I bought the BeOS version when BeOS 5 came out and thus was able to get the Win version a few months ago. In compairing it to MS Office97 and MS Office2K (the only versions I have) I'd have to say that it's a very nice and well done office suite. For just doing normal, basic "office" work (99.9% of what everyone really does) it is as good as MS Office or better. One of my favorite things it has is that it can save to PDF format so I can easily create PDF files w/o forking out $$$$ for Adobe Acrobat. I can't wait for the Linux version to ship.
The downside: Those are definitely no[sic] systems for power users (current processors are 700 MHz Celeron and 700 MHz P3,
I don't know about anyone else but I can run a very nice web/file/print/mail server on a P-III 700MHz. A 700 MHz Celeron makes a good desktop. Are we getting so power hungry that we need to have frelling monster servers just do read mail?
I just got Comcast Cable access. Prior to that I had nothing for over a year (nothing like bankruptcy and divorce to kill you). Right now I just have my linux laptop plugged in but once I finished getting moved into the apartment I'll stand my other systems up. I don't need any services or anything, just access. What the hell does it matter to them if I got three or five boxes? For what I do with them, testing SW and different OS's, they take little or no more bandwidth anyway.
But if they try and block me or take it away or make me pay more I'm fighting it. First through the system, and if that doesn't work...
Q: I would like to know if anyone at Sun has seriously looked at the XFce desktop environment?
It would make an excellent compromise between CDE and GNOME. XFce is fully GNOME compliant. It will work seemlessly with GNOME & GNOME apps while still giving users the look 'n' feel of CDE. And XFce has many features than GNOME (KDE, CDE, et. al.) do not have. In addition, the speed and resource usage are so much better than anything except striped down or bare bones WM/Environments like IceWM or twm. I think it would be worth taking a very hard look at.
For the record; I am not writing this to start a holy war on window managers or desktop environments. I would just like to get some feedback from vendors who currentlly use CDE as their primary environment whether they have looked at XFce or even know about it.
This is a much more interesting and multi-layered question than most people think. Linux doesn't need MS Office from the perspective of a productivity suite. However, from a marketing and "perception" point-of-view I don't know if it wouldn't be a bad thing. The perception is that unless it runs MS Word/PowerPoint/Excell it isn't useful. Yes, we all know that the existing Linux office suites can read/write MS Office files just fine. But "normal" people don't want to know from file formats. They want to ruun the app.
The funny thing is that if MS did port Office over to Linux it would do two things; it would increase their market share on Office, however, it would make a tremendous dent in their desktop OS market share.
Porting MS Office to Linux would only be a good thing for Linux. From a "perspective" perspective, that is.
Another option for the WM is XFce. It's got the speed of IceWM and Blackbox yet it has more power and capabilities than KDE or GNOME. No, I am not making this up. Go get it and try it. There is no desktop environment or window manager that can come close to matching half of the capibilities that XFce has. No bullshit; no hype. It's just true.
For a file manager, XFtree, which comes as part of XFce, is increadable. You will not believe what it can do. And if you need any kind of connection to a WinXX network, XFsamba is increadable. There is no better Samba tool. Period. rox is good too, though.
Dillo was mentioned and it is worth having a look at. It's very usable if you don't need frame support.
Someone mentioned running text based tools as an option. I would have to say that the #1 file manager I use is mc in an xterm. And links in an xterm does great for web stuff.
When I was younger, 19 through 28 or so, I used to work the holidays to let the people who had families have the time off to spend with them (and get the extra pay). Then after I got married I would work the occational holiday to get the extra pay. Once my son was born I didn't work holidays unless it was something critical. Now that my wife is my ex-wife, well, when I have my son I am home with him. When it's her turn to have him I work, like this week.
I have a medical disability called Fibromyalgia [more on e2] that has greatlly reduced my ability to type (abong other things). I have IBM's ViaVoice for Linux and it's pretty good but it's only usefull for dictating documents. I still need to use the keyboard and mouse to do anything else on the computer. Linux/UNIX are my preferred environments but it is getting very difficult to do anything anymore. If I had the resources I would help initiate or fund or anything a project but, well, I can't.
Hopefully this will spark something in the community that will help get something going.
Man, who among us that's read Gibson and Stephens doesn't want this? I want the direct link to the net. And no, I'm not worried about someone cracking into the link. Do you have any idea how powerfull a firewall/ids the human brain is? Besides, I'd put OpenBSD or Linux in front of it anyway.:-)
I am wondering if there's a really good explination of why the desktop metaphor is, to borrow a phrase from "1984", un-good. To be honest I don't see any of the new metaphores solving the one big problem of data storage; lots of crap with no common organization.
As far as formal education goes, I dropped out of collage after ammassing 20 credits in two years.
At the time I was just looking for a job and my first one was as a computer operator. This was in the "olden days" of punch cards, etc.
I did this for a few years, then got talked into applying for an internship as a programmer. Imagine my supprise when I got excepted. Again, this was in the "olden days"... COBOL/CICS programmer on MVS.
Well, after doing this for some more years I found myself in the position of having to make some information available on the niacent web. I had been playing with this thing called Linux since November or Devember of 1991 and, since I had to get the data up but had $0.00 budget, I did what I had to do. OC, once the system was up it needed to be maintained. Thus, for the last 6 or 7 years, I have been a SysAdmin.
The way I learned my "craft" was through books, experamentation & lots of questions. Dumb luck had a LOT to do with things.
Don't know (nor do I care) about the Tick but Buffy ROCKS!!!
I've been a big fan of the show since the very beginning and it's just a trip how they can take what seems like a completely absurd idea and make a great show out of it.
Oh hell yeah! GNOME and KDE are greaat but they are not as useable as the CDE UI. Now if you want the CDE look'n'feel but with a much faster environment and with many more capabilities than GNOME or KDE you have to try XFce.
No, bullshit. No "Desktop Wars". Just go try it and see for your self.
This isn't technically true. SLS was the first "commercial" distro (in that it was available for purchase). Slack was the first commercial distro to break out of the unknown.
For the trivia buffs, Slack was the 4th distro out (not counting HJ Lu's Boot/Root floppies). It followed MCC, TAMU & SLS.
The place where I work has over 80 Solaris servers and at least 20 Linux servers (not counting the 5 or 10 Linux desktops). The Linux boxes are in full production. The work they do is very high profile (think Sep. 11th and a big 5 sided building) and, no joke, I can't tell you about it.
FWIW, we're going to be adding 20 to 40 more servers, both Linux & Solaris.
The idea that WM's have stalled is slightly off base. It's true that basic window managers have not advanced that much in a while but desktop environments have been movingf at a furious pace. Everyone knows about GNOME and KDE but there's lot's more out there than just those two. If you want to see the state-of-the-art in desktop environments you should go check XFce out <http://www.xfce.org>. If you've looked at it before you need to look again. It's got many more capabilities than GNOME or KDE and it's so much faster it's not even funny.
I do agree that that idiotic theme music has to go. It's to "Dawson's Creek". And the "soft porn", while being great eye candy, was unneeded. However, as others have mentioned, the Vulcan/Human thing works pretty well. The show is set many hundreds of years before TOS and the reactions of all the races seemed to fit well within the plot. This show has promise.
Olivier Fourdan is very good about working others code into the XFce project. The code for many features and additional utilities (xfsamba is a great example) has been incorporated. The key, IMO, is that Olivier, while being very accepting of code and patcher, still keeps the core of the project in focus.
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I bought the BeOS version when BeOS 5 came out and thus was able to get the Win version a few months ago. In compairing it to MS Office97 and MS Office2K (the only versions I have) I'd have to say that it's a very nice and well done office suite. For just doing normal, basic "office" work (99.9% of what everyone really does) it is as good as MS Office or better. One of my favorite things it has is that it can save to PDF format so I can easily create PDF files w/o forking out $$$$ for Adobe Acrobat. I can't wait for the Linux version to ship.
Uh, I didn't make any comments about anyones spelling. Dooooooooooood, learn to read. :-P
Good for you. I should be joining you in the institution of matrimony within 3 to 6 months. That is once my divorce is final.
I don't know about anyone else but I can run a very nice web/file/print/mail server on a P-III 700MHz. A 700 MHz Celeron makes a good desktop. Are we getting so power hungry that we need to have frelling monster servers just do read mail?
But if they try and block me or take it away or make me pay more I'm fighting it. First through the system, and if that doesn't work...
It would make an excellent compromise between CDE and GNOME. XFce is fully GNOME compliant. It will work seemlessly with GNOME & GNOME apps while still giving users the look 'n' feel of CDE. And XFce has many features than GNOME (KDE, CDE, et. al.) do not have. In addition, the speed and resource usage are so much better than anything except striped down or bare bones WM/Environments like IceWM or twm. I think it would be worth taking a very hard look at.
For the record; I am not writing this to start a holy war on window managers or desktop environments. I would just like to get some feedback from vendors who currentlly use CDE as their primary environment whether they have looked at XFce or even know about it.
- Convert HTML files to PDF or PostScript
- Generate a table-of-contents for books
- Generate indexed HTML files
- Generate files on-the-fly for web applications, from the command- line for batch jobs, or from a GUI for interactive work.
It might not be the silver bullet but it can help you with making various formats for your docs.Is it me (probably) but is the 1.0 version not on the web site?
> Does Unix really need Office at this point?
This is a much more interesting and multi-layered question than most people think. Linux doesn't need MS Office from the perspective of a productivity suite. However, from a marketing and "perception" point-of-view I don't know if it wouldn't be a bad thing. The perception is that unless it runs MS Word/PowerPoint/Excell it isn't useful. Yes, we all know that the existing Linux office suites can read/write MS Office files just fine. But "normal" people don't want to know from file formats. They want to ruun the app.
The funny thing is that if MS did port Office over to Linux it would do two things; it would increase their market share on Office, however, it would make a tremendous dent in their desktop OS market share.
Porting MS Office to Linux would only be a good thing for Linux. From a "perspective" perspective, that is.
For a file manager, XFtree, which comes as part of XFce, is increadable. You will not believe what it can do. And if you need any kind of connection to a WinXX network, XFsamba is increadable. There is no better Samba tool. Period. rox is good too, though.
Dillo was mentioned and it is worth having a look at. It's very usable if you don't need frame support.
Someone mentioned running text based tools as an option. I would have to say that the #1 file manager I use is mc in an xterm. And links in an xterm does great for web stuff.
When I was younger, 19 through 28 or so, I used to work the holidays to let the people who had families have the time off to spend with them (and get the extra pay). Then after I got married I would work the occational holiday to get the extra pay. Once my son was born I didn't work holidays unless it was something critical. Now that my wife is my ex-wife, well, when I have my son I am home with him. When it's her turn to have him I work, like this week.
Hopefully this will spark something in the community that will help get something going.
Man, who among us that's read Gibson and Stephens doesn't want this? I want the direct link to the net. And no, I'm not worried about someone cracking into the link. Do you have any idea how powerfull a firewall/ids the human brain is? Besides, I'd put OpenBSD or Linux in front of it anyway. :-)
I am wondering if there's a really good explination of why the desktop metaphor is, to borrow a phrase from "1984", un-good. To be honest I don't see any of the new metaphores solving the one big problem of data storage; lots of crap with no common organization.
As far as formal education goes, I dropped out of collage after ammassing 20 credits in two years.
At the time I was just looking for a job and my first one was as a computer operator. This was in the "olden days" of punch cards, etc.
I did this for a few years, then got talked into applying for an internship as a programmer. Imagine my supprise when I got excepted. Again, this was in the "olden days"... COBOL/CICS programmer on MVS.
Well, after doing this for some more years I found myself in the position of having to make some information available on the niacent web. I had been playing with this thing called Linux since November or Devember of 1991 and, since I had to get the data up but had $0.00 budget, I did what I had to do. OC, once the system was up it needed to be maintained. Thus, for the last 6 or 7 years, I have been a SysAdmin.
The way I learned my "craft" was through books, experamentation & lots of questions. Dumb luck had a LOT to do with things.
I've been a big fan of the show since the very beginning and it's just a trip how they can take what seems like a completely absurd idea and make a great show out of it.
Anyway, back to the bug reports.
I really like Simplicity for Java, myself. It's really a good tool.
Oh hell yeah! GNOME and KDE are greaat but they are not as useable as the CDE UI. Now if you want the CDE look'n'feel but with a much faster environment and with many more capabilities than GNOME or KDE you have to try XFce.
No, bullshit. No "Desktop Wars". Just go try it and see for your self.
This isn't technically true. SLS was the first "commercial" distro (in that it was available for purchase). Slack was the first commercial distro to break out of the unknown.
For the trivia buffs, Slack was the 4th distro out (not counting HJ Lu's Boot/Root floppies). It followed MCC, TAMU & SLS.
The SIPRNET is completely, physically disconnected from the rest of the world. In fact, you can't even get to the boxes w/o a clearance.
FWIW, we're going to be adding 20 to 40 more servers, both Linux & Solaris.
The idea that WM's have stalled is slightly off base. It's true that basic window managers have not advanced that much in a while but desktop environments have been movingf at a furious pace. Everyone knows about GNOME and KDE but there's lot's more out there than just those two. If you want to see the state-of-the-art in desktop environments you should go check XFce out <http://www.xfce.org>. If you've looked at it before you need to look again. It's got many more capabilities than GNOME or KDE and it's so much faster it's not even funny.
And Scott Bakula kicks a$$.
Olivier Fourdan is very good about working others code into the XFce project. The code for many features and additional utilities (xfsamba is a great example) has been incorporated. The key, IMO, is that Olivier, while being very accepting of code and patcher, still keeps the core of the project in focus.
I saw a TV ad for the gamecube just this morning here in VA. It was on one of the cable channels; can't remember which one.