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StarOffice 5.1 released
Thomas Leineweber writes "Stardivision has just released the new version 5.1 of its StarOffice. You can download it as usual for free for non-commercial use. "
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From the german requirement page:
Glibc 2.07 or higher supported.
I guess that means 2.1 support, it would be
totally stupid to release something not working on current caldera, RedHat, debian.....
Fredrik
Yes, I tried SO 5.0. It didn't _perfectly_ translate Micros~1 Word 97 files (failing on bullet points and Symbol fonts, in my case). And there was no mention of immunity to "macro viruses" or "macro trojans".
But the 5.1 version has been out for hours and what we see is criticism of 5.0. Gang, give reviews of 5.1 here, esp. since improved compatibility is supposed to be a feature!
- Pretty easy to use. My kids (6 and 8) use it all the time. The 8 year old had no trouble going through the tutorial.
- Macro programming language (ELF) does networking and you can extend it with C.
- Database integration. Not quite as slick as access, but it does work. PostgreSQL, MySql (if you can call that a database), Oracle ? Solid, and Adabas, (Informix?).
- Applix Anywhere -- access your applixware system via a java applet in your browser.
- They just released their OLAP product, TM1. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it sounds pretty slick.
- They have open-sourced their extension language, including the drag-and-drop app builder.
- Typical office suite integration -- put a chart in a document, update the underlying data in a spreadsheet, and the chart gets updated. This might work between users, I'm not sure.
- One of the *first* companies to port their suite to Linux. Must be at least 3 years ago by now. (Hellloooo Island!).
- Ported to Alpha and Power PC.
- You can get a win95 version for something like $75.
Down sides- Not as many wiz-bang surface features compared to ms office.
- Mail client is kinda not so great.
- HTML editor needs some work.
- Non-anti-aliased fonts (but is this just x?)
As for dealing with Microsoft Office, RTF import/export works ok for simple documents. The Microsoft Input filters are a lot better, but Applix doesn't currently generate native ms word -- only rtf.The mailing list is pretty active, with a bunch of the engineers constantly answering questions, often in the form of macros that do the trick (Hi Eric, Hi Mark!).
If you have the $99 bucks give it a try.
-- cary
Well, hmmm ... I am an MBA, a CPA, and a CMA, and have managed a number of projects with >200 people in the oil business for the last twenty years. I have about 200 people in my department. I report to the CFO here. So I think that I know my way around the "management decision meeting" business. I have one question: What's the weather like on your planet?
"Other side?" What "other side?" The only side that I am aware of is the "how much does it cost us" side. Try the "other side" crap at Phillips, Shell, Mobil -- er DoubleCross --, BP, or any of the other majors and your ass will be out the door that afternoon. Did you learn that in "Business School" -- that sounds like the stuff that kids these days keep trying to pull in interviews. I have been wishing for one of those hooks to come out and drag them out of my office when they say stuff like that (my secretary is not interested and claims osteoporosis) because when they start talking about "other sides" and "third options" and "new paradigms" the interview is basically over. It means that they cannot add or subtract and/or have never met a budget in their life. And they think that they know something about real technology. Which is even more dangerous.
The only thing that is important is the bottom line, son, and I think that you have never been responsible for one on your life. AIX stays up for 1000 days at a time. Solaris is almost as good. Even HP-UX and OSF will do 200 days. Jesus Christ on a pogo stick -- IRIX will do more than 30 days. NT won't stay up for two weeks under load. Office is a pox and is restricted here because of the support budget that it alone uses up. We restrict the availability of Powerpoint (what the technicians refer to as "Powerpointyhair") for the same reason. As far as I can tell, Linux is just another UNIX, just a lot smaller. I have been working with UNIX for years (and Linux for the last four years on the advice of some of the younger staff members), and I have never seen an advantage to NT and Office and Windows before that (and OS/2 before that, and Macs on and off -- lately IMacs). Perhaps it is the CPA in me coming out -- it's all about ROI and cost of ownership and it doesn't get any better than UNIX and mainframes (more so now with IBM's price cuts). It is amazing (and reveals your fundamental lack of experience) that you would actually suggest that NT/Office is a good value proposition! I have tried Star Office once. I wasn't impressed -- a lot of the machines here are older Pentiums with 32MB and Star Office would not run well on them. But as a value proposition you are suggesting that a system that runs us about $6500/seat in support and licences PER YEAR EVERY YEAR costs less than one that would be free+$300 (last I checked) once. ONCE. That is why we are seriously considering Applix (smaller) or a freeware suite (LyX, GNUmeric, and some others -- but that is enough and exmh is quite nice -- we have menus for setting up procmail automatically) for the new systems as we replace them and/or using X as X terminals on the old systems (with new monitors and video cards). All of this is driven by cost. Period.
"Other side?"
You shouldn't have slept through the accounting classes -- they were part of your curriculum for a reason.
But hey -- I know who we have (I hired most of them) and I know that you aren't working for me -- I only hope that you are working for one of our compeditors.
I use StarOffice on my computer at work. The machine is dual boot, and I'm allowed to use Linux most of the time because we're doing Java development. When some idiot^Wmanager sends a document in a Microsoft format, Star Office can handle it 99.99% of the time. When Star Office can't, I have the option of either asking for it again in RTF, or booting back into Windows NT and using Office. But a few weeks ago our idiot VP of Product Development sent out a document that included a Word Virus, and I was one of the few people not infected.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
The previous version (5.0 for all of you who don't know about it) didn't really impress me. Yes, it had tons of features, but it was really slow and unstable. I downloaded this thing and expected a few bugs to be fixed to give me a little bit more stable application. Boy, was I wrong. All of a sudden, they have tuned the previous glob of lard into something... well, faster. The install was speedier, and the same thing goes for just about everything else. The interface has also been improved. After a few minutes of usage, it feels like Star Division might have gotten it right this time.
Note: I tested the OS/2 version and not the one for Linux, but I'm pretty sure the same thing applies to every single other version out there.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
At ftp://ftp.stardivi sion.de/pub/staroffice/unxlxni/so51_lnx_01.tar you can get the english version. (Change 01 to 49 for Gernam, 33 for French, and 39 for Italian.)
Its loaded (took me about 5 mins to get in) but seems to be going pretty quick (20k/s to the East Coast USA)
/*He who controls Purple controls the Universe. *
www.gotontheinter.net
Updated vaguely once a whenever, maybe once a whenever-and-a-half.
Yes, it has MS Office 95 and 97 filters, and in my experience it does a markedly better job than WordPerfect Office at opening MS Office files. But it's not really compatible. It won't touch fast-saved documents, has trouble with longer ones, requires macros (if your business uses any) to be rewritten, and it's an even bigger memory hog than MS Office.
All this said, it's a decent office suite with a lot of great features, a nice interface, and damn fine cross-platform support. But it won't coexist comfortably with other office suites any better than any other office suite. A business or institution really can't mix office suites; for all the filters in the world, their file formats are still too far apart for everyday use.
A word processor that can "usually" open Word files is useless. When you're sent a Word file, the only acceptable word processor is one that can always open a Word file, even with clipart, drawings, equations, a glossary, embedded spreadsheets, and so forth.
You're not smarter than the people you work for. You're naive. There are a lot of things I dislike about MS Office, but even if StarOffice were suddenly so free that it was GPL'ed, it can cost a fortune to migrate a running business from one office suite to another.
If you have a department running Linux or some other such OS on the desktop and you need access to the company's standard office suite, WinFrame might make sense. And if you're on one of the major commercial Unixes, there's always SoftWindows.
Gee, I had no problem getting all my windows hot keys working in linux, in fact I have more hotkeys in linux than I do in windows. It took about 10 minutes with xkeycaps to configure X so that the windows key is mapped to one of the Meta modifiers, and the context menu key is recognized in the 104-key layout as a key. So, I go into the WindowMaker menu config (substitute whatever system you use to assign hotkeys to commands) and start mapping keys...
lets see...
context menu key gives me the menu I get when I right click on the title bar, windows-space shades the window, windows-F4 closes it, windows-x toggles maximize, windows-n minimizes it, windows-h hides it, windows-t brings up a terminal, windows-e brings up an editor (my current favorite is joe) in a term for quick jotting of notes, windows-q exits the X session, windows-1 through windows-5 switches to a particular virtual desktop, windows-leftarrow and windows-rightarrow moves to the previous and next virtual desktop, respectively...
need I go on? Or have I blabbed at the mouth enough?
-Cheetah
For 5.0, RedHat 6.0 has an RPM of Star Office which works just fine. It's not installed by default, it's on the Applications CD.
I wish I could find out if 5.1 works or not on my RedHat 6.0 system, but as another /.er already stated, the download area says that its closed.
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Between the two, I'd recommend Star Office, **IF** you have gobs of RAM (minimum 64M) and a fairly speedy processor to go with it. It's more polished, and I think it deals better with fonts, though given that it's running on X (the "it's 1999 and I still don't have built-in TrueType font support by default" window system), there's only so much you can expect.
I'd be curious to hear other people's opinions on this too...
P.S. Yes I know you can get TrueType font renderizers for X, my RedHat 6.0 XFree86 came with one installed. But it was an extra feature RedHat was nice enough to through in, and even with that X doesn't have a great way to deal with such fonts, or font scalability, transparently.
P.P.S. On ONE occasion Applix nuked the file I was editing when I tried to save it... only once over a period of about a year, but still, fyi...
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
it can cost a fortune to migrate a running business from one office suite to another
Yep, and that includes from one version of MS Office to another.
Sure, you can retrofit filters and such so that your department still using Office 95 can open docs than some other branch that's using Office 97 sends you - maybe. But what about those old Word 5.0 files you've got around, or the Word documents from the division that used to be all-Mac? Yeah, you can open them (if you jump through the right hoops), but you'll lose the formatting. (Voice of experience here.)
Yes, it's an effort to switch from one office suite to another -- and each one still insists on its own internal format as well as supporting (to some degree or other) several other "portable" document formats -- but you're going to face that cost every time - or at best every other time - Microsoft comes out with a new version of Office, so you ought to look at all the long term costs involved.
Hell, a halfway competent manager will have already looked at these factors and decreed some standard -- as in really standard, not just what's most popular -- document format (or subset of document content) for the company, so that last year's contract boilerplate is still recognizable in next year's version of Office -- whoever's Office it is.
-- Alastair
STAR OFFICE 5.1 Download Sites:
FTP SITES:
Sun SITE UTK at University of Tennessee - Knoxville
TU Clausthal - Germany
Sun SITE Central Europe at RWTH-Aachen - Germany
Sun SITE Finland at the Tampere University of Technology
Sun SITE Switzerland - cnlab & SWITCH - Rapperswil & Zurich
Star Division - Germany
Star Division - Germany
AARNet Mirror Project - Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
HTTP SITES:
Sun SITE USA at University of North Carolina - UNC Chapel Hill
Sun SITE UTK at University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Sun SITE Central Europe at RWTH-Aachen - Germany
Sun SITE Finland at the Tampere University of Technology
Sun SITE Nordic at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan - Stockholm
Sun SITE Belgium
Sun SITE Northern Europe at Imperial College - London
Sun SITE Switzerland - cnlab & SWITCH - Rapperswil & Zurich
Do the macros work in this version?
---Joe Merlino gnupg public key ID: 1E91EBAF
Just installed the english version of 5.1 from sunsite.utk.edu/pub/ StarDivision/unxlnxi/. My mashine is running rawhide from about a week before 6.0 came out - should be pretty similar.
SO works with libc-2.1.1 ok with about 5 minutes of testing. It still slightly munged a test M$ Word 97 doc I had laying around. Abiword did a better job of importing the same doc.
First, StarOffice lacks a lot of features. One example: Word's revision marks. SO doesn't have this feature. Word does. It is pretty common to want to mark different revisions of, e.g., a contract.
Second, SO's import feature isn't 100%, and sometimes it isn't even close. If people are passing around Word files, a lot of formatting will be missed.
I wouldn't be without vi for quick in-and-out work. Half the time I'm telnetted into an OS/2 box and just need to quickly edit one config file or script. vi does stuff like that great. However, for longer editing sessions I prefer Emacs or Textpad (a product for Win machines). For quick and simple when generating new files the best thing is cat > filename.txt on Unix, or copy con > filename.txt on DOS or OS/2.
Looks like it works with my Debian potato (glibc2.1) based system. There is also an AppIcon in wmaker, which was missing in 5.0.