And what about ICONS!!!! The Mandrake icons and the menu system itself are both totally unprofessional. Can Mandrake afford to pay an icon designer who knows how to make icons in more than two shades of blue?
They do employ a professional designer, who has more than enough experience designing playrooms for four year old children in over thirty different child care centers, thank you very much...
If Deskview/X goes Open Source, there might be a Linux port. There's 16 bit versions of Internet exporer 4.01SP2 and I think there might be a 16Bit 5.0 too. Combine them with Desqview/X and you might have IE under Linux : )
Tho Wine will probably do it soon enough anyway. Just a thought.
RPM's work just fine (when they work), but if a library is missing, for God's sake, TELL ME WHERE I CAN DOWNLOAD IT or better yet, go find it and download it for me!
There's a tool call APT which works on top of RPM which will do exactly that - you can download and install it from FreshRPMs.
Of course, functionality spread over 2 seperate command line tool doesn't appeal to end users, so it would be lovely if someone could write an app like the QNX installer for Linux. I've used Red Carpet, Synaptic, and all the other GUI package installers and they really don't compare to the installer, which lets me simply browse repositories, click what I want, and do whatever's necessary to get the app installed.
Microsoft has now put security priority #1 and I don't know what that's worth, but I would bet that they're going to start getting away from running everything as "root" on the latest and greatest MS OS.
FYI, the MS equivalent of the root account is system, and most services run under this account. A similar group with the log on locally right (which system doesn't have) is Administrators, or which XP users are a member of by default.
four days, ahem. Anyway, just to double check, its 8AM Monday and lon32 is still down according to both traceroute and the 1800 number. The problem `will be fixed in an unspecified amount of time'. When it comes up, Telstra will likely close the er
ror reports, say the connection was restored giving `the connection was restored' as the technical explanation, and issue no compensation or apology whatsoever. Thanks guys. God, just because you own the national telecommunications infrastructure doesn't mean you know how to use it.
Just in case anyone's interested, here's a traceroute to a customer I perform tech support for's ADSL router on Tue Jan 22 08:44:54 EST 2002:
traceroute to 203.44.X (203.44.88.81), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 10.42.0.1 (10.42.0.1) 9.301 ms 6.122 ms 13.005 ms
2 meb2-pos3-5.gw.optusnet.com.au (198.142.192.33) 8.421 ms 7.441 ms 7.759 ms
3 meb1-ge1.gw.optusnet.com.au (198.142.168.177) 29.544 ms 8.222 ms 7.709 ms 4 pos2-3.mg1.optus.net.au (202.139.0.37) 8.508 ms 9.153 ms 8.064 ms
5 GigEth12-0-0.mn1.optus.net.au (202.139.188.131) 13.071 ms 9.408 ms 7.696
ms
6 POS-6-1-0.lon20.Melbourne.telstra.net (139.130.6.25) 9.957 ms 9.580 ms 9.772 ms
7 GigabitEthernet5-0.win-core1.Melbourne.telstra.net (203.50.79.129) 9.612 ms 11.185 ms 10.874 ms
8 Pos2-0.ken-core4.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.6.165) 19.978 ms 20.940 ms 19.781 ms
9 * * *
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
Fast ethernet at lon32 would typically appear after core4.
lon32, a router in Telstra's Lonsdale St exchange in Victoria which these days handles ADSL connection has been down, according to Telstra's 1800 support number, for for days leaving a few hundred business ADSL uusers without connectivity for 95% of the time since Friday morning (its Tuesday Morning now). The Service Status page doesn't acknowledge this particular outage (though it does acknowledge three others).
I work for a IT Services customer and its worth noting the amount of problems customers who use ADSL ISPs with Telstra as their upstream provider have in comparison to others, particularly ISPs reselling RequestDSL (eg, BRD) or NC/Alternet (Netspace).
I'm no lawyer, but I know if someone wants to launch mass legal action against Telstra for this kind of shit then quite a few customers would be interested.
Coleman Powermate will soon start selling a small portable fuel cell power supply. The AirGen Fuel Cell Generator provides 1.2kW for up to 10 hours on a bottle of pure hydrogen.
Its pretty intereting to note that in the last few months a few sources have been getting osme pretty good results when benchmarking Linux against Windows for gaming - specifically Quake 3 on GeForces. Hover a proper installer would be great. The CD uses Wise installer archives. There is a free Unix Wise archive extractor (sorry, lost the URL:( )but it needs to be updated for the latest archive format.
* This months Atomic (a well known Australian overlocking / hardware geek mag)
Kernel modules were created for precisely that purpose. The solution to the problem is making things more modular.
Aunt Tilly doesn't care about a whopping 1.5% speed increase in StarOffice or Evolution. If she did decide she wants to recompile her kernel, and the utility Aunt Tilly is to do this allows her to render her system unusable (to her) she's gonna care a lot more about the fact that her machine doesn't work.
Linux people tend to be overly obsessed with their kernels, probably from pre-modutils when recompiling the kernel every 5 seconds was part of running the OS. Personally I find there's a whole bunch of other performance tweaks people could bring about on their machines that would have more impact than recompiling the kernel. Its just that recompiling a kernel is cooler.
Fuck that. For a server, I want a secure, reasonably modular kernel that I know a whole bunch of other people will be using. With a `known quantity' like this I can subscribe to the relevant mailing lists and know about any stability problems, FS corruption issues, security bugs, etc, and download / install the new relewases or run `apt-get upgrade' to fix the problem. Like Red Hat's Alan Cox 2.4.9-13, that's been installed by my distro. There are thousands of other people using this kernel built in this way with this set of options and submitting bugs to RH and the kernel mailing lists.
For a desktop, I repeat: end users don't generally care about kernels unless they're a problem, many of those that do don't bother to tweak their machine in any other way, which seems to indicate that many simply *like* recompiling kernels than any real technical reason.
Eric Raymond supports this idea saying that this will bring Linux to a wider market. Those that oppose this idea mainly think that only those educated few should custom build their own Kernels.
My own personal opinion is that:
* nobody should have to ever recompile their kernel (just update their distro in the worst case)
* everyone should be able to have the option of doing so easily if they want to.
The GNOME people don't always provide packages when they announce something has been released. So if you're looking for packages, try
* Ximian's Red Carpet - nightly CVS GNOME is avaliable is the GNOME Preview channel. Just grab tonights:). This is for all Linux distros.
* Red Hat's Gnomehide (GIYF), if you're running 7.2. Hopefully Havoc should update it to the Alpha soon, but you can use it now - my work has about 3000 packages for Red Hat 7.2 is our APT repository and GNOMEhide installs just fine.
Yes there are tools to thoroughly delete files on your computer, rather than just unlinking them when they're put in the trash, but it's the distributed nature of content these days that poses a special problem to the Ollie North's of the world.
Well, I don't think any OS has ever been short of undeletion tools - in unix, one can grep the inodes on a disk for a particular known string of a file and recover it fron a known template. Tools like gpart (a partition guesser) also easily recover those vital 512 bytes of your hard disk.
Where Unix has been lacking, behind most other systems, is the opposite - a good, reliable, trashcan. It might be interesting to note that there's now a reliable trashcan for Linux, BSD and other glibc systems th simply preloads and wraps unlink, `move and a couple of other system calls.
Since glibc is a part of the Linux Standard base, it works along with every LSB standard app. Even better, it doesn't matter whether you delete the file from KDE, GNOME, shittyunixtoolkitforhellcirca1980something or a terminal.
Anyway, check out Libtrash. And if you're a GNOME or KDE hacker, I'll give you a big hug if you use this as the default trashcan or your next release.:D
If they want to, they can make Word pop up an evil clown covered with blood that randomly insults you every 18 seconds if they feel like it. Its their product.
mmm...Word docs are only usable in Windows, huh? What about Macs?
What about Linux? Testing StarOffice against Microsoft's own case study docs from their partner site reveals StarOffice / OpenOffice does a pretty good job of importing complex layout oriented work docs.
You should probably word in the way that I can read Work documents, but I'd prefer not to, as the file's are very large and take a long time to send via email, and don't always look the same between different document viewing programs.
Well, there is a standard, on Linux anyway.
on
OpenPKG 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
Red Hat Packaging Method version 3 (the latest of which is 3.05) is the Linux Standard Base packaging system and has been some time now.
Debian supports the LSB in this manner via APT - I think that's a nasty solution, and will cause more long term plain tham implementing things like suggested dependencies (and different levels of suggestion), and some other minor things.
Issues like policy, task packages, and APT are already a reality on many RPM based Linux distributions, so I don't see the technical difference between them really being that great.
Of course, that won't stop the people who haven't used one or other system from complaining below that one or the other system doesn't do things it clearly has for a very long time.
> The RedHat Package Manager (RPM) version 4 is not a perfect solution, but even with its drawbacks and pitfalls it fulfills the fundemental needs of OpenPKG.
I dont know about you but that doesnt really inspire a lot of confidence in me. Essentially this reads to me like they wanted to quickly extend an inferior package management system. *shrug*
Well, to me it looks like they're acknowledging that no packaging system is perfect. Deb and RPM both do some things better than the other. One is an LSB standard, the other isn't. They made their choice based on that, fair enough.
> METAFONT is pretty much integrated into TeX if
> you're using... well, I've only used teTeX and
> MiKTeX, but there are scripts to autogenerate
> any fonts that are needed.
I'd be much happier if it wasn't. I'm more than willing to give it a go if there are soem I've missed, but almost all the scripts I've tried have had issues with certain fonts. Since these aren't part of Tex, their reliability seems to be more a concern. But I might be wrong - if you can point me to a reliable ttf2mf script or sample code I'd be grateful, and change my mind on the topic.
And... well, you can't compete with the userbase.
I think StarOffice is more than capable of competiting with the userbase of not only Tex but Microsoft Office, which is infinitely larger. It provides all the advanatages of a structured presentation independent documentation system, a modern font system, XML/XSLT, and a killer GUI editor (or just hack at in in vi and sh if you'd prefer). Now 6 is more modular and reliable, it really has a chance of doing well.
It's been a standard for nearly twenty years.
And it has a dwinling userbase because people that use computers these days are impatient and non technical. StarOffice represents a good chance to have Joe User create real documents, and is a joy for the mroe technical of us to work with.
The original program is probably as close to bug-free as any large piece of software can possibly be. Did I mention the enormous userbase?
So is hello world. As good as tex is, I don't see it ever appealing to Joe Average. And for the rest of us, XML won the file format wars and we're glad it did.
Use a small Linux distro if you don't want to but any of the precooked terminals.
TinyX handles X for Linux, Unix and BSD
RDesktop handles Terminal Services for NT4TSE and Windows 2000
The Metaframe Client does, obviously, Metaframe on your Windows and Solaris app servers.
StarOffice 6 XML. *waves goodbye to Tex forever*
on
Writing Documentation
·
· Score: 3, Informative
StarOffice 6 uses a new file format which amount to a pkzipped archive containing four standard XML documents and in line objects as seperate files.
I've used both Staroffice and Tex extensively to document networks for customers at my workplace. And I think Tex is in zombie mode now - dead, but not quite realizing it.
Tex:
* Attempts to seperates content from presentation
* Can automatically produce some parts of a document based on others
* Is hand editable in plain ASCII
* Exports to many common file formats
It also:
* Uses metafont, a font system that is unlike every other modern Unix application in existence and is designed around the use on non scalable fonts
* Has non-programmer editing tools which still aren't really suitable for end users and don't produce the output intended.
StarOffice 6 contains all the advantages above - content and style can be kept seperate, the text file format is plain ASCII, stylesheets are used, and StarOffice can export to a lot more fileformats than tex can via the use of XSLT and StarOffice's own inbuilt filters.
The GUI editing program also shits all over the Tex tools I've used - a simple Word Processor application with 2 additions:
* The stylist, a style pallette which applies styles to parts of content and allows the editing of those styles
* The Navigator, a floating window which provides a heirarchical view of the document allowing the author to immediately see and edit the structure of the content as well as move to different parts of it.
Hence its pretty easy for a non programmer to produce a real structured document without extensive knowledge of the system. People who write good documentation are often non programmers - they write documentation from an end user POV for their fellow end users, and if the end users aren't programmers, the documentation person doesn't have to be either in my opinion.
Of course, you can always produce and manipulate StarOffice 6 documents from your text editor, shell or other scripts. I'm working on converting our old Tex documentation script to produce SUn XML Writer documents as we speak.
Oh yeah, and no more jumping through hoops deadling with metafont shittiness. Yay.
Its a pity the 6.0 beta crashed on the poster - personally I find its the most stable and fast StarOffice yet, and that 5.2 was flaky, especially with net installs.
My main beef w/Linux at this point is that I can't sync my Casiopeia via USB cradle (I have to use the serial keyboard "cradle") which is slow and painful.
My god damn parallel printer (HP 960c) is not very well supported and making a/etc/printcap entry w/printtool is not helping (even w/the drivers from the HP sourceforge page).
VMWare 3 has a lot of new abilities in terms of getting stuff like your digital camera to work, and probably your printer too. It should solve your problem.
Slashdot Mirror
And what about ICONS!!!! The Mandrake icons and the menu system itself are both totally unprofessional. Can Mandrake afford to pay an icon designer who knows how to make icons in more than two shades of blue?
They do employ a professional designer, who has more than enough experience designing playrooms for four year old children in over thirty different child care centers, thank you very much...
Ancient X apps and Windows 3.1 applications?
/X and you might have IE under Linux : )
If Deskview/X goes Open Source, there might be a Linux port. There's 16 bit versions of Internet exporer 4.01SP2 and I think there might be a 16Bit 5.0 too. Combine them with Desqview
Tho Wine will probably do it soon enough anyway. Just a thought.
RPM's work just fine (when they work), but if a library is missing, for God's sake, TELL ME WHERE I CAN DOWNLOAD IT or better yet, go find it and download it for me!
There's a tool call APT which works on top of RPM which will do exactly that - you can download and install it from FreshRPMs.
Of course, functionality spread over 2 seperate command line tool doesn't appeal to end users, so it would be lovely if someone could write an app like the QNX installer for Linux. I've used Red Carpet, Synaptic, and all the other GUI package installers and they really don't compare to the installer, which lets me simply browse repositories, click what I want, and do whatever's necessary to get the app installed.
Microsoft has now put security priority #1 and I don't know what that's worth, but I would bet that they're going to start getting away from running everything as "root" on the latest and greatest MS OS.
FYI, the MS equivalent of the root account is system, and most services run under this account. A similar group with the log on locally right (which system doesn't have) is Administrators, or which XP users are a member of by default.
Shouldn't you want until the program starts creating actual HTML until you write a book about it?
for for days
t (203.50.79.129) 9.612 ms 11.185 ms 10.874 ms
four days, ahem. Anyway, just to double check, its 8AM Monday and lon32 is still down according to both traceroute and the 1800 number. The problem `will be fixed in an unspecified amount of time'. When it comes up, Telstra will likely close the er
ror reports, say the connection was restored giving `the connection was restored' as the technical explanation, and issue no compensation or apology whatsoever. Thanks guys. God, just because you own the national telecommunications infrastructure doesn't mean you know how to use it.
Just in case anyone's interested, here's a traceroute to a customer I perform tech support for's ADSL router on Tue Jan 22 08:44:54 EST 2002:
traceroute to 203.44.X (203.44.88.81), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 10.42.0.1 (10.42.0.1) 9.301 ms 6.122 ms 13.005 ms
2 meb2-pos3-5.gw.optusnet.com.au (198.142.192.33) 8.421 ms 7.441 ms 7.759 ms
3 meb1-ge1.gw.optusnet.com.au (198.142.168.177) 29.544 ms 8.222 ms 7.709 ms 4 pos2-3.mg1.optus.net.au (202.139.0.37) 8.508 ms 9.153 ms 8.064 ms
5 GigEth12-0-0.mn1.optus.net.au (202.139.188.131) 13.071 ms 9.408 ms 7.696
ms
6 POS-6-1-0.lon20.Melbourne.telstra.net (139.130.6.25) 9.957 ms 9.580 ms 9.772 ms
7 GigabitEthernet5-0.win-core1.Melbourne.telstra.ne
8 Pos2-0.ken-core4.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.6.165) 19.978 ms 20.940 ms 19.781 ms
9 * * *
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
Fast ethernet at lon32 would typically appear after core4.
lon32, a router in Telstra's Lonsdale St exchange in Victoria which these days handles ADSL connection has been down, according to Telstra's 1800 support number, for for days leaving a few hundred business ADSL uusers without connectivity for 95% of the time since Friday morning (its Tuesday Morning now). The Service Status page doesn't acknowledge this particular outage (though it does acknowledge three others).
I work for a IT Services customer and its worth noting the amount of problems customers who use ADSL ISPs with Telstra as their upstream provider have in comparison to others, particularly ISPs reselling RequestDSL (eg, BRD) or NC/Alternet (Netspace).
I'm no lawyer, but I know if someone wants to launch mass legal action against Telstra for this kind of shit then quite a few customers would be interested.
Coleman Powermate will soon start selling a small portable fuel cell power supply. The AirGen Fuel Cell Generator provides 1.2kW for up to 10 hours on a bottle of pure hydrogen.
Whatcho talkin' `bout Willis?
Its pretty intereting to note that in the last few months a few sources have been getting osme pretty good results when benchmarking Linux against Windows for gaming - specifically Quake 3 on GeForces. Hover a proper installer would be great. The CD uses Wise installer archives. There is a free Unix Wise archive extractor (sorry, lost the URL :( )but it needs to be updated for the latest archive format.
* This months Atomic (a well known Australian overlocking / hardware geek mag)
* The Register
It was inevitable, but I'm glad its happening. Onward penguin soldiers.
Now if Slashdot would post the news that Tuxracer 1.0 is avaliable for ordering I'd be a happy man.
Kernel modules were created for precisely that purpose. The solution to the problem is making things more modular.
Aunt Tilly doesn't care about a whopping 1.5% speed increase in StarOffice or Evolution. If she did decide she wants to recompile her kernel, and the utility Aunt Tilly is to do this allows her to render her system unusable (to her) she's gonna care a lot more about the fact that her machine doesn't work.
Linux people tend to be overly obsessed with their kernels, probably from pre-modutils when recompiling the kernel every 5 seconds was part of running the OS. Personally I find there's a whole bunch of other performance tweaks people could bring about on their machines that would have more impact than recompiling the kernel. Its just that recompiling a kernel is cooler.
Fuck that. For a server, I want a secure, reasonably modular kernel that I know a whole bunch of other people will be using. With a `known quantity' like this I can subscribe to the relevant mailing lists and know about any stability problems, FS corruption issues, security bugs, etc, and download / install the new relewases or run `apt-get upgrade' to fix the problem. Like Red Hat's Alan Cox 2.4.9-13, that's been installed by my distro. There are thousands of other people using this kernel built in this way with this set of options and submitting bugs to RH and the kernel mailing lists.
For a desktop, I repeat: end users don't generally care about kernels unless they're a problem, many of those that do don't bother to tweak their machine in any other way, which seems to indicate that many simply *like* recompiling kernels than any real technical reason.
Eric Raymond supports this idea saying that this will bring Linux to a wider market. Those that oppose this idea mainly think that only those educated few should custom build their own Kernels.
My own personal opinion is that:
* nobody should have to ever recompile their kernel (just update their distro in the worst case)
* everyone should be able to have the option of doing so easily if they want to.
The GNOME people don't always provide packages when they announce something has been released. So if you're looking for packages, try
:). This is for all Linux distros.
* Ximian's Red Carpet - nightly CVS GNOME is avaliable is the GNOME Preview channel. Just grab tonights
* Red Hat's Gnomehide (GIYF), if you're running 7.2. Hopefully Havoc should update it to the Alpha soon, but you can use it now - my work has about 3000 packages for Red Hat 7.2 is our APT repository and GNOMEhide installs just fine.
It's not a security problem. It's a privacy problem.
Pardon? Security is about protecting assets. Is a list of all the music, video, and web sites I view not an asset?
I don't think so.
Most of the linux kernel hackers have egos the size of small countries
small countries? Guess you haven't met Rusty yet...
Yes there are tools to thoroughly delete files on your computer, rather than just unlinking them when they're put in the trash, but it's the distributed nature of content these days that poses a special problem to the Ollie North's of the world.
:D
Well, I don't think any OS has ever been short of undeletion tools - in unix, one can grep the inodes on a disk for a particular known string of a file and recover it fron a known template. Tools like gpart (a partition guesser) also easily recover those vital 512 bytes of your hard disk.
Where Unix has been lacking, behind most other systems, is the opposite - a good, reliable, trashcan. It might be interesting to note that there's now a reliable trashcan for Linux, BSD and other glibc systems th simply preloads and wraps unlink, `move and a couple of other system calls.
Since glibc is a part of the Linux Standard base, it works along with every LSB standard app. Even better, it doesn't matter whether you delete the file from KDE, GNOME, shittyunixtoolkitforhellcirca1980something or a terminal.
Anyway, check out Libtrash. And if you're a GNOME or KDE hacker, I'll give you a big hug if you use this as the default trashcan or your next release.
Forget graphics, NOW is the time for immersion!
That's an awesome idea. Imagine
* running out of ammo for your shotgun, and grabbing the barrel and bashing the opposing player on the skull.
* actually picking up weapons and slowing down your rate of fire and the like as you don armor, place turrets, etc.
* grabbing someone' weapon
* hiding round a corner and tripping them when they follow you
* being knocked to the ground and crawling for a little while if you're injured...
* Using that high powered gattling gun that's out of ammo as a high powered drill to put through your opponents midsection
* Throwing bodies down a flight of stairs at your oncoming opponents
* Using other players as human shields
etc.
If they want to, they can make Word pop up an evil clown covered with blood that randomly insults you every 18 seconds if they feel like it. Its their product.
/me logs a feature request at bugs.openffice.org
mmm...Word docs are only usable in Windows, huh? What about Macs?
What about Linux? Testing StarOffice against Microsoft's own case study docs from their partner site reveals StarOffice / OpenOffice does a pretty good job of importing complex layout oriented work docs.
You should probably word in the way that I can read Work documents, but I'd prefer not to, as the file's are very large and take a long time to send via email, and don't always look the same between different document viewing programs.
Red Hat Packaging Method version 3 (the latest of which is 3.05) is the Linux Standard Base packaging system and has been some time now.
Debian supports the LSB in this manner via APT - I think that's a nasty solution, and will cause more long term plain tham implementing things like suggested dependencies (and different levels of suggestion), and some other minor things.
Issues like policy, task packages, and APT are already a reality on many RPM based Linux distributions, so I don't see the technical difference between them really being that great.
Of course, that won't stop the people who haven't used one or other system from complaining below that one or the other system doesn't do things it clearly has for a very long time.
> The RedHat Package Manager (RPM) version 4 is not a perfect solution, but even with its drawbacks and pitfalls it fulfills the fundemental needs of OpenPKG.
I dont know about you but that doesnt really inspire a lot of confidence in me. Essentially this reads to me like they wanted to quickly extend an inferior package management system. *shrug*
Well, to me it looks like they're acknowledging that no packaging system is perfect. Deb and RPM both do some things better than the other. One is an LSB standard, the other isn't. They made their choice based on that, fair enough.
> Uh, no.
Well, you disgree.
> METAFONT is pretty much integrated into TeX if
> you're using... well, I've only used teTeX and
> MiKTeX, but there are scripts to autogenerate
> any fonts that are needed.
I'd be much happier if it wasn't. I'm more than willing to give it a go if there are soem I've missed, but almost all the scripts I've tried have had issues with certain fonts. Since these aren't part of Tex, their reliability seems to be more a concern. But I might be wrong - if you can point me to a reliable ttf2mf script or sample code I'd be grateful, and change my mind on the topic.
And... well, you can't compete with the userbase.
I think StarOffice is more than capable of competiting with the userbase of not only Tex but Microsoft Office, which is infinitely larger. It provides all the advanatages of a structured presentation independent documentation system, a modern font system, XML/XSLT, and a killer GUI editor (or just hack at in in vi and sh if you'd prefer). Now 6 is more modular and reliable, it really has a chance of doing well.
It's been a standard for nearly twenty years.
And it has a dwinling userbase because people that use computers these days are impatient and non technical. StarOffice represents a good chance to have Joe User create real documents, and is a joy for the mroe technical of us to work with.
The original program is probably as close to bug-free as any large piece of software can possibly be. Did I mention the enormous userbase?
So is hello world. As good as tex is, I don't see it ever appealing to Joe Average. And for the rest of us, XML won the file format wars and we're glad it did.
Mike
Use a small Linux distro if you don't want to but any of the precooked terminals.
TinyX handles X for Linux, Unix and BSD
RDesktop handles Terminal Services for NT4TSE and Windows 2000
The Metaframe Client does, obviously, Metaframe on your Windows and Solaris app servers.
StarOffice 6 uses a new file format which amount to a pkzipped archive containing four standard XML documents and in line objects as seperate files.
I've used both Staroffice and Tex extensively to document networks for customers at my workplace. And I think Tex is in zombie mode now - dead, but not quite realizing it.
Tex:
* Attempts to seperates content from presentation
* Can automatically produce some parts of a document based on others
* Is hand editable in plain ASCII
* Exports to many common file formats
It also:
* Uses metafont, a font system that is unlike every other modern Unix application in existence and is designed around the use on non scalable fonts
* Has non-programmer editing tools which still aren't really suitable for end users and don't produce the output intended.
StarOffice 6 contains all the advantages above - content and style can be kept seperate, the text file format is plain ASCII, stylesheets are used, and StarOffice can export to a lot more fileformats than tex can via the use of XSLT and StarOffice's own inbuilt filters.
The GUI editing program also shits all over the Tex tools I've used - a simple Word Processor application with 2 additions:
* The stylist, a style pallette which applies styles to parts of content and allows the editing of those styles
* The Navigator, a floating window which provides a heirarchical view of the document allowing the author to immediately see and edit the structure of the content as well as move to different parts of it.
Hence its pretty easy for a non programmer to produce a real structured document without extensive knowledge of the system. People who write good documentation are often non programmers - they write documentation from an end user POV for their fellow end users, and if the end users aren't programmers, the documentation person doesn't have to be either in my opinion.
Of course, you can always produce and manipulate StarOffice 6 documents from your text editor, shell or other scripts. I'm working on converting our old Tex documentation script to produce SUn XML Writer documents as we speak.
Oh yeah, and no more jumping through hoops deadling with metafont shittiness. Yay.
Its a pity the 6.0 beta crashed on the poster - personally I find its the most stable and fast StarOffice yet, and that 5.2 was flaky, especially with net installs.
My main beef w/Linux at this point is that I can't sync my Casiopeia via USB cradle (I have to use the serial keyboard "cradle") which is slow and painful.
/etc/printcap entry w/printtool is not helping (even w/the drivers from the HP sourceforge page).
My god damn parallel printer (HP 960c) is not very well supported and making a
VMWare 3 has a lot of new abilities in terms of getting stuff like your digital camera to work, and probably your printer too. It should solve your problem.
I know I can't speak for anyone else here, but for me the attraction of using Linux is not having to worry AT ALL about licenseing issues.
Fair enough. Personally, I just want something that works. So do most people I think.
Sometimes Linux is the best tool for the job. Sometimes Windows is. This has the potential to make Linux more often the best tool for the job.
Works for me.