Re:StarOffice is not the only choice under Linux.
on
KOffice 1.1 Rolls Out
·
· Score: 1
You're thinking of WordPerfect 8, which was libc5 based.
WordPerfect Office 2000 and WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux are the complete suite (WordPerfect, Quattro, Presentations, Paradox, etc.), and are based on libc6. I'm using it under Red Hat 7.1, and before that, I was using it under Caldera eDesktop 2.4.
The only drawback was price -- while the WordPerfect 8 application was free, WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux is $99.00 or more (I paid $149.00 for the deluxe version). Still, I feel as though it was worth it -- I wrote several long, complex documents using WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux on the way to my degree.
StarOffice is not the only choice under Linux.
on
KOffice 1.1 Rolls Out
·
· Score: 2
I use Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. It has its quirks, but it is very powerful indeed and puts StarOffice to shame, features-wise.
I've always had great luck with Caldera & Mandrake. Iffy luck with Red Hat. Corel's distro I got free at a Corel promotion, but their installer would not start on my laptop, my desktop, or my roommate's notebook. So much for Corel Linux. Debian always works great but is such a pain to install in any custom way that you have to really want punishment to live through it, and it's development/stability-testing cycle is so long you're always running terribly safe, but 2-year-old, software.
I really liked Caldera OpenLinux for a long time (through 2.4) but have recently become so tired of always seeing Red Hat and no other packages for every last piece of software that I finally just went Red Hat 7.1 and have been reasonably satisfied.
I tried both Win4Lin and VMware, wanting to do two things: 1) sync my Windows CE device and install software to it from Linux and 2) run VirtualDub (except capture mode) under Linux.
I bought both Win4Lin and VMware Workstation and gave them a try. Win4Lin 3.0 was a nightmare to install -- on a stock RedHat 7.1 box -- and the tech support at Netraverse was less than helpful, even perhaps a little rude. I finally gave up on the GUI installer and dug through the RPMs until I cobbled together my own installation using their undocumented command-line tools. Using Windows 98 SE, Win4Lin is fairly fast and seamless, but some of the windows updates didn't install correctly (among them Internet Explorer 5.5) and VirtualDub did not run at all (I guess it uses DirectX).
VMWare installed easily, though it's a little more clumsy just to use. Once I had Windows running on it, it took VirtualDub and ActiveSync with no problem. Unfortunately, it's slower than Win4Lin in general and the way it "captures" the mouse cursor in X drives me nuts (yes, I have tools installed, but I still have to hit CTRL-ALT-ESC if a dialog box from another app pops up over the VMWare window). In the end, though, VMware seemed like the more solid product with better support, and it ran the apps I needed as well as all Windows updates (including IE 5.5 and DirectX 8).
Yes, I did try Wine for both things, but Wine is such a poorly documented mess at this point... I mean, there are rumors of people getting many things to run correctly, but just try tracking the knowledge down. When you do find it on something like Google groups, the details and DLL/registry fun needed to get specific apps to work with Wine is insane. I think at this point Wine is just a development platform (ala what Corel did with WordPerfect Office for Linux) because it sure isn't useful for anything else (but solitaire).
Re:For every action, there is an equal and opposit
on
Quicktime In Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Uh-oh, here we go again.
What are the "clear limitations" of X? We now have anti-aliased text, direct-rendered 3D hardware support, true-type font support, support for running on embedded devices (i.e. iPaq)... What else do you want?
Meanwhile, X has some *clear* advantages: much more seamless multi-display support, remote display capability, network font servers, easy extensibility...
Installation and icons are the responsibility of the distribution and the API. It's not about X, it's about Red Hat and GNOME, which could solve both problems. And color pointers have been done by several software packages, among them many of Loki's games. There are also X extensions around (or at least there used to be -- search freshmeat) for color and animated color root window pointers.
Your speed claims are ridiculous. I personally watch full-screen DVD video all the time using vlc in X. It looks great to me, no frames are dropped, and my hardware is virtually identical to yours. Just search for 'vlc' at freshmeat. I also own and play Quake III all the time under X using my GF2 card, and it's within just a few frames of the Windows speeds I get, with some definite advantages -- like being able to run it in a window.
If your 3D card isn't as fast, just maybe you should ask your video card manufacturer for some drivers! And don't make fun of my Nvidia card and their 'closed' drivers -- all of your Windows 3D drivers are closed.
Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean it isn't possible. And the things you're talking about would be just as difficult to get together if you had to do it by hand under Windows -- so blame the people who put it all on your CD-ROM (whoever made your distro) and not X, which is a great piece of software that is very stable, mature, and well-designed.
The penguins bitch about the degredation of the web into "proprietary standards" like QuickTime and Shockwave, yet rejoice when these finally become available on Linux... At least stick to your guns. If you dislike these formats because they are proprietary, it shouldn't matter of the are available for whatever platform you use, because you don't want it. If you disliked them simply because they weren't penguin-friendly, then admit that, too...
This is the fallacy of the 'other' -- assuming that all members of communities other than your own are similar to one another.
Have you considered that there may be many 'species' of penguins? Among them, for example, may be both those that hate proprietary standards and those (a separate 'species') that simply don't like anything which doesn't support Linux. And there are more types of penguins, too. For example, those (myself included) which couldn't give less of a rat's ass about Quicktime one way or the other. And how about those 'VM Penguins' who have QuickTime running under NT in one window and Linux running under NT in another window?
It takes all kinds. There's nothing wrong with allowing the 'Yay, Quicktime for Linux!' penguins to have a moment in the sun. Please don't assume, however, that all penguins are the same. Linux users are no more homogenous than Windows users, motorcyclists or ethnic minorities.
It is quite snappy. I think you might need to take a look at your system.
I run Mozilla (nightlies) on an Athlon 1GHz machine with 768MB CAS2 memory and a GeForce 3. It is noticeably slower than Konqueror and a snail compared to Opera.
I choose Konqueror because Opera has a few render bugs and because Konqueror is better KDE-integrated. I only open Mozilla for one or two sites that still cause Konq to punt -- but they're few enough and far enough between that I only have to launch Mozilla every 3-4 days.
The downside is that it uses AAA alkalines, so it's not as green as I'd like.
Why not buy some NiMH AAA batteries and a charger? I picked up a couple of sets on eBay for the price of pizza delivery and a charger at Wal-Mart that does 8 batteries at once for $20.00. I also picked up some AA size for my Nikon digicam.
I'm no longer buying batteries, at the NiMH sets last much longer than alkalines or even lithiums.
A filesystem like reiser/ext3/xfs is only designed to guarantee the internal consistency of the filesystem and metadata after a power failure. No guarantees are made about the data itself.
Contrary to popular misunderstanding, using a journaled filesystem does not mean you can start using the power switch before doing a proper shutdown -- try this and you will lose data on any filesystem. It's just that on the journaled filesystems, the risk of further filesystem corruption as a result of power failure is drastically reduced and there is no long delay to analyze the entire filesystem for consistency when powering up again.
I didn't mean subsistence cash -- i.e. cash for food. I meant cash, as in Bill G. and $50 billion in personal fun.
Everyone should be compensated for the valuable work they do for society. But to refuse to do that work unless you can become more wealthy than most everyone else (as is the case in the tech industry) is evil and selfish.
That ungrateful rabble of users is the human race. Why hate it so? It gave rise to your mother, to your father, and to you, and your children will depend on it for their own livelihoods.
At least give the users a little respect. After all, why create software, if not for the users? Oh yes... for the cash. I find that position distasteful indeed.
I'm not normally on Stallman's side. I think he's a lunatic who wants to give Linux a less catchy name just to get his rocks off.
But I'm definitely on his side inasmuch as I don't think that there should be an information economy. Or rather, I think that all information of all kinds should be owned by all people -- and that nobody should be able to hide information of any kind for any reason. I know that there are a billion practical pitfalls (some of them very large indeed) for this position which makes it very dangerous, unprofitable, naive, stifling to innovation and any other word you might think of.
But in my gut, I know that not only does information want to be free -- it must be free, owned by all of the people everwhere, in order for me to feel at ease. Information is just too powerful to be controlled by the few -- and yet under our current system, the more powerful the information, the fewer the people who are likely to have access to it. Somehow I know this is bad. Rational, irrational, I don't care. I don't want flerbage (was that the word?). I don't want freedom for the information makers. I want freedom for all would-be information-users and for those who would be affected by such information. I want freedom for everyone to have and to hold any information made and to use it as they will.
Yes, yes, I know... But it's a very strong gut feeling that I'll never lose. It's almost what I'd call the sense of info-entitlement. Anyway, I'm putting my "logic cap" back on now that I've had my irrational moment of gut feeling, and I'm putting my flame-retardant suit on as well...
PS. Oh.. ReiserFS is totaly safe for me.. Sometimes I just hit reset out of boredom to see it getting up without fsck-ing and filling up lost+found:)) I should tell those people things are working really fine!
This is not a bright thing to do... a journaling filesystem of this type does not guarantee against data loss, it only guarantees against internal inconsistency -- meaning that when you reset, you may lose recent data and you may also find some files that are "corrupted" (i.e. seem to contain data from other files). The only thing ReiserFS buys you (relative to ext2) is a guarantee that file or metadata corruption won't spread after the reboot, without needing a time-consuming fsck to get such a guarantee.
Re:XFree86 4.x + DRI + OpenGL is *plenty* fast.
on
Kohan for Linux
·
· Score: 1
All of these drivers use DRI. The reason GeForce2 is optimized is that it's written by the manufacturer -- something bemoaned by the closed-source haters, but as a gaming enthusiast, I'm certainly happy with it...
XFree86 4.x + DRI + OpenGL is *plenty* fast.
on
Kohan for Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Wrong. XFree86 4.x with DRI is fast, fast, fast. Frame rates are at most about 1% (and usually less than that) behind Windows on my GeForce2. And if you're about to say "but not everyone can afford your fast new GeForce2" remember that you're the one complaining about 3D speed issues in the first place...
Of course, I can also do things with X that you can't with windows. For example, running a 3D-accelerated program like Morph3D or Sproingies in my root window as 3D-accelerated wallpaper.
Have you ever played, say, Q3A with DRI under Linux+X? Guess not. If you had, you wouldn't say what you just said...
I've heard of it. I own it for Win32. Soon I will buy it for Linux -- one less reboot needed.
Let me guess, you're a fan of the FPS genre? I for one am glad that Loki has chosen to produce some popular games in _other_ genres. So far, their game choices have been right on -- rather than port everything "new" or "fragworthy" they're actually taking the time to find out which games are _fun_ and porting those...
I didn't say it was right. But it's also no more wrong than being an IRS agent. People have to work. Other people get screwed. It's the nature of capitalism.
Having worked for a major (i.e. Media Metrix top 10) news and links portal, I can honestly say that this practice of "astroturfing" (as I understand the word) is not limited to small sites like LinuxToday.
Part of my job description as the maintainer of a chunk of the site hierarchy was to use a whole stack of pseudonyms and basically wander around doing just this in the interest of generating page views, responses, and "positive" discussion for advertisers and reviewed products in a number of areas. This was not optional, it was expected.
Slackware 2.3,3.0,3.1,3.2,4.0,8.0: downloaded.
OpenLinux 1.3,2.3,2.4: downloaded.
Red Hat 5.0,5.1,7.1: downloaded.
Total I've spent on distributions: $0.00.
Applications are another issue.
I bought every game Loki ever released for Linux.
I bought Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 deluxe for Linux.
I bought Corel Draw 9 for Linux.
I bought VMWare for Linux.
I bought Win4Lin for Linux.
I bought ApplixOffice 5.0 for Linux.
I've probably spent over $1000 on Linux applications. But that's nearly what a family member paid for Windows 2000 professional and Office 2000 professional alone, so I still feel pretty good.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking of WordPerfect 8, which was libc5 based.
WordPerfect Office 2000 and WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux are the complete suite (WordPerfect, Quattro, Presentations, Paradox, etc.), and are based on libc6. I'm using it under Red Hat 7.1, and before that, I was using it under Caldera eDesktop 2.4.
The only drawback was price -- while the WordPerfect 8 application was free, WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux is $99.00 or more (I paid $149.00 for the deluxe version). Still, I feel as though it was worth it -- I wrote several long, complex documents using WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux on the way to my degree.
I use Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. It has its quirks, but it is very powerful indeed and puts StarOffice to shame, features-wise.
Caldera = Mandrake = hacked & whacked Red Hat.
Corel = hacked & whacked Debian w/a broken installer.
I've always had great luck with Caldera & Mandrake. Iffy luck with Red Hat. Corel's distro I got free at a Corel promotion, but their installer would not start on my laptop, my desktop, or my roommate's notebook. So much for Corel Linux. Debian always works great but is such a pain to install in any custom way that you have to really want punishment to live through it, and it's development/stability-testing cycle is so long you're always running terribly safe, but 2-year-old, software.
I really liked Caldera OpenLinux for a long time (through 2.4) but have recently become so tired of always seeing Red Hat and no other packages for every last piece of software that I finally just went Red Hat 7.1 and have been reasonably satisfied.
Long-winded ramble. You're welcome...
I tried both Win4Lin and VMware, wanting to do two things: 1) sync my Windows CE device and install software to it from Linux and 2) run VirtualDub (except capture mode) under Linux.
I bought both Win4Lin and VMware Workstation and gave them a try. Win4Lin 3.0 was a nightmare to install -- on a stock RedHat 7.1 box -- and the tech support at Netraverse was less than helpful, even perhaps a little rude. I finally gave up on the GUI installer and dug through the RPMs until I cobbled together my own installation using their undocumented command-line tools. Using Windows 98 SE, Win4Lin is fairly fast and seamless, but some of the windows updates didn't install correctly (among them Internet Explorer 5.5) and VirtualDub did not run at all (I guess it uses DirectX).
VMWare installed easily, though it's a little more clumsy just to use. Once I had Windows running on it, it took VirtualDub and ActiveSync with no problem. Unfortunately, it's slower than Win4Lin in general and the way it "captures" the mouse cursor in X drives me nuts (yes, I have tools installed, but I still have to hit CTRL-ALT-ESC if a dialog box from another app pops up over the VMWare window). In the end, though, VMware seemed like the more solid product with better support, and it ran the apps I needed as well as all Windows updates (including IE 5.5 and DirectX 8).
Yes, I did try Wine for both things, but Wine is such a poorly documented mess at this point... I mean, there are rumors of people getting many things to run correctly, but just try tracking the knowledge down. When you do find it on something like Google groups, the details and DLL/registry fun needed to get specific apps to work with Wine is insane. I think at this point Wine is just a development platform (ala what Corel did with WordPerfect Office for Linux) because it sure isn't useful for anything else (but solitaire).
Uh-oh, here we go again.
What are the "clear limitations" of X? We now have anti-aliased text, direct-rendered 3D hardware support, true-type font support, support for running on embedded devices (i.e. iPaq)... What else do you want?
Meanwhile, X has some *clear* advantages: much more seamless multi-display support, remote display capability, network font servers, easy extensibility...
Installation and icons are the responsibility of the distribution and the API. It's not about X, it's about Red Hat and GNOME, which could solve both problems. And color pointers have been done by several software packages, among them many of Loki's games. There are also X extensions around (or at least there used to be -- search freshmeat) for color and animated color root window pointers. Your speed claims are ridiculous. I personally watch full-screen DVD video all the time using vlc in X. It looks great to me, no frames are dropped, and my hardware is virtually identical to yours. Just search for 'vlc' at freshmeat. I also own and play Quake III all the time under X using my GF2 card, and it's within just a few frames of the Windows speeds I get, with some definite advantages -- like being able to run it in a window. If your 3D card isn't as fast, just maybe you should ask your video card manufacturer for some drivers! And don't make fun of my Nvidia card and their 'closed' drivers -- all of your Windows 3D drivers are closed.
Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean it isn't possible. And the things you're talking about would be just as difficult to get together if you had to do it by hand under Windows -- so blame the people who put it all on your CD-ROM (whoever made your distro) and not X, which is a great piece of software that is very stable, mature, and well-designed.
This is the fallacy of the 'other' -- assuming that all members of communities other than your own are similar to one another.
Have you considered that there may be many 'species' of penguins? Among them, for example, may be both those that hate proprietary standards and those (a separate 'species') that simply don't like anything which doesn't support Linux. And there are more types of penguins, too. For example, those (myself included) which couldn't give less of a rat's ass about Quicktime one way or the other. And how about those 'VM Penguins' who have QuickTime running under NT in one window and Linux running under NT in another window?
It takes all kinds. There's nothing wrong with allowing the 'Yay, Quicktime for Linux!' penguins to have a moment in the sun. Please don't assume, however, that all penguins are the same. Linux users are no more homogenous than Windows users, motorcyclists or ethnic minorities.
I run Mozilla (nightlies) on an Athlon 1GHz machine with 768MB CAS2 memory and a GeForce 3. It is noticeably slower than Konqueror and a snail compared to Opera.
I choose Konqueror because Opera has a few render bugs and because Konqueror is better KDE-integrated. I only open Mozilla for one or two sites that still cause Konq to punt -- but they're few enough and far enough between that I only have to launch Mozilla every 3-4 days.
Why not buy some NiMH AAA batteries and a charger? I picked up a couple of sets on eBay for the price of pizza delivery and a charger at Wal-Mart that does 8 batteries at once for $20.00. I also picked up some AA size for my Nikon digicam.
I'm no longer buying batteries, at the NiMH sets last much longer than alkalines or even lithiums.
A filesystem like reiser/ext3/xfs is only designed to guarantee the internal consistency of the filesystem and metadata after a power failure. No guarantees are made about the data itself.
Contrary to popular misunderstanding, using a journaled filesystem does not mean you can start using the power switch before doing a proper shutdown -- try this and you will lose data on any filesystem. It's just that on the journaled filesystems, the risk of further filesystem corruption as a result of power failure is drastically reduced and there is no long delay to analyze the entire filesystem for consistency when powering up again.
I didn't mean subsistence cash -- i.e. cash for food. I meant cash, as in Bill G. and $50 billion in personal fun.
Everyone should be compensated for the valuable work they do for society. But to refuse to do that work unless you can become more wealthy than most everyone else (as is the case in the tech industry) is evil and selfish.
I hate it when I make a stupid spelling mistake in the middle of my point.
That ungrateful rabble of users is the human race. Why hate it so? It gave rise to your mother, to your father, and to you, and your children will depend on it for their own livelihoods.
At least give the users a little respect. After all, why create software, if not for the users? Oh yes... for the cash. I find that position distasteful indeed.
I'm not normally on Stallman's side. I think he's a lunatic who wants to give Linux a less catchy name just to get his rocks off.
But I'm definitely on his side inasmuch as I don't think that there should be an information economy. Or rather, I think that all information of all kinds should be owned by all people -- and that nobody should be able to hide information of any kind for any reason. I know that there are a billion practical pitfalls (some of them very large indeed) for this position which makes it very dangerous, unprofitable, naive, stifling to innovation and any other word you might think of.
But in my gut, I know that not only does information want to be free -- it must be free, owned by all of the people everwhere, in order for me to feel at ease. Information is just too powerful to be controlled by the few -- and yet under our current system, the more powerful the information, the fewer the people who are likely to have access to it. Somehow I know this is bad. Rational, irrational, I don't care. I don't want flerbage (was that the word?). I don't want freedom for the information makers. I want freedom for all would-be information-users and for those who would be affected by such information. I want freedom for everyone to have and to hold any information made and to use it as they will.
Yes, yes, I know... But it's a very strong gut feeling that I'll never lose. It's almost what I'd call the sense of info-entitlement. Anyway, I'm putting my "logic cap" back on now that I've had my irrational moment of gut feeling, and I'm putting my flame-retardant suit on as well...
This is not a bright thing to do... a journaling filesystem of this type does not guarantee against data loss, it only guarantees against internal inconsistency -- meaning that when you reset, you may lose recent data and you may also find some files that are "corrupted" (i.e. seem to contain data from other files). The only thing ReiserFS buys you (relative to ext2) is a guarantee that file or metadata corruption won't spread after the reboot, without needing a time-consuming fsck to get such a guarantee.
All of these drivers use DRI. The reason GeForce2 is optimized is that it's written by the manufacturer -- something bemoaned by the closed-source haters, but as a gaming enthusiast, I'm certainly happy with it...
Wrong. XFree86 4.x with DRI is fast, fast, fast. Frame rates are at most about 1% (and usually less than that) behind Windows on my GeForce2. And if you're about to say "but not everyone can afford your fast new GeForce2" remember that you're the one complaining about 3D speed issues in the first place...
Of course, I can also do things with X that you can't with windows. For example, running a 3D-accelerated program like Morph3D or Sproingies in my root window as 3D-accelerated wallpaper.
Have you ever played, say, Q3A with DRI under Linux+X? Guess not. If you had, you wouldn't say what you just said...
I've heard of it. I own it for Win32. Soon I will buy it for Linux -- one less reboot needed.
Let me guess, you're a fan of the FPS genre? I for one am glad that Loki has chosen to produce some popular games in _other_ genres. So far, their game choices have been right on -- rather than port everything "new" or "fragworthy" they're actually taking the time to find out which games are _fun_ and porting those...
I only hope they survive.
I didn't say it was right. But it's also no more wrong than being an IRS agent. People have to work. Other people get screwed. It's the nature of capitalism.
Having worked for a major (i.e. Media Metrix top 10) news and links portal, I can honestly say that this practice of "astroturfing" (as I understand the word) is not limited to small sites like LinuxToday.
Part of my job description as the maintainer of a chunk of the site hierarchy was to use a whole stack of pseudonyms and basically wander around doing just this in the interest of generating page views, responses, and "positive" discussion for advertisers and reviewed products in a number of areas. This was not optional, it was expected.
I'd be surprised if this is a rare practice.
Exactly what my analogy described, in the context of the original post. Read it again.
Umm... This isn't a very good analogy. Imagine instead:
Slackware 2.3,3.0,3.1,3.2,4.0,8.0: downloaded.
OpenLinux 1.3,2.3,2.4: downloaded.
Red Hat 5.0,5.1,7.1: downloaded.
Total I've spent on distributions: $0.00.
Applications are another issue.
I bought every game Loki ever released for Linux.
I bought Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 deluxe for Linux.
I bought Corel Draw 9 for Linux.
I bought VMWare for Linux.
I bought Win4Lin for Linux.
I bought ApplixOffice 5.0 for Linux.
I've probably spent over $1000 on Linux applications. But that's nearly what a family member paid for Windows 2000 professional and Office 2000 professional alone, so I still feel pretty good.
Nyaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Hello!?
In the Konqueror JavaScript preferences, check the "disable window.open()" option. That will disable pop-up ads for all domains.
The method in Mozilla has now been described here also (thanks to other posters).
Hope this helps.