wozz writes "Walnut Creek will be bundling Applixware with their FreeBSD Power Desktop " Good news - wonder if there are any other similar deals in the works.
47 comments
Re:Applixware is losing
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Anonymous Coward
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Do you WANT to run Star Office?
Re:Is it really cool?
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Anonymous Coward
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Please elaborate (ie, a mini-review;-) about Xess. I need a spreadsheet and was thinking about buying it.
Re:coolness
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Anonymous Coward
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People often seem to be confused by this.
The issue in the Windows/IE case is whether or not Microsoft have monopoly power in the PC operating systems market. If they have, bunding IE may be an anti-competitive practice. If they haven't, it's simply ah effective distribution scheme.
At the end of the day, the issue isn't bundling per se, it's that the holder of a monopoly must play by a different set of rules to everyone else.
Re:Am I right or what?
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Anonymous Coward
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"Hello. My name is Jordan Hubbard, and I pronouce FreeBSD/fribbised/ ". Sorry, that's been a long running joke and had to be done.
WindowMaker
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
WindowMaker provides a nice compromise between the two (twm and KDE). NeXT developed a brilliant interface (a rather nice OS too), and we're quite lucky to have a free imitation of it.
Applix is doing fine.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Applix has gone from 24 11/16 to 13 1/4, true enough. But it also way up from its 52 week low of 2 13/16 Applix also earns real money: 22 cents a share and has a market capitalization of 140 million. They have also recently implemented stock repurchase plans, which is a sign that the company has money to burn. The plus 24 high was because day traders grabbed the stock and played games with it for a couple of days after institutions started buying it. It was touted, rightfully so, as a Linux play. For us chumps who bought it a year ago at 3 dollars a share, it's been a fun and profitable ride. I plan on hanging on to the stock. Its move into BSD space is not a "save the low end" strategy, it's a smart move period. I'm glad to see smallish companies competing with Microsoft and Sun and making money at it. The linux/bsd folks need more companies like Applix.
Re:cool
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Anonymous Coward
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NetBSD supports PPC (in fact, AIX includes some NetBSD code, along with the code from 4.4BSD and earlier).
I don't think there are currently any plans to port FreeBSD to PPC.
Re:neiner
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Anonymous Coward
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neiner
Dimwit
Re:cool
by
Anonymous Coward
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Wow, is this a *real* first post?
Give yourself a pat on the back, you get the first post award of the day.
Re:The real trick is...
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Anonymous Coward
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However, if by 'Tech Support' you mean: books, magazines, training videos, training seminars, user groups....
Then there's a lot of support for Office, and almost none for ApplixWare (or Star Office, for that matter)
Re:The Long Ear of the Law
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I assume you were trying for first post?
Good try at making a reasonable first post, next let's try "on-topic".
Current is 4.4.2...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
And it is pretty stable. You can turn on auto-save (I do) if you are worried. But Applixware is much more stable than either Word Perfect 8.0 or Netscape 4.xx. Plus applix should get some credit for supporting (well, at least doing) a linux port years ago, very early in the game.
Oh, and that was 3.something. 2.x must have been on something other than Linux?
-- cary
Re:Must have been a very cheap port.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
- Actually, it cost a lot of time/money- Walnut Creek had been working on it for almost 2 years- If it had been cheap then it would have happened as soon as SuSE et al came out with it....
Is it a port? OR linux emulation?
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Anonymous Coward
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I've heard (for a couple of years) that Applix ran on BSD under Linux emulation. So is this even a port?
-- cary
Re:Is it a port? OR linux emulation?
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norn
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· Score: 1
Yes, it's a native binary.
Re:coolness
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Didn't Microsoft get into trouble for bundling an app suite with operating system software?
Re:It's about time.
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Anonymous Coward
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KDE
Re:The real trick is...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
When's the last time you heard anyone get useful output out of consumer grade technical support?
The notion that Microsoft based products are inherently more suitable because of such 'tech support' is ludicrous.
Re:Is it really cool?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If you think Applix is buggy, go to CompUSA and get a copy of Xess for Linux.
Re:It's about time.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
KDE may very well be the more stable on FreeBSD, but don't you think it's a little misleading to judge the stability of a many megabyte desktop environment on the basis of whether or not the default install process added one line to a file in your home directory? Especially given that there are valid technical reasons why one would not want to add the line? BTW, I think you might be looking for 'exec gnome-session'.
Am I right or what?
by
Anonymous Coward
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Am I the only one who thinks it's much cooler to pronounce FreeBSD as "frebbised"? I think this proununciation easily lends to the idea of another mascot, the hairless Frebble.
Re:Applixware is losing
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Applix still had to contend with this even before Sun bought Star Division. It was competiting with a gratis product now and was competing with a gratis product before.
The stock price is more a matter of 'spectator' public perception.
Even before the Sun purchase of Star Office, Applix was supporting Linux on Alpha and PPC. This is just an extension of prior practice.
gnome vs kde
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Anonymous Coward
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gnome is very linux-centric. it is not portable and it is not stable. granted kde wants to be windows though. run twm;)
Re:cool
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yeah, if only { Free | Net | Open }BSD would support my SCSI card, I'd love to give 'em a shot. I grew up on BSD, I'd love to run it at home.
Unfortunately, they still lag behind linux in hardware support, and I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a new SCSI card just to run *BSD.
Must have been a very cheap port.
by
Forge
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· Score: 1
Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris are very similar ( relative to other Unixes ) so it takes very little effort to port from one to the other. As such all that was keeping Applix off FreeBSD was the lack of a market. After all Applix is already on the other two.
Now it appears there are a significant number of people with FreeBSD on the desktop, so...
It's also worth noting that FreeBSD generally comes with KDE so this is another nail in the coffin of the "It's too hard" daemon.
-- --=
Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Re:Must have been a very cheap port.
by
kvajk
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· Score: 1
Yeah, but supporting yet another UNIX is a significant cost for a software company, in terms of internal infrastructure and processes and all that junk. The porting may be easy, but the support and distribution and all that are not.
I've used Applix, and find it to be full-featured, easy, and very fast. I like it. Still, I've now converted to the One True Way, which is, of course, abiword, at www.abisource.com. (Still under development, unfortunately. But already good enough for me to scrape by with.)
And PPC support. I do like Applix, and I think that This will be good for Applix and FreeBSD. I'd rather back Applix than StarOrfice. Applix has been a friend of the Nix's for years.
GNOME leaves ~7 Core Dumps on my harddisk after a 5 minute session, on FreeBSD-STABLE.
Never had the problem with Linux, 'though.
Yet another version of "BSD"?
by
slickwillie
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· Score: 1
"Berkeley System Distribution". Someone ought to compile a complete list. I don't think I've ever seen the correct one in one of these kind of articles.
My point was more of the fact that people will buy things based on the premise of havng support, even if they never use it...
I am certainly *not* calling M$ tech supprort good/functional/enviable, but the fact that help might be there in some official capacity is enough to allay the fears of some people, and let them buy something they otherwise might have steered clear of. "Wow, I heard there's companies that support Linux apps for users, not just buisnesses" is about the best thing to help spread the use of Linux and BSD right now. The reports in the media have raised the awareness quite a bit, but there are some mental hurdles that some people need to get over first. I've been using Linux (one distro or another for several years now), and I have had some friends (even CS majors, mind you), that were unwilling to try it because "what if I can't get a hold of you if something goes wrong".
It's like weak encryption, it may not help out a lot, but it does make you feel better...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
On FreeBSD, KDE seems to be better supported. I have found it to be faster and more stable, never mind much easier to configure. Unless you really want to spend a long time right now figuring out all the guts of these things and tweaking a million parts, just install KDE from the ports collection. There are FreeBSD build scripts in the KDE src, but it's a pain to get done.
I'm using GNOME with Window Maker on my FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT system and it's surprisingly stable. This isn't "October GNOME", though, but I can run all the things like Gnumeric, GNOME-card, etc. While I don't use them much, they're fun to play with.
A desktop for all seasons
by
Mr.+Protocol
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· Score: 1
People's perceptions are so odd. They hate Microsoft. They hate MS Office. They hate Word.
On the other hand, everyone loves Xerox PARC. They have so many neat toys. They invented personal computers and local area networks. They had this wonderful windowing technology that Apple stole. They had Smalltalk. They had the Bravo editor, just about the first windowing editor.
The funny thing is that I have been given to understand that the first version of Word was based on Bravo. And once I heard that and took a dispassionate look, I was aghast. Guess what? Word does look'n'feel somewhat like Bravo!
It's mighty scary. I personally am glad to see commercial office suite software on FreeBSD because that's what I run. I run it because I have a personal fondness for it, being a BSD user since 3BSD for the VAX. I know it and am comfortable with it, and I'll be happy to be able to do stuff on FreeBSD that I use Lotus SmartSuite for under Windows (I don't run Office either).
But really, I don't think FreeBSD is going to do much in the desktop market. Unless there are strong reasons for running it on the desktop, I think its future lies mostly in serverland. As far as desktop users can tell, Linux and FreeBSD are sort of a push, and Linux has a lot more how-to-do-it books on the market. (Except in Japan, where I hear there are just scads of FreeBSD books!)
And that doesn't matter either. It's a good thing to have tools available on servers. So, hurrah for Applixware. I'm looking forward to it. I just hope it turns out to be usable and stable. I wasn't too happy by that Forest Service guy's experiences. I hope that was an anomaly.
Applixware 2.3.7 was one of the buggiest pieces of software I ever came across. The filters were pretty lame, help documentation poor, and the application had a bad habit of simply going away, saving nothing to disk -- no backup, nothing. It's probably the only software I've ever used that I was really scared to fire up. Hopefully Applix has improved.
I work for the US Forest Service which -- until this October -- has been using ApplixWare for its OfficeSuite. We're currently on version 4.37, and the program still sucks. The reason behind our use of it was that the FS is using IBM 6500s and PCs and ApplixWare could work on both.
Enough of the rank and file in the Forest Service, however, complained about how absolutely crappy the system is that we're now switching over to Microsoft Office. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I don't mind not having to use Applix anymore.
I agree with all your complaints, but the worst part to my mind is that Applix more or less decided to use all their own shortcut keys for common operations. You wanna paste? Try F5, or F6, I don't recall.
Applix mail is atrocious, too. It's slow, the interface is horrible (click here, then type here -- hands always moving from keyboard to mouse and back), and it's just a hassle to use.
I have avoided using AW as much as possible -- it's just too obnoxious to be worth the trouble.
They just lost their most important reference customer, Sun (for obvious reasons). Their stock has lost 50% since late august. This BSD piece looks like quite a desperate move to save it in the "low end" market segment.
The free support offered by Applix for those who buy this package. It doesn't make much of a difference for many of us, who are used to downloading everything, toying around with it at our own risk and enjoyment. It does make more of a statement for the more widespread acceptance of BSD/Linux on laptops (aand desktops). Redhat's free install support for those who buy the box may not seem like a big deal to some, but it really goes a long way.
Joe Q Random: "Why would I try this - there's not even anyone to call if I have a problem" John Q Hacker: Joe: "But I wan't get to them - it's not working..."
Support is a major selling point for many people - even for those who are somewhat technically competant, but just want it to work *now*, and can't get a hold of the info in any other way but the phone...
The increase in the number of companies that are selling pre-loaded Linux/BSD boxen is definitely a step in the right direction - sometimes you just want the right tool for the job, and you want it working, without having to worry about hardware / partitioning issues... You can always play with the other stuff later, but let's get up and running.
Just my $ 1/50
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Now I've just got to get another PC. I've been waiting to run FreeBSD in my mix for a long time, but had nothing really to use it for. Applixware is as good a reason as any, I presume.
Now the important question. Which has better FreeBSD support? Gnome or KDE?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you WANT to run Star Office?
Please elaborate (ie, a mini-review ;-) about Xess. I need a spreadsheet and was thinking about buying it.
People often seem to be confused by this.
The issue in the Windows/IE case is whether or not Microsoft have monopoly power in the PC operating systems market. If they have, bunding IE may be an anti-competitive practice. If they haven't, it's simply ah effective distribution scheme.
At the end of the day, the issue isn't bundling per se, it's that the holder of a monopoly must play by a different set of rules to everyone else.
"Hello. My name is Jordan Hubbard, and I pronouce FreeBSD /fribbised/ ". Sorry, that's been a long running joke and had to be done.
WindowMaker provides a nice compromise between the two (twm and KDE). NeXT developed a brilliant interface (a rather nice OS too), and we're quite lucky to have a free imitation of it.
Applix has gone from 24 11/16 to 13 1/4, true enough. But it also way up from its 52 week low of 2 13/16 Applix also earns real money: 22 cents a share and has a market capitalization of 140 million. They have also recently implemented stock repurchase plans, which is a sign that the company has money to burn. The plus 24 high was because day traders grabbed the stock and played games with it for a couple of days after institutions started buying it. It was touted, rightfully so, as a Linux play. For us chumps who bought it a year ago at 3 dollars a share, it's been a fun and profitable ride. I plan on hanging on to the stock. Its move into BSD space is not a "save the low end" strategy, it's a smart move period. I'm glad to see smallish companies competing with Microsoft and Sun and making money at it. The linux/bsd folks need more companies like Applix.
NetBSD supports PPC (in fact, AIX includes some NetBSD code, along with the code from 4.4BSD and earlier).
I don't think there are currently any plans to port FreeBSD to PPC.
Dimwit
Wow, is this a *real* first post?
Give yourself a pat on the back, you get the first post award of the day.
However, if by 'Tech Support' you mean:
books,
magazines,
training videos,
training seminars,
user groups....
Then there's a lot of support for Office, and almost none for ApplixWare (or Star Office, for that matter)
I assume you were trying for first post?
Good try at making a reasonable first post, next let's try "on-topic".
And it is pretty stable. You can turn on
auto-save (I do) if you are worried. But
Applixware is much more stable than either
Word Perfect 8.0 or Netscape 4.xx. Plus
applix should get some credit for supporting
(well, at least doing) a linux port years
ago, very early in the game.
Oh, and that was 3.something. 2.x must have
been on something other than Linux?
-- cary
- Actually, it cost a lot of time/money- Walnut Creek had been working on it for almost 2 years- If it had been cheap then it would have happened as soon as SuSE et al came out with it....
I've heard (for a couple of years) that
Applix ran on BSD under Linux emulation.
So is this even a port?
-- cary
Didn't Microsoft get into trouble for bundling an app suite with operating system software?
KDE
When's the last time you heard anyone get useful output out of consumer grade technical support?
The notion that Microsoft based products are inherently more suitable because of such 'tech support' is ludicrous.
If you think Applix is buggy, go to CompUSA and get a copy of Xess for Linux.
KDE may very well be the more stable on FreeBSD, but don't you think it's a little misleading to judge the stability of a many megabyte desktop environment on the basis of whether or not the default install process added one line to a file in your home directory? Especially given that there are valid technical reasons why one would not want to add the line? BTW, I think you might be looking for 'exec gnome-session'.
Am I the only one who thinks it's much cooler to pronounce FreeBSD as "frebbised"? I think this proununciation easily lends to the idea of another mascot, the hairless Frebble.
Applix still had to contend with this even before Sun bought Star Division. It was competiting with a gratis product now and was competing with a gratis product before.
The stock price is more a matter of 'spectator' public perception.
Even before the Sun purchase of Star Office, Applix was supporting Linux on Alpha and PPC. This is just an extension of prior practice.
gnome is very linux-centric. it is not portable and it is not stable. granted kde wants to be windows though. run twm ;)
Yeah, if only { Free | Net | Open }BSD would support my SCSI card, I'd love to give 'em a shot. I grew up on BSD, I'd love to run it at home.
Unfortunately, they still lag behind linux in hardware support, and I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a new SCSI card just to run *BSD.
Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris are very similar ( relative to other Unixes ) so it takes very little effort to port from one to the other. As such all that was keeping Applix off FreeBSD was the lack of a market. After all Applix is already on the other two.
Now it appears there are a significant number of people with FreeBSD on the desktop, so...
It's also worth noting that FreeBSD generally comes with KDE so this is another nail in the coffin of the "It's too hard" daemon.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Wrong story, dear.
If this is a desparate move, then why did it take them over a year to port to FreeBSD? This port was supposed to be available this time last year!
I'm thinking that ApplixWare saw the writing on the wall and got off their butts and finished the port!
But...why should I pay for something I can get for free (StarOffice)?
Excellent. I was getting tired of adding all these Linux apps like StarOffice and WordPerfect.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
And PPC support. I do like Applix, and I think that This will be good for Applix and FreeBSD. I'd rather back Applix than StarOrfice. Applix has been a friend of the Nix's for years.
photosMy Photostream
KDE. Definately KDE.
GNOME leaves ~7 Core Dumps on my harddisk after a 5 minute session, on FreeBSD-STABLE.
Never had the problem with Linux, 'though.
"Berkeley System Distribution". Someone ought to compile a complete list. I don't think I've ever seen the correct one in one of these kind of articles.
http://www.FreeBSD.org/FAQ/misc.html#AEN3582
To be redundant, KDE. When I installed the KDE package, it installed an .xinitrc file, so when I ran startx it started KDE.
I then installed the gnome package. I am still trying to figure out how to run it.
I hate it when preview doesn't work right...
just for reference, John Q Hacker decided to mention the newsgroups and the other on-line help...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
My point was more of the fact that people will buy things based on the premise of havng support, even if they never use it...
I am certainly *not* calling M$ tech supprort good/functional/enviable, but the fact that help might be there in some official capacity is enough to allay the fears of some people, and let them buy something they otherwise might have steered clear of. "Wow, I heard there's companies that support Linux apps for users, not just buisnesses" is about the best thing to help spread the use of Linux and BSD right now. The reports in the media have raised the awareness quite a bit, but there are some mental hurdles that some people need to get over first. I've been using Linux (one distro or another for several years now), and I have had some friends (even CS majors, mind you), that were unwilling to try it because "what if I can't get a hold of you if something goes wrong".
It's like weak encryption, it may not help out a lot, but it does make you feel better...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
On FreeBSD, KDE seems to be better supported. I have found it to be faster and more stable, never mind much easier to configure. Unless you really want to spend a long time right now figuring out all the guts of these things and tweaking a million parts, just install KDE from the ports collection. There are FreeBSD build scripts in the KDE src, but it's a pain to get done.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
It's great that people are starting to bundle the app suites with distros...
Kudos to walnut creek.
djx
the only trail worth taking is the one you blaze yourself
What SCSI card are you using? Initio? If so, they've got a FreeBSD driver on their website somewhere.
I'm using GNOME with Window Maker on my FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT system and it's surprisingly stable. This isn't "October GNOME", though, but I can run all the things like Gnumeric, GNOME-card, etc. While I don't use them much, they're fun to play with.
People's perceptions are so odd. They hate Microsoft. They hate MS Office. They hate Word.
On the other hand, everyone loves Xerox PARC. They have so many neat toys. They invented personal computers and local area networks. They had this wonderful windowing technology that Apple stole. They had Smalltalk. They had the Bravo editor, just about the first windowing editor.
The funny thing is that I have been given to understand that the first version of Word was based on Bravo. And once I heard that and took a dispassionate look, I was aghast. Guess what? Word does look'n'feel somewhat like Bravo!
It's mighty scary. I personally am glad to see commercial office suite software on FreeBSD because that's what I run. I run it because I have a personal fondness for it, being a BSD user since 3BSD for the VAX. I know it and am comfortable with it, and I'll be happy to be able to do stuff on FreeBSD that I use Lotus SmartSuite for under Windows (I don't run Office either).
But really, I don't think FreeBSD is going to do much in the desktop market. Unless there are strong reasons for running it on the desktop, I think its future lies mostly in serverland. As far as desktop users can tell, Linux and FreeBSD are sort of a push, and Linux has a lot more how-to-do-it books on the market. (Except in Japan, where I hear there are just scads of FreeBSD books!)
And that doesn't matter either. It's a good thing to have tools available on servers. So, hurrah for Applixware. I'm looking forward to it. I just hope it turns out to be usable and stable. I wasn't too happy by that Forest Service guy's experiences. I hope that was an anomaly.
Applixware 2.3.7 was one of the buggiest pieces of software I ever came across. The filters were pretty lame, help documentation poor, and the application had a bad habit of simply going away, saving nothing to disk -- no backup, nothing. It's probably the only software I've ever used that I was really scared to fire up. Hopefully Applix has improved.
cool might have to get freebsd now.
a real zero.
They just lost their most important reference customer, Sun (for obvious reasons). Their stock has lost 50% since late august. This BSD piece looks like quite a desperate move to save it in the "low end" market segment.
The free support offered by Applix for those who buy this package. It doesn't make much of a difference for many of us, who are used to downloading everything, toying around with it at our own risk and enjoyment. It does make more of a statement for the more widespread acceptance of BSD/Linux on laptops (aand desktops). Redhat's free install support for those who buy the box may not seem like a big deal to some, but it really goes a long way.
Joe Q Random: "Why would I try this - there's not even anyone to call if I have a problem"
John Q Hacker:
Joe: "But I wan't get to them - it's not working..."
Support is a major selling point for many people - even for those who are somewhat technically competant, but just want it to work *now*, and can't get a hold of the info in any other way but the phone...
The increase in the number of companies that are selling pre-loaded Linux/BSD boxen is definitely a step in the right direction - sometimes you just want the right tool for the job, and you want it working, without having to worry about hardware / partitioning issues... You can always play with the other stuff later, but let's get up and running.
Just my $ 1/50
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Now I've just got to get another PC. I've been waiting to run FreeBSD in my mix for a long time, but had nothing really to use it for. Applixware is as good a reason as any, I presume.
Now the important question. Which has better FreeBSD support? Gnome or KDE?
-Brent--