive, hand-carved wooden frame. A year later the artist had his own gallery and a house with indoor plumbing -- and Annie got some of his best work for free and had a friend for life.
That's really a very beautiful story, and perhaps the best part of the article. It almost has strains of JonKatz in there, while remaining just on this side of probable. Even though it's pretty much unrelated to the review/comparison, it's a nice touch. Well done!
Yes! That guy!
Does anyone know if StarOffice on Windows can:
a) Print to PDF?
or
b) edit PDF?
This is undoubtedly not a new, point, but worth repeating: printing to PDF is a really key capability for Star Office, in that it would provide users with an easy way to send documents they know most people can read (I'd love to say they could send it HTML, but we all know the perils of print-based formatting in HTML).
If StarOffice had something as simple as a little checkbox when you used File->Send to email the current document to someone that said "Also send a copy of this document in PDF, for maximum compatibility", StarOffice could make a the state of document formats. Even more so if users could then fire the PDF up in their word processor and change it back.
Viva la PDF.
I used ADABAS on Linux and from what I saw it is a serious piece of work compared to Access.
I would take ADABAS any day over Access.
PostgreSQL simply destroys Access and it is free and has a nice GUI tool that is very user friendly called:
pgaccess
Please take a look, it is a great tool.
The official name is "the X Window System", or simply "X".
X-Window, X-Windows, XWindows, or whatever, are simply used by people out of convienence/laziness/ignorance.
Why is this important? My wife depends upon a grammar checking program. On average, it brings up her score on term papers by a letter grade. The only product with a grammar checker for Linux is WordPerfect. I purchased a copy of Corel Office 2000 and installed it under Mandrake 8.1, but it is extremely unstable (sometimes it silently crashes, allowing her to enter text but saving only empty files). Since Corel sold their Linux OS division, they also nuked their online Linux help for Corel Office (which seems to be a violation of their EULA, since they still own the Office for Linux division, but that's another story). The only place this help exists is in Google's cached pages. I would purchase Star Office if it had a grammar checking program.
Has anybody heard a rumor about plans for a grammar checking program in the next version of Star Office? Does anybody have any hints on making WordPerfect 9 more stable under Mandrake 8.x? Is it worth the money to upgrade to WordPerfect 10? Does anybody know of a stable word processor with a grammar checker for Linux?
Both StarOffice and OpenOffice *can* create PDFs in both Windows and Linux: I've been using this method for about eight months with no major difficulty.
In a nutshell, the applications rely on farming out the task to Ghostscript. It's not perfect -- TrueType fonts will sometimes result in uncorrectable errors (most often with apostrophes), and of course you may lack the ability to generate indexes and searchable documents, but for the most part, it's more than workable. It's been a godsend for me.
Finally, both Star/OpenOffices include (on the Linux side, anyway) instructions on how to do this yourself. Use the HTML reference above as a guide, and you should have no difficulties.
As far as I can tell using this solution is not an option for commercial services, but I am no legal expert, so use this at your own risk if this is the case.
Good luck.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Does this version of Star/Open Office attempt to install itself every time you run it?
/usr/local/*) the first time, it now just wants to run the installation program again when I start it as a real user. Obviously other people aren't having this problem, but I'll be damned if I know why.
That's my biggest gripe with this suite: both in SO (5.2 or 5.3; don't remember) and OO 641, it goes into the install every time I run it. I'd actually like to USE the program, but after installing it (in
Both SO and OO behave this way.
Randall.
Property law should use #'EQ, not #'EQUAL.
General question: as a scientist I spend half my time writing grants. Anymore, these dang grants must have lots of eye candy or no moola.
/OpenOffice in this sense? Please note I am NOT talking about changing attributes of the graphics (I use the Gimp for that), but mereley inserting and arranging them in the text. You'd be amazed how much time you can waste doing this.
So, after more than 10 years using Wordperfect, I switched over to Word last year, only because it handles embedded graphics (jpg's, giff's) much better than Word perfect.
How is the Star Office
Windows ME is probably the sorriest excuse for a Windows operating system since Windows 2.0. You would be far better served sticking to 98 SE or going directly to XP.
What's so terrible about spaces in usernames? Me, I like 'em that way.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Well, if you wanna see Mandrake alive and kicking in the future, that's why. They need some cold hard cash to keep their shop running.
"If these clowns want handouts, they need to visit their local VCs"
The funny thing is that they already did that, and they went public with an IPO, and they are still asking Guy Caballero-style for donations.
The biw question I see is support. While MS still dominates the home office setting, StarOffice might just take a small market share. I have used MS Office in the past, and the tech support simply does not in any way shape or form exist. I tihnk that if they offer REAL tech support, StarOffice may be a viable solution for the non-technically inclined. I say this because there are many people that build systems for friends and familt members. If I knew StarOffice would provide good tech support, I would gladly purchase that for the computer than obtaining purchasing MS Office.
The trouble with StarOffice not being free and open source is that Sun may dump it. Sun tends to do stuff like that. I have two paid-for, boxed, commercial Sun Java development environments that are abandonware.
I just wish it was still free (as in beer).
Guess I have to go back to finding a copy of Office on one of the P2P networks.
Sorry, I'm not in the mood to feed any trolls today... try back tomorrow.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yup, this is the method I use as well (inna overview-stylee). I should mention that all the methods described by sheldon & DeadMeat above, as well as tweek's comments in this thread, work pretty much the same way (DeadMeat's proviso that WP does it internally notwithstanding).
Another point. Once you shovel on Ghostscript and a generic printer PS driver (I use Adobe's own myself on Windows) on either OS, pretty much *any* application that has a print option should be able to create a PDF.
Last point: As to electroniceric's original question on editing PDFs after the fact, that I don't know. I suspect there aren't such things around. Please post if you know differently.
Thanks.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
This is something that really needs to be brought out. Linux let's you choose everything, from your distribution and your kernel, down to your wordprocessor, browser, window manager, file manager, your ftp/web/database server, and a myriad of other things. Just pick a free one, and run with it. If you don't like it, switch. Linux provides a marvelous amount of choice...
Now, for a big company, or a new user, choice isn't so good. they want to just use X, Y, and Z application so that there is less to learn (and administer). Not me...I like 'exploring' applications...but i'm not the vast majority of people.
For me, I'd like a distribution that included every application that it could cram in...possibly with Disk 1 very supported...and Disk 3 being "extra apps we like and threw in." Disk 1 could have all the core apps, so Bob Person could just stick it in and get all he wants and needs. While I have my extras on the other disks. It's just a suggestion.
A second suggestion: Is it just me or is Abiword, Kword, and OO/SO have only MS office as a standard document type between them? I suggest that all of the open-source office people get together and decide on one format, and then support their own if they want to.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Perhaps if people were not so dependent on grammer checkers, their grammer would be improve, thus breaking their dependence on them.
From The article:
:)
One place StarOffice falls down -- and falls down hard -- is its inability to work with WordPerfect files,
Maybe a hard pill to swallow for the desktop users who "fell" for the whole WP for Linux thing a year or so back (when in reality it was more akin to WP for Windows running under WINE -- than a native office suite..) Needless to say, if they were able to get a few documents created with the whole WP thing -- then chances are they would want to open and work with them in Star Office, right??? I hope they get this worked out. OTOH -- it is nice to see some commercial software making a go for the linux Desktop. (I wish IBM would dust off some of the old Lotus stuff and give it a run
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
uh.. ten pack!
I don't use office software often and have Koffice on my debian testing box currently. What are the advantages/disadvantages between KOffice/openoffice/StarOffice?
... and they say (that is, their PR rep said, when I picked up my copy of 6.0) they continue to do so :)
... what's the point? Couldn't you as easily get SO as MS Office, if that's the only concern?
...
Star Office has been sold packaged before -- I nearly bought one of the 5.2 boxes, but found that other programs did everything I wanted pretty well (my needs are few), and that I hated the 5.2 monolithic interface.
If you'd get Office from one of the P2P networks (free as in beer), but otherwise like SO, then
Sun has funded the development of OpenOffice, and still do. They've still got at least some wheels on the open source road
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I use MS office version 4.3. Thats the one for windows 3.1. I tried all the latest office software from microsoft and have even used star office 5.2 all these programs are heavily bloated. I never need or even want 99.9% of their features. Office 4.3 runs great on my athlon 1200 and it very stable. Frankly if wordpad could really handle macros I would just use that. I dont do word processing in linux, just codeing and for that all I need is g++ and emacs (kdevelop once in a while)! My point is, who the hell cares about staroffice 6.0. All these office progs. are slow, useless, boring old news.
You don't like being corrected, do you?
*
Linux? A third of the market? In your wetdreams, byteboyz. The number is 0.025% and don't forget that. You are cockroachspit --- not even a stain on the PC-OS desktop market. ... hehe , the weenies drooltool, why do ya think it got the name ??
As for GIMP-leg
Every corp I know (us included) are/is still running on Office 97 because of all the wonky MS licensing dealy-doos. Also because it'd cost the 501c3 non-profit I work for ~$20, $30k that we don't have.
With that in mind, I was wondering what folks thought of SO 6.0 vs. office 97, which is what it would replace around here (and lots of other places) if it's good enough. I have a feeling most "pro" reviews will only compare it v. XP.
AMCGLTD.COM. Where cats, science fictio
How much will it retail for?
why bother..they charge for it. Might as well get the industry standard, Office.
Office is the standard in fact - and it is unfortunate that they are the standard. Using SO is not taking the hard road to avoid MS, in fact a lot of the "linux zealots" here on slashdot do use MS products. It's about cheaper, better, and more secure.
And to your sig...that isn't security, that's removing stupid little annoyances like you.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
I've got five or six PCs at work, installed with Win98 (1st edition, we're cheap) and working with IE 4, 5, and 6. In fact, IE 6 is the only part of Win98 that's still supported.
Having good MS Office filters would be enormously important for OpenOffice and StarOffice.
Word file format is the de facto standard in most companies and institutions. Most internal and external communication and documentation is done with Word and Excel, and you need to import , edit, and then export MS Office documents. Without perfect, 100% compatible filters, you simply can't use OpenOffice in such an environment. If even one word wraps differently, a table can go useless. Not that MS Office itself is totally free of these problems, but they are much worse with OO/SO.
OpenOffice export filter to MS Word breaks very easily. Sometimes even basic formatting is lost. Some images disappear. Bullets turn into strange symbols. Tables of Contents and Indexes break. Pages with complex headers or footers simply cause Word to crash.
Even really simple things such as WMF, JPEG, or GIF export filters are faulty in sdraw. GIF doesn't seem to work at all, and WMF and JPEG lose objects under certain conditions.
The filters are OO's definitely weakest point at the moment. I hope they get the problems solved, as it's otherwise such a great software.
Another item on my StarOffice "wish list" would be the ability to create and edit .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files, something that is readily available for MS Word and Corel WordPerfect. Give me this feature, even if it's a plugin that costs $50 over and above whatever Sun decides to charge for StarOffice, and they'll get my money.
StarOffice 6 beta has this feature, and I'd be very surprised if the final didn't have it either. I think Roblimo just missed the menu option.
Though I can't say I normally use any parts of an office suite other than the word processor (which I'm pretty sure is the case with most users), why has nobody mentioned two other alternatives to SO/OO that work great - AbiWord and KWord? I don't do anything heavy-duty, but these word processors both work great for basic day-to-day use. Personally I favor AbiWord, but both are quick/unbloated, can read word files without problems, and I have yet to encounter a task that I haven't been able to do in one or both of these.
The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now
to upgrade IE, probably even on internet2 (I tried on a dual T1 when almost no one was using it). Microsoft's update servers are so bloody slow you'd be better off taking the "hit" that WinME has, and not bothering to update.
See
= 28 0
http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid
for some free (as in beer) tools - many more listed for cost
Also if you want to open a PDF doc programmaticaly and edit it try PDFLib 4.0
which has source code available for some versions,
http://www.pdflib.com/
Four responses to the guy's message, not one responding to any of the questions he asked... Makes me wish I used WordPerfect for Linux so I could give him an useful response... ;)
I have used staroffice for a couple of years now and have never had a problem with it. I primarilly use only the word processor and only for term papers. I have never had a problem transfering files between Staroffice 5.1,.2 and 6 beta for windows to microsoft office for windows or mac.
I constantly tell my collegues who similarly only use office for writing essays about staroffice, but none of them have downloaded it yet. Why? Because they have old copies of microsoft office that came with their computers that, if necessary, they just install in their new computers.
I will probably never go back to microsoft office. But why will the majority of non-techy consumers switch when microsoft office comes free a computer bought from most of the big vendors? I am pondering buying a new laptop and just like you can barely buy a computer without windows, you can barely buy a computer without some version of microsoft office, or works at least. Just like you can't get windows without internet explorer. Buisness as usual for microsoft...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Why can't the Open Office crew abstract the file import/export into an independant library? I personally prefer AbiWord, and I'm sure many others have their own WP preferences. If all could share a common library then we could choose between WPs without fear of losing all our work to date. I would love to be able to read and edit Word files in AbiWord. Data legacy is the killer, and it's why M$ has the world pretty much under its thumb. I know others have already called for a unified Open WP format but really nothing seems to have been done. Why is this?
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I haven't used Open Office yet, but was wondering how the performance is?
Loading?
Use of System Resources?
How does the Windows port compare in performance to MS Office 97 and 2000?
I'm running a Thinkpad with 266 Pentium, 96MB RAM.
Funny, Sun's site says April/May/June 2002. Which means June of course.
$40 for StarOffice was the price for the deluxe edition quoted to ZDNet by Sun. Hit the site & look it up before you assume I'm wrong. I do my homework.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Stupid Mac FAG!!
Serious, for its age, OO is improving faster than anything MS has shelled out. I like it a helluva lot better than SO 5.2. Plus it's open source, what's not to like?
:P) It's incredible how OO will help out schools. I can't wait till OO 1.0 comes out.
Sure it can be a bit slow, but on my old P166 (64MB RAM, 1GB HDD, Mandrake 8.2, running IceWM) it takes about ~35 seconds to load up. Sure MS Office may be a bit faster than OO, but it's eating a lot of memory by being preloaded.
OpenOffice is bound to only get better (the spell check isn't that great, maybe needs grammar check? Or do people actually need to learn proper grammar?..I sure cant
Of course we can't forget OO is made up of SO code that was released by Sun (correct me if I'm wrong.) The Sun developers did a good job, and the OO developers are making it even better. Good job! I remember when some people were bitching that nothing was coming out of the OpenOffice project, they must feel like asses now.
Yah, I remember Visicalc on the Apple. And this point is worth noting: even running under an emulator, it absolutely leaves Excel choking in its dust for speed on twin 1.2GHz CPUs... (-:
I also remember MultiPlan, and why Microsoft killed it.
FWIW, Word sucked up until about version 5, then began to be quite useable (albeit a little crashy and with all of those bugs you mentioned), then between about 5.5 and 6.01a seemd to do all right modulo the viruses. After that, it was just more bloat for very little extra functionality (except on the Mac, where it was a case of removing deliberately-installed hobbles which MS inflicted on Macs for not being owned by Bill).
I've been using SO5.2 extensively for interoperating with MS-Office, and no problems. The poster who wrote about Word-XP (Word 10?) docs being readable by Word-97 (AKA Word 8) is full of it. One of the things I use SO5.2 for is inhaling Word2000 docs and making them readable by Word97; the `Save As...' type-WordXX feature in the later MS-Words seems a bit hit and miss.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Ah, yes, that would explain why cdrecord operates IDE CD burners through the
I also have a USB scanner which uses SCSI packets layered in PartPort (IEEE-1284) packets layered in USB packets because doing it with a string of converter chips was apparently cheaper than doing it properly.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Congratulations. In our house, things don't work that way. In fact, all the correcting in our house seems to be directed at me.
Of course, I'm not talking about grammar. If you can correct your wife's grammar, daily, and still call her your wife, you're wasting your time posting at slashdot. There's millions to be made selling your secret. (Unless the secret is that she's a non-native speaker. There's still millions to be made in that line, I guess, but it's a crowded market.)
Not to flame, but how exactly does this post reflect a comparision between 641C and the upcoming release? I must've missed the comparable feature list, or whatever was used.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I love what SO et al. stand for. However, without the official recognition that Microsoft IS a monopoly, SO and the rest will never make it to the prime time. MS's closed source file formats that change from version to version kill any chances that these other products will ever be successful. Too bad. A lot of work has been put into this...
/greg
I used to run office 2000 with no problems on a Pentium 166 with 64 megs of ram at one job I had. Sometimes access queries took a minute or two but everything else was quite snappy. On a related note, does anyone know why the linux version was so much slower than the windows version of Star 5.2? That was the only thing that kept me from using linux in college. I had an ancient laptop, and it would take several minutes to load star office in linux, but in windows, it was no slower than my old copy of office 95.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Someone please keep quiet, I'm trying to format my LaTeX... eh? What do you mean these "new" office apps dont typeset? Waste of space!
...as we have been since the beginning of school in September.
I work at an all-girls boarding school. We have a number of international students here and almost every girl this year brought her own computer with her.
Installed on these computers is every version of MS Office ever made, Wordperfect, Lotus, DOS stuff, sometimes not even a word processor! In addition, many of these versions of software are of international origin.
Solution? For us the choice was simple. We switched from MS Office to OpenOffice.Org in all the classrooms, our dorm terminal server, and installed it on every student computer.
The education price isn't all that much for MS Office, but we couldn't afford to put a copy on every student and teacher computer as well as having enough licenses for the dorm server. We had just purchased 30 new teacher computers and would have needed over 100 licenses for the dorm terminal server.
Initial reaction to this wasn't all that popular, especially amongst the teachers. But I put it this way: I asked them which one would be willing to give up his or her job so we could afford to pay for enough MS Office licenses?
Since I had no takers, I told them that I felt like Microsoft really didn't need our money - WE DO. To sweeten the process, I gave every teacher a copy of OOo at orientation to install at home and get familiar with it. The plan worked great.
We still get the occasional grumble, but it IS hard to argue with free and NONE of us liked the alternative.
This has unified our Office software and we don't violate any laws by giving out copies of it. It is perfectly usable and every new version of OOo has really improved it's stability/usability.
It is our intention to go to StarOffice 6 when it is released, but we'll see what the education terms are (probably free or near free).
What I think this project could use is a 'skins' feature. It probably wouldn't do for OOo to release a version that looks EXACTLY like MS Office, but I could see a hacker doing it just for fun.
It could certainly be a way of sneaking this in through the back door of almost every institution.
If there is any one area I'd like to see work done after stability/usability issues are resolved, it would be the UI. But again, different doesn't necessarily mean inferior. Try the 'Draw' program (which supports OpenGL objects!) to see what I mean.
Anyway, glad to see OOo and Star get some well deserved press. I wish I would see more comments from people actually using this on a daily basis (as I do), but I imagine that by this time next year I will.
Sincerely,
Chuck Hunnefield
admin@NOSPAM.lindenhall.org
Linden Hall School for Girls
Lititz, PA, USA
"Start doing the impossible..."
As much as I'd like it to be the case, I just cannot get rid of that mac/photoshop combo yet, because for certain tasks, i'm just too slow with gimp. This is mostly due to with small GUI issues (and of course to having years of PS experience compared with only the occasional experimental wee hours in the gimp) such as
- in PS, the tab key will hide and show all toolbox elements at an instant, freeing up valuable screen space. YES, this works in the gimp too, if the drawing window is focused, the dialogs disappear. however, hitting tab again once will only show the main toolbox, focused, and i have to focus the drawing window again and hit tab again to see the rest of the dialogs. doesn't sound like much of an inconvenience, but this this 100 times per hour and it will be.
- in PS, cursors can be set to exactly display the current brush size, i haven't found that in gimp, i can only switch between crosshairs and tool icons. the PS setting here is invaluable.
There are a couple of other gripes i have with the user interface that have me keep my mac for real graphics work. i'm sure it will all get there into the gimp someday, and i'm sure willing to try and move more of my work to use it whenever there's a new release or something.anyway, to hear it for the gimp, here's one feature that's VASTLY superiour to the equivalent photoshop tool:
- The magic wand selection tool can adapt its sensitivity on the fly when the mouse is dragged to the left or to the right. i'd love to see that in Photoshop... great gimp feature!
Anyway, weren't we talking about StarOffice in the first place? Heh... rambling again...For crying out loud, stop the stupid Java bashing. Yes, the SO/OO GUI is quite slow - especially on Linux - but it's not because of Java. StarOffice/OpenOffice is NOT WRITTEN IN JAVA. So go bashing C/C++ instead, which is what it IS written in, as far as I know.
/ Peter Schuller
--
peter.schuller@infidyne.com
http://www.scode.org
I'm hoping that they have really cheap student pricing for the thing. I love the beta, and it's replaced Abiword as my Linux word processor (I'm still rooting for Abisoft though, Go! Go! Go!) and I'm pretty comfy using it in place of MS Office, which is something I wasn't comfortable doing before. I wouldn't mind paying the $50 bucks, but I'll use OpenOffice before I pay $99. Here's hoping the student discount pays off!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
The fonts in OpenOffice are the ones installed on your system. No more no less!
The speed is about the same.
spell checking is included and works for me.
Printing works fine here
Moritz
Sun will not support Star Office/Open Office on a competing UNIX platform. Sun wants you to buy a Blade instead of a PowerMac.
klyx and contemporary lyx files are not interchangeable.
klyx will never remerge with lyx; it's forked from too old a version. However, gui independence s the big project in lyx development right now, and will result in multiple toolkits (e.g., qt) being supported.
hawk
First of all, I use Win2k on my main machine and Sorcery (or sometimes Mandrake) on my secondary machine (which is also my television at the moment... Linux works fine for me in that dept.)
I would love to remove Windows from my machine (not that I have anything against Win2k.. it's stable and fast... but I believe in open source and just have more fun when using Linux.)
*But* I have more than DirectX games that I can not run on Linux. Let me give you a quick list:
Trillian (like Gaim, but better w/ file xfer
mIRC (I have very specific scripts I use and I don't like how it runs in wine)
CuteFTP (Is there anything that's really like this and not a weak copy in Linux? I'd love to find a replacement.)
Teleport Pro (for spidering sites like my University Classes homepages, etc.)
Columbine Bookmark Merge (which lets me convert between IE, Netscape and Opera bookmarks and keep them all in synch)
Kyodai (I love this game... w/ 3D and all effects... does it work in Wine?)
Snood (It's fun... )
Unreal Tournament (How well does this work and perform?)
Simcity 3000
Age of Empires and Kings!!!!! Darn you Microsoft!
Cygwin (just joking ;-)
The Windows breeds of old gaming emulation.. yeah I know Linux has them too but they are *never* as good, especially with lack of guis and all sorts of other things missing and my game controllers never work right.)
PSpice
LogicWorks digital logic design
Matlab
Mathematica
Maple
Other engineering / scholastic programs (like physics simulations programs I have)
Akoff music composer
Cool Edit Pro!! I have never seen anything this good in linux... and I use this program all the time.
KaZaA (yeah yeah, spyware, but I got the Wheel of Time PDF off this... I own all the books but this helps me do searches and stuff.)
Musicmatch Jukebox (yes there is a linux version but it sucks compared to the windows one... I use the pay per month music match radio to get my "cd quality" legal music streamed to me)
Noteworthy Composer (I've used some of the Linux equivs but I don't feel anywhere as productive or comfortable)
Adobe Photoshop (I know.. the Gimp, but I dislike the UI for the Gimp and am much more productive in Photoshop... plus all the tutorials etc that are easy to find everywhere on the internet to help me accomplish anything practicly.)
Voice over IP PC to Telephone!!!!!!! ARGH!
Pinball! I want a good pinball game!
ActiveX (i know it's evil but some things use it on the web that I need) and compatible (that means non standard or old in the ms world ;-) java and plugin support. How many times have I went to load a java program that refused to work like it does in windows are not at all....
My scanner never works right in any distro I've tried... not sure why, it's a supported HP scanner but SANE hates me :(
Real Good DVD software... I want stable, easy to full screen, full menu functionality, etc.
Corel Painter Classic (I love to play with this with my pen tablet)
Plugin and video capability free without using another plugin I have to pay for (this doesn't bother me much)
Borland C++ Builder (not too worried about this because of KDevelop)
JCreator (I use for simple java and haskell)
Komodo
Good asian support (My girlfriend is Thai)
Weatherbug
Outlook and Access
Getright! Nothing is as good as getright! Argh...
Now I know some of this can run in Wine but I don't usually like how they perform or "feel".... and some have Linux "equivs" but I don't think they measure up.... hmmm If anyone knows some really good alternatives I'd love to hear about them... in fact I implore you to suggest things. Please give me a reason to dump MS...
Ok back to work...
Use the Z-modem protocol between Information Superhighway routers to compress the plaintext. ~LordOfYourPants
The City of Largo has 15 years of WordPerfect documents and is in the process of moving over to OO running on Linux. A project to create a WP import filter has begun. We have joined monetary forces with several other people and contracts are being signed. Please, if you would like to contribute money to this project contact Josh (agliodbs at openoffice.org) and cc me (drichard at largo.com). We are hoping that it will ready in about 60 days and then will be placed into the OO build.
Thanks!
Completely OT: Wouldn't WP's tagged formatting code method make it an ideal way to create low-end XML? It already has great word-processing features, and claims an XML format. WP could output SGML 8 yrs ago or more. Re: WP and XML, search google or see, for example: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/05/31/wordperfect/
Hardly off-topic, since SO's file formats are a very valid dimension of it's readiness for the real world. WordPerfect's document capabilities are often underrated due to it's UI. I've had a love/hate relationship with WordPerfect over the years - it's positively user hostile at times and when things go wrong, it's as opaque as vi without the benefit of simplicity. Still, it's the only WP I've ever found that handles long documents well (which is why it's still the standard in much of the legal and real estate businesses), and the "Reveal Codes" feature is very nice for power users. In many ways it's the best mix out there of word processor and desktop publishing capabilities.
As an aside, I've used SO6beta for several months now, and *if* you put in the small effort to learn it's slightly different UI philosophy, you'll find that it's a VERY capable office suite. There are a few bugs (which I and others have filed) that keep me from making it my everyday tool, but overall, it's really quite good. Although there are some holes realtive to MS Office, it also covers some nice areas that Office doesn't. Sun's got a winner here. When it hits the shelves, I'll buy a boxed copy rather than upgrade the Office 97 I've been using for years - I really think it will be good enough to make that viable. The fact that it runs on non-Windows OSes is just icing on the cake. (C'mon BSD!)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I will fuck you up the ass whitey and make you fall in love!