Sun has made a huge investment of time, money and energy in Free Software for the desktop. Especially for GNOME and Open Office.
I'm very glad that this is paying off for them. Hopefully IBM, HP and DELL will want to start competitng with SUN in putting Linux on Desktops.
It is interestering to think that anybody can now put Fedora 1 on their machines and bundle a whole load of high quality software for 0 licensing cost.
I wonder if these will appear in 1st world countries?
I'm not a fanboy. I'm a core AbiWord developer. I've written about 200,000 LOC for that program.
I was aggresive because what you said flied totally in the face my experience. I've installed Linux and Windows desktops. It was much easier to install Linux than windows and much less to configure.I've watched students with nothing but Windows experience become productive on Gnome desktops in 30 minutes.
The catorgy that Linux lags Windows is the Windows Geeks segment. People who buy the latest hardware, read "Windows Secrets reveleaved" articles in mags and keep their parents Windows machines running at home.
For those people Linux is not so good coz the latest hardware doesn't have Linux drivers at release.
I have my 73 year-old mother running RedHat 9 with AbiWord-2.
I bought a modern system with hardware supported by Linux (modem, motherboard, monitor, scanner printer).
I stuck the RH 9 CD in the computer and pressed click a few times on my mouse. It all justed worked first time. No extra CD's for drivers. The sytem is up and running. My mother is very happy browsing the web, reading/sending emails, doing a bit a of scanning and writing letters.
Somone with *no* prior experience can use a GNOME desktop with about 3-4 hours training.
I guess my mother daughter and wofe are totally illusionary?
Want a FAST, word processor that reads and writes MS Word docs, runs on Windows, Linux and QNX?
Try AbiWord-2.0.1 just released yesterday. It loads in 1 second, looks perfect in Linux, Windows and QNX, has Tables, Footnotes, Endnotes, Mail Merge, Revisions marks and some custom features all it's own.
For a quick introduction to AbiWord-2.0 and it's many features, try the tour .
Binaries for AbiWord for Windows, QNX, SUSE 9.0 and RedHat 9 are available for download.
There is also a wv2 library being built that is lGPL'd.
There are also rumours that OO will break their doc import/export code out into stand alone libraries that will be LGPL'd. That would be a great help too.
Ahh actually a large part of the the reason they got less 60% efficiency may well be the interconnect. In this case the infiniband drivers and the whole network IO on OSX maybe not be what is possible in Linux.
All this stuff is *really* good in Linux. In the past OSX has lagged Linux in these areas. They may well get better performance with a Linux kernel.
They have to maintain that efficiency in a factor of 20 scale up to get 14 TeraFlops.
That's a huge factor. Getting that factor 20 scale is hard and is a large part of the usefulness of the underlying software and networking architecture.
Since it hasn't been demonstrated, the Top 500 people are right to withhold judgement.
Oh come on now. Apple is only going to please it's own installed base withthe G5 machines unless they can break into the new super-computer-cluster market currently owned by lintel.
So what most inmportant are plain SPECMarks and the linpack matrix benchmarks done in double precision floating point on a 64-bit linux install for the AMD-64 chips.
In any case it looks like Intel has really dropped the ball with it's Itanium white elephants.
Coz you clearly no nothing about what is happenning in the world of Linux GUI's and based your statements on typical MAC arrogance.
There is a very well defined set of Human Interface Guidelines for GNOME. GNOME 2.4 which is used in slackware, is almost totally compliant with these.
The panel can be put anywhere you want (which has always been the case). The AA Fonts used in Slackware are just totally beautiful. Fully on par with anything on OSX.
GNOME 2.4 comes complete with a very easy to use built-in browser which is far more standards compliant than safari or IE and MUCH easier to use than Mozilla.
There is LOTS more stuff here than you have a clue about.
Having been forced to recently use Windows *shudder* I can confidently say the AA for font on modern Linux distros is first class.
If you want beauty and elegance try AbiWord-2.0 or Gnumeric-1.2 (available on this slack pre-release)
You can make a Linux desktop look anyway you like. Both the GNOME and KDE desktops are fully themeable. If you can't design your own themes there are lots of themes available that can be installed with a single click. Got bored of your desktop? Try a new layout!
See: http://art.gnome.org/
For GNOME themes. There is a similar site for KDE but I don't run KDE so I don't know where it is.
Anyway, learn a bit before you spout off on slashdot. We're happy to flame cluseless newbee's here.
I got all excited and immediately downloaded this. Unfortunately your project has suffered extensive bit rot. It doesn't come close to compiling with gcc-3.2.
gtk-- has been depreciated for years. Any chance of updating the gtkmm-2.0?
For the numbered outline, simply define a new style based on "Numbered Headings" and change Auto numbering style from simple Numeric to Alphabetic, roman, whatever you like.
For the cut+and select and delete bugs, I'm stumped. They work great on my box. Please submit a bug along the offending document in a bug report to our bugzilla.
Web layout! I'm impressed that someone actually uses that:-) Please post a bug report and we'll that fixed.
Regarding the scrolling causing text distortion, this bug was fixed right before the 2.0 release.
I think must have played with a pre-2.0 beta. Look at the hint for auto numbered styles. They work much the same as MS Word. We could include more by default I guess but it's just as easy for the user to create their own and save them to a template file.
So go ahead and switch:-)
PS. We take good bug reports with easy to reproduce examples very seriously.
Very few Mac users will ever switch to Linux. Very few Home users of Windows will switch to Linux. Big companies are in the process of *Forcing* their drones to use cheap linux platforms.
Linux use will also skyrocket where there are no Windows machines (2nd and 3rd World).
About half the Ximian guys use OS X to develop on but there is zero corporate interest in OS X. It's expensive, it needs expesnive hardware, it doesn't have the remote management tools of the Linux desktops and you're just locked into another proprietry OS. Where is the win there?
On the other hand Open Source platform developers will definately not be resting our Laurels and OS X will have to steadily improved to remain ahead of Gnome and KDE.
The terms of the GPL require them to release the source code to anyone who buys a phone from them and wants to see it (for the kernel at least). Geeks should be able to see the source code. Whether they could anything useful wit it is another matter. All the interesting stuff would be in userland.
There is every reason to think a factor of two increase in sales is absolutely possible.
They have less than 1% of the desktop market but a reasonable chance of that rising by over a factor of 10 (to 10%) in a few years.
Linux use continues to grow expontially and they have the biggest concentration of linux talent anywhere.
Plus quarter on quarter growth of advanced server is around 50%! If that continues over a year or so so a factor two in revenue will be a piece of cake.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm amazed that no here on slashdot has said this in this context.
Tim Burness-Lee invented the World-Wide-Web at CERN to enhance the ability of Particle Physicists to collaborate.
Particle Physicists are also making a huge investment of time and money to improve GRID computing.
Particle Physicits were the first to use large clusters of Unix Workstations to do large scale computation.
The list goes on...
But the point of Particle Physics is to find out more about the Universe. Along the way we've done more than our fair share to benefit all mankind.
Sun has made a huge investment of time, money and energy in Free Software for the desktop. Especially for GNOME and Open Office.
I'm very glad that this is paying off for them. Hopefully IBM, HP and DELL will want to start competitng with SUN in putting Linux on Desktops.
It is interestering to think that anybody can now put Fedora 1 on their machines and bundle a whole load of high quality software for 0 licensing cost.
I wonder if these will appear in 1st world countries?
Martin
Like I said, Windows Geeks are not yet well served.
Lots of other people are.
I'm not a fanboy. I'm a core AbiWord developer. I've written about 200,000 LOC for that program.
I was aggresive because what you said flied totally in the face my experience. I've installed Linux and Windows desktops. It was much easier to install Linux than windows and much less to configure.I've watched students with
nothing but Windows experience become productive on Gnome desktops in 30 minutes.
The catorgy that Linux lags Windows is the Windows Geeks segment. People who buy the latest hardware, read "Windows Secrets reveleaved" articles in mags and keep their parents Windows machines running at home.
For those people Linux is not so good coz the latest hardware doesn't have Linux drivers at release.
You're so full of shit it's incredible!
I have my 73 year-old mother running RedHat 9 with AbiWord-2.
I bought a modern system with hardware supported by Linux (modem, motherboard, monitor, scanner printer).
I stuck the RH 9 CD in the computer and pressed click a few times on my mouse. It all justed worked first time. No extra CD's for drivers. The sytem is up and running. My mother is very happy browsing the web, reading/sending emails, doing a bit a of scanning and writing letters.
Somone with *no* prior experience can use a GNOME desktop with about 3-4 hours training.
I guess my mother daughter and wofe are totally illusionary?
Idiot.
Want a FAST, word processor that reads and writes MS Word docs, runs on Windows, Linux and QNX?
Try AbiWord-2.0.1 just released yesterday. It loads in 1 second, looks perfect in Linux, Windows and QNX, has Tables, Footnotes, Endnotes, Mail Merge, Revisions marks and some custom features all it's own.
For a quick introduction to AbiWord-2.0 and it's many features, try the tour .
Binaries for AbiWord for Windows, QNX, SUSE 9.0 and RedHat 9 are available for download.
There is also a wv2 library being built that is lGPL'd.
There are also rumours that OO will break their doc import/export code out into stand alone libraries that will be LGPL'd. That would be a great help too.
Ahh actually a large part of the the reason they got less 60% efficiency may well be the interconnect. In this case the infiniband drivers and the whole network IO on OSX maybe not be what is possible in Linux.
All this stuff is *really* good in Linux. In the past OSX has lagged Linux in these areas. They may well get better performance with a Linux kernel.
They have to maintain that efficiency in a factor of 20 scale up to get 14 TeraFlops.
That's a huge factor. Getting that factor 20 scale is hard and is a large part of the usefulness of the underlying software and networking architecture.
Since it hasn't been demonstrated, the Top 500 people are right to withhold judgement.
Oh come on now. Apple is only going to please it's own installed base withthe G5 machines unless they can break into the new super-computer-cluster market currently owned by lintel.
So what most inmportant are plain SPECMarks and the linpack matrix benchmarks done in double precision
floating point on a 64-bit linux install for the AMD-64 chips.
In any case it looks like Intel has really dropped the ball with it's Itanium white elephants.
Martin
I believe it uses librsvg. The fastest and most complaint SVG renderer out there.
(Maintained by my good friend and fellow AbiWord developer Dom Lachowicz)
Martin
Coz you clearly no nothing about what is happenning in the world of Linux GUI's and based your statements on typical MAC arrogance.
There is a very well defined set of Human Interface Guidelines for GNOME. GNOME 2.4 which is used in slackware, is almost totally compliant with these.
The panel can be put anywhere you want (which has always been the case). The AA Fonts used in Slackware are just totally beautiful. Fully on par with anything on OSX.
GNOME 2.4 comes complete with a very easy to use built-in browser which is far more standards compliant than safari or IE and MUCH easier to use than Mozilla.
There is LOTS more stuff here than you have a clue about.
Clearly you're a clueless Mac bigot who can't code and doesn't understand why everyone doesn't lick Steve Job's arse.
Having been forced to recently use Windows *shudder* I can confidently say the AA for font on modern Linux distros is first class.
If you want beauty and elegance try AbiWord-2.0 or Gnumeric-1.2 (available on this slack pre-release)
You can make a Linux desktop look anyway you like. Both the GNOME and KDE desktops are fully themeable. If you can't design your own themes there are lots of themes available that can be installed with a single click. Got bored of your desktop? Try a new layout!
See:
http://art.gnome.org/
For GNOME themes. There is a similar site for KDE but I don't run KDE so I don't know where it is.
Anyway, learn a bit before you spout off on slashdot. We're happy to flame cluseless newbee's here.
Martin
I got all excited and immediately downloaded this. Unfortunately your project has suffered extensive bit rot. It doesn't come close to compiling with gcc-3.2.
gtk-- has been depreciated for years. Any chance of updating the gtkmm-2.0?
Thanks!
Martin
For the numbered outline, simply define a new style based on "Numbered Headings" and change Auto numbering style from simple Numeric to Alphabetic, roman, whatever you like.
:-) Please post a bug report and we'll that fixed.
:-)
For the cut+and select and delete bugs, I'm stumped. They work great on my box. Please submit a bug along the offending document in a bug report to our bugzilla.
Web layout! I'm impressed that someone actually uses that
Regarding the scrolling causing text distortion, this bug was fixed right before the 2.0 release.
I think must have played with a pre-2.0 beta. Look at the hint for auto numbered styles. They work much the same as MS Word. We could include more by default I guess but it's just as easy for the user to create their own and save them to a template file.
So go ahead and switch
PS. We take good bug reports with easy to reproduce examples very seriously.
As opposed to the numerous Free Word processors that natively run on Mac's....
The AbiWord project has being trying to people to help out Hub on the OSX port for years. Not much help so far.
Well Hub will eventually get there but basically it appears to me that OSX has a hard-core of users but very few coders outside of Apple.
OOo has similar problems.
Martin
The information in the Bible is the opposite of confidential!
It's newly supported in Codeweaver's Wine 2.0. There must be 1000's of posts on why OSX is better than Linux coz of MS Office and Photoshop.
It's imply not true any more. Plus more apps work under Linux every day under Wine.
That said, we're I am at a University and for my Wife's Microbusiness, Scribus is just great. (For posters, flyers, etc)
Thanks very much guys!
Martin Sevior
Very few Mac users will ever switch to Linux. Very few Home users of Windows will switch to Linux. Big companies are in the process of *Forcing* their drones to use cheap linux platforms.
Linux use will also skyrocket where there are no Windows machines (2nd and 3rd World).
About half the Ximian guys use OS X to develop on but there is zero corporate interest in OS X. It's expensive, it needs expesnive hardware, it doesn't have the remote management tools of the Linux desktops and you're just locked into another proprietry OS. Where is the win there?
On the other hand Open Source platform developers will definately not be resting our Laurels and OS X will have to steadily improved to remain ahead of Gnome and KDE.
But that is good. That is progress.
Martin
The terms of the GPL require them to release the source code to anyone who buys a phone from them and wants to see it (for the kernel at least). Geeks should be able to see the source code. Whether they could anything useful wit it is another matter. All the interesting stuff would be in userland.
Martin
tell that to PIXAR who just purchased a 1024 node blade server running Linux.
Tell that to SGI who have a 64-way Itanium running Linux...
There is every reason to think a factor of two increase in sales is absolutely possible.
They have less than 1% of the desktop market but a reasonable chance of that rising by over a factor of 10 (to 10%) in a few years.
Linux use continues to grow expontially and they have the biggest concentration of linux talent anywhere.
Plus quarter on quarter growth of advanced server is around 50%! If that continues over a year or so so a factor two in revenue will be a piece of cake.
You haven't seen dom's printer.
0.5 sec to open abiword, 0.5 to load the doc, 8 secs to print it.
15 secs to open 00
You do the math.
If that's all she needs AbiWord http://www.abiword.com is all she needs. It's way faster than OO.
Cheers
Martin