Linux and OpenOffice save Microsoft Presentation

EvilGrinUK writes "A presentation about Shared Source (SSI) by the head of Microsoft Ukraine was almost ruined when the Windows machine (a Tablet PC) linked to the projector developed problems. The solution was to adopt OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 and ALT Linux Compact 2.3, which was already running on the presenter's laptop (an IBM Thinkpad). Here's a picture."

Comments

Big deal?

[1155]

What's the big deal here? Right tool for the job. The other laptop wasn't working during crunch time, so why not?

Re:Big deal?

[gregbaker]

What's the big deal here? Right tool for the job.

I suspect this has a lot more to do with Windows video drivers than anything.

I spend a good chunk of time dealing with laptops and projectors and I can tell you wil certainty that display drivers are getting harder and harder to get working with projectors.

There was a time when you could press fn-F4 and flip to the external display. Now, there's a control panel on the system dock (or whatever that thing with all the icons is called). You might get an extended desktop, you might have to go through four dialogs to find a setting, you might never find it. Mercy on your soul if you have a wide-screen display.

My new tablet refuses to drive the external display at resolution >800x600, even though the built-in display and projector both have a native resolution of 1024x768. Even that takes multiple-clicks to get turned on. It works exactly right under Linux (fn-F4 and Bob's your uncle at 1024x768), but the Windows drivers get in the way.

My guess is the presenter had a new laptop with such a display driver. OO-guy had an older laptop, or had this stuff stored out already.

Powerpoint Crash

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of a time in college during a MS presentation when the MS powerpoint crashed into an Apple desktop. Oh well, its business, you do what you need to do. Microsoft is relativly pragmatic these days.

laughed out loud at that picture

[Adult film producer]

ahh the irony.. "shared source initiative"..... :D

what is it with slashdot running all these captchas lately ? "To confirm you're not a script, please type the text shown in this image:" I did this yesterday, shouldn't there be a period of grace for logged in users ?

Microsoft's competitive advantages

[team99parody]

Why should we be surprised. A MSFT exec already told us that runningRunning Linux is Microsoft's competitive advantage.

"Hilf is the director of Microsoft's platform technology strategy group....

Linux running at Microsoft? Isn't that sacrilege? Think of it <b>more as a competitive advantage</b>, said Hilf."

Happens the other way too

[Leif_Bloomquist]

Come on, let's be honest here. How many times has Windows saved the day for a Linux application, or even install?

i.e. For myself, back when trying to install Red Hat 8.0 on my machine at home, I had to constantly reboot back into Win2K to download patches/rpms, or read up about bugs and errata, get network drivers, configuration minutae, etc.

It's stable now, but having a working (out of the box) Win2K install to fall back on was crucial to "save" my Linux installation.

Let's not be too smug here, would this have been news if they'd been bailed out by a different Windows version?

Reminds me of something that just happened to me

[aardwolf204]

I'm the sysadmin of a company of about 100. The other day I was in the CEO's office waiting to give him a presentation on the latest version of the Intranet. The boss came in very upset, he had been having some problems with his laptop and hadn't been able to boot into windows all morning. There was a very important document on his drive that he just had to have for a meeting later that afternoon. I turned off the projector and started to attempt to recover his documents.

First I tried Bart PE, a Windows XP bootable CD. It allowed me to see the hard drive, but the file sizes were all wrong. I tried to connect it to the network but it wouldn't recognize the network card. I tried plugging in a USB flash drive but it wouldn't recognize that either.

DOS was out of the question as the drive was NTFS. Then it hit me, I had a copy of Knoppix 3.8 on me. I booted it up and it saw the network and thumbdrive instantly. I saved the boss's files and he was very impressed. While I was setting him up on a spare notebook he was playing with the menus in KDE and we made small talk about governments and businesses saving tons of cash by switching to Linux, Open Office, and other free software.

So Linux saved the day for his poor broken Windows box, just a little ironic. Now this sysadmin is never leaving without a copy of Knoppix again.

Re:How funny.. Cache slower than original...

[whitehatlurker]

This site is really slow, but this text was rescued off the page found there. Note that this is REALLY REALLY OLD!

Text says:

Thanks! But we were kind of slashdotted :-)

Intro

Well guys you really made my day -- poor old Duron 800/512M with some 3 dozens of sites and 300 gigs of free software on FTP was literally crawling until I've limited this vhost to 1 conn/IP. And figuring it out has taken some of my lame time, too. :-]

Okay, nevermind that -- hope that those who managed to get the contents yesterday enjoyed the situation. :-)

Facts
This is old news: the event happened on October 9, 2004.
Microsoft rep in Ukraine had to use free software to get on with a presentation on a free software conference since his munition failed to cooperate with projector.

See below (also posted to the places I could track down).

Resources

Please refer these images if you need and not original gallery -- these are hosted on 4-way Xeon, SCSI RAID and faster pipe, not on overloaded all-in-one server:

[Links omitted for pity's sake ...]

Re:oh my

[Ford Prefect]

what was more embarrassing is how badly open office mangled the powerpoint presentation, and you KNOW it did.

Powerpoint presentations usually look pretty mangled anyway. I had endless problems with NeoOffice/J seemingly scrambling the formatting of work-related presentations, documents and so on, until I borrowed a Windows machine with Microsoft Office and discovered that was how the documents were supposed to look... ;-)

Re:oh my

[whoisshe]

what was more embarrassing is how badly open office mangled the powerpoint presentation, and you KNOW it did.

that's microsoft's fault for not using an open standard document format.

i'm looking forward to castigating MS regularly now, until they fully support the standard.

Hi from Kiev -- we're OK, and it's old but fact ;)

[gvy]

Thanks for the direct link, cache lags indeed as I can see; there's a story page there too (thrown together after the first wave of pre-slashdot effect hit our gallery; and yes, the fact is just as this, there is one more independent photo link there).

The bottleneck ATM is the shaper, we enjoy sponsored colocation and hardware (by WNet ISP) and current outbound traffic is around 512Kbps.

Otherwise, our ALT Linux server that's serving you now is perfectly OK, given it's 4-way Xeon with a meg cache per CPU with a gig of RAM and SmartArray. So load average is more like: 0.19, 0.14, 0.12.

Here's a postcard from Apache (no nginx on top of it even ;-) -- 167 requests currently being processed, 8 idle servers (I've upped MaxClients from 150 to 250, hope it's enough for some time -- seen 180+ max today).

and here's top's top:

CPU0 states: 1.1% user, 4.4% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 93.3% idle
CPU1 states: 0.2% user, 0.2% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 99.1% idle
CPU2 states: 0.3% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 99.2% idle
CPU3 states: 0.0% user, 0.1% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 99.4% idle
Mem: 1033300k av, 680024k used, 353276k free, 0k shrd, 4168k buff
346864k active, 246712k inactive
Swap: 522072k av, 2240k used, 519832k free 482032k cached

PS: we'll be doing 4th conference like that this October, feel free to contact me during next weeks if you're eager to travel to Kiev and roll a speech on Free Software!

Linus Torvalds Saved by Windows XP!

[Jahz]

"At a presentation on the progress of the linux kernel, Linus Torvalds Linux-based laptop it the dust. The presentation was saved by a kind audience member who volunteered his Windows XP laptop to finish displaying the remainder of the presentation." Ever seen this article? Of course not. It doesnt exist. and THATS why this is a big deal.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[Pantero Blanco]

I think the idea is that allowing people who really need to post anonymously due to censorship laws where they live is worth the GNAA's and the FP's.

Excel file saved by OO-Calc

[sktea]

I had a similar experience when a user in my organization couldn't open an Excel workbook -- Excel 2002 crashed whenever the user tried that specific XLS file. I checked first that Office XP was fully patched (it was); then I opened the offending file in Calc and identified the problem: a column which normally contained a simple formula somehow got corrupted. Instead of the formula, there was a long string of gobbledygook in each cell in that column. I replaced the string with the correct formula, saved it in XLS format and voilá! The user thanked me and I informed all of the IT support folks to keep a copy of OpenOffice handy for just such an occasion.

Re:Well, what would *you* have done?

[Neopoleon]

"There's something seriously wrong with your infrastructure (OS, application, hardware, etc) for that to be happening."

Not to point fingers, but I've also worked on plenty of Linux installs that have crapped their pants (mostly because of X, I'll admit).

"I really hope you never work on medical equipment or airlines or weapons systems or anything else that matters"

Do you really think that we would approach a medical, airline, or governmental system in the same way we'd approach a consumer device like a tablet?

The tablet runs a version of XP that's been beefed up with tablet support. Like XP, this OS comes bundles with the ability to handle a wide array of hardware/software combos. It's been pretty well demonstrated that the *vast* majority of XP (and cousins) crashes are due to bad third-party drivers, particularly where video is concerned.

If we were building a device for a medical purpose, for example, we'd probably start with Windows XP Embedded and only include the components absolutely necessary for the system to run (note that Windows CE would also be a good bet). We certainly wouldn't include things that weren't needed. I'm guessing, for example, that many pieces of medical equipment will get by fine without drivers for the latest Audigy, or whatever, and so we wouldn't include support.

A consumer device needs to be ready to deal with many hardware and software scenarios that Microsoft can only begin to guess at. A vertical need, like medical or airline equipment, can be put together in a very targeted way so as to avoid the problems normally associated with consumer hardware.

Look at Apple - they own almost the entire hardware and software stack. They control everything from the OS to the mail app to the web cam drivers, and their machines *still* crash like crazy (I own a PowerBook, and although I love the thing, it *does* crash, and when it does, it *really* crashes).

Think about that, and then think about every cheap piece of unsupported hardware that actually works with XP. Will all of them? No, but many do, and that's incredible. It's something for which we don't get enough credit.

So, yeah. I understand your concerns, but we know better than to treat specialized devices like general purpose consumer platforms.

Re:oh my

[vanka]

Not that I'm Microsoft's biggest fan or anything; but there may be a reason that PowerPoint may not display its own slideshows correctly.

Say you create a PowerPoint presentation and then open it in OpenOffice or NeoOffice or whatever, it then is mangled by the program. You save it in its mangled state and then open it on PowerPoint again. This mangles it even more.

I manage a few non-profit computer labs for seniors and low-income families and in one of my labs I installed OpenOffice (didn't feel like shelling out $200-$300 for each of the eight computers, nor did I have the funding), while at the two other labs and at home I have Microsoft Office. So when I type up some documentation at home and try to edit it at the OpenOffice lab, the Word document always get mangled. Any kind of formatting beyond the basic (font, font size, bold, italic, underline, text alignment) gets screwed so badly that I have to redo all the formatting. It is easier to leave it unformatted and do the formating in OpenOffice. I hope OpenOffice 2.0 fixes this.

That having been said, I do recommend OpenOffice to those who need basic wordprocessing and do not want to dish out $300. We teach basic computer skills at our labs and we teach (and give out CDs of) OpenOffice.