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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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Don't waste your time on either.
Linux doesn't have a word processor. The best thing is Lyx - very fast and work can be imported to several formats. Conversion to html is not bad unless there are math formulas which get translated into messy gifs, etc.
The 60 meg. Star Office download says it all. Tired, ugly and bloated imitation of MS Office. Word Perfect is even worse - terrible motif interface. Try to change directories with the file selector and constantly "filter" to go to parent directory if you are lucky. Very intuitive, folks.
There are several gtk based work processors that looked promising but they seem to be dead in the water. KOffice seems to be trying to imitate MS in using CORBA in the place of COM - nobody really wants or needs embedded objects or "in-place editing" which increase bloat and instability geometrically. Linked objects - all right. You don't need CORBA or COM for that. What a way to ruin the K Desktop Environment, one of the few Linux desktop apps or systems that is really useful.
People just want an attractive, modern Word Processor that can perhaps also be used as a WYSIWYG html editor with images and tables. Not even frames, thank you. If we want to edit our images we can use a separate application. We don't want or need Office compatibility either. If you want to load and save Office files, use Windows and make sure you have the same version of Office that the files require. Most of the Slashdot visitors are using Windows anyway even though they also may have Linux installed just to impress other geeks.
It's not happening. 10 years ago I had much better word processing and desktop publishing software at very low cost with an Amiga. Regardless of the hype, Deluxe Paint 10 years ago was better for most drawing and painting tasks than Gimp - which is really an image or photo processing factory that can also be used as a paint or drawing program in a very round-about way. Like writing a script to draw a circle.
Linux is a server system, with lip service being paid to its usefullness as a desktop productivity or home system. Servers don't need browsers or word processors or paint programs.
If you want to have fun with a desktop system use Windows 9x, MacIntosh or even get out that old Amiga 500 or Atari ST you have in the closet.
- 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.
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.
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
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.