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First! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:First! (Score:5, Informative)
Try disabling java in the settings. Made my version run a whole lot faster.
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Re:First! (Score:5, Funny)
Is there anything Java can't slow?
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Re:First! (Score:5, Funny)
Sun's stock price drop.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AJAVA [google.com]
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
(AC that got first post above here)
Already done. It's still slow. One other tip, as well as disabling the Java, is increase the amount of memory OpenOffice can use. That speeds things up, at the expense of RAM.
Having said that, OOo does what I need it to do, but subjectively it's still slow. Slow to start and slow when running. The widgets are particularly bad: flickering, slow to react, and never quite mapped to my theme correctly.
Re:First! (Score:5, Informative)
Why-oh-why did the OpenOffice devs decide to create a whole new widget library?
Portability. Remember that OpenOffice comes from StarOffice, which came from a company called Star Division (good band name, eh?). Star Division developed StarOffice back in the early nineties, before even Windows 95 was available... and they used their own C++ cross-platform library that was meant to make GUI development easier between Windows, OS2, Mac, and OSF/Motif.
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Re:First! (Score:5, Informative)
Modern systems only load the memory pages of executables that are actually needed, so it doesn't matter how big the executable is -- what matters is how much of the executable actually needs to be loaded.
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Big surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Big surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps, however videocard drivers could also be the cause of all 3, especially video and graphical user interfaces.
But, even the power usage, could be from improperly handling the videocard, or maybe even bypassing it and using the CPU. (fuck if I know, just an assumption)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps not directly, but you could send a message to the videocard/netbook maker to inform them, and they might be able to either help you then (might have an 'experimental' driver or something) or possibly soon after.
Or, perhaps contact, or even browse Ubuntu forums, or one of many other distributions forums and downloads pages, you might find a driver that comes with the original Debian, or RedHat, or one of the netbook specific distro's.
But for starters, if you haven't already, you could at least go int
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not that there's anything I can do about it...
Who says there's nothing you can do about it? Have you tried a different video card? I was able to significantly speed up flash and UI on an old box by using the proprietary nVidia driver.
Ubuntu defaulted to the open source nv driver because the card couldn't support Compiz, but there was still a significant performance gain to be had by using the binary blob.
Re:Big surprise (Score:5, Funny)
XP on the same netbook does youtube just fine, but has a 3 hour batter life to ubuntu's 4
Obviously you should just virtualize XP alongside ubuntu so you can take advantage of Ubuntu's extended battery life but still utilize XP's greater flash performance! It's a win/win!
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Re:Big surprise (Score:5, Funny)
It's a win/win!
Wouldn't that be a lin/win box?
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Re:Big surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Only on older hardware is XP better than Vista/7.
ZDNet did a 'test' and found that with modern hardware 7/Vista (but more so with 7) easily beat XP comfortably.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3789&page=3
The better the hardware, the smaller the difference I suppose or the bigger the advantage Vista/7 has over XP.
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Re:Big surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Ubuntu gets 25% longer battery life on my netbook...
XP...has a 3 hour batter life to ubuntu's 4 hour.
Isn't that 33% longer?
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Re:Big surprise (Score:4, Informative)
That depends on how you define "longer":
1 - (3 / 4) -> 25% longer
4 / 3 - 1 -> 33% longer
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Big surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Could it be that playing Youtube videos uses 25% more cpu power? And thus, because you didn't play them on your ubuntu laptop it got longer battery life?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Big surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Some tips on netbook power. Hopefully /. will correct anything wrong here:
1) Underclocking can have huge savings... as much as the backlight being on/off. I don't mean using cpufreq to change processor frequency... the power savings apparently comes from the ram and slowing down the ridiculously bad Intel GMA945. This is generally easier on XP since the OEM will have some software to do this, and nothing pre-packaged exists in Linux afaik.
2) Use a plain background and plain graphics... no gradients or pictures. GMA can use run-length encoding to compress the display memory on a line-by-line basis, and if the line hasn't changed the display uses the compressed version.
Somebody check my numbers... assuming 666 fsb, that's 666Mhz*4 bytes per second. The display might use 1024*600*3 bytes and if it refreshes the display at 60 fps, the shared memory for the display uses:
(1024*600*3*60) / (666*Mhz*4) = 15% of fsb time
That must be wrong, because at high res it would be using all the time. But I don't know what assumption is wrong... but anyway if you can compress by say 80% by using solid colors (or vertical gradients) then you can save some power and make the system somewhat faster. This might have to be turned on with the driver, idk if linux driver can do this.
3) Some USB devices use a lot more power than you'd expect. For instance a standard USB laser mouse can use a watt from various things like having USB polling it frequently.
4) As far as I can tell from reading the web, RAM power is basically how many modules you have installed not how much memory is on them. Maybe it's based on the number of chips? Anwyay it looks like upgrading memory should increase battery life by reducing disk access. So for instance if the system has low ram, like 512mb you might see disproportionately better power on linux since it generally uses less ram, so less hd activity.
5) It's almost not worth it to put the hard disk to sleep. Modern laptop drives you might save .2-.4w over just idle, but spin up might take 5w. So telling hd to spin down every 3 min for instance might actually use more power.
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One phrase invalidates the whole shebang... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Due to the efficiency of Visual Studio 9 over GCC"... I don't want to pick a compiler flamewar here, but I think it is fair to say that making blanket statements about one particular compiler producing faster code than another is pretty ignorant. There are some things VC does that GCC doesn't do, and vice versa, compiler switches can make a big difference, and you really would need to study the most commonly used code in OO under both compilers to see who is, in fact, generating better code, and, incidentally, for which processor.
Re:One phrase invalidates the whole shebang... (Score:5, Informative)
No it isn't. It's written in C++. Look, you even contradict yourself with this quote:
Note that it doesn't say "The JRE is required for OpenOffice.org". You can install and run OO.o without installing Java, provided you don't want to use OO.o Base
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I came across a really fun bug in one version of the MS compiler where a colleague had tried using the SEE intrinsics to speed things up and found that it had become slower. Looking at the generated asm, it turned out that it was doing a function call for every intrinsic (while GCC just issued a single SSE instruction). I think the MS approach was to generate them as function calls and then use the inliner to turn them into single instructions, but for some reason the function inlining pass wasn't being r
OpenOffice benchmarks? Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is speed really the issue here? My LAPTOP was a bargain-barrel purchase 3 years ago and it has no problem running OpenOffice + FireFox + other standard software on either Ubuntu or XP.
What I care about is, "Which one is least likely to crash and make me lose my work?" That's always been my big complaint with the Windows versions of free software (GIMP comes to mind), not speed.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My first thoughts were also "Is speed really the issue here?" but for different reasons. I used Open Office for eight months before having to give up due to a massive number of small niggles that when combined make it very unpleasant to use. I think a lot of issues need to be addresses in Open Office before speed but sadly none of the problems ever seem to be addressed and they instead seem to focus on adding new features. In the end I had to give up and switch to Kingsoft Office 2009.
Warmboot faster under XP (Score:3, Informative)
I wonder if the faster warmboot times under XP are due to its prefetching functionality. Another benchmark with prefetching disabled could determine this. Maybe Ubuntu or other distributions can try adding prefetch [google.com] functionality to their distributions and put Windows where it belongs, (at) last.
Re:Warmboot faster under XP (Score:4, Informative)
I've installed 'preload' on my laptop ( Ubuntu 8.10 ) and it almost makes the OOo splash screen obsolete ( it only shows for a second or so ). Isn't that the same sort of thing as 'prefetch' but maybe without aiding boot times?
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OS X (Score:4, Informative)
On my Mac desktop I used OpenOffice for a long time. I find MS Office on the Mac to be a train wreck. But OO's performance really sucks on the Mac, even with Java turned off. I switched to Apple's own iWork '09 and it's fantastic, far superior to any alternative on the same OS. I prefer open document formats, but I need to get my job done.
My point is I hope the OO teams can focus more on performance across the board. I realize the difficulty when it's built for multiple platforms, but once performance is improved it'll be a much better contender.
Who cares about CPU speed if it slows your work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. ... Who cares if OpenOffice opens a .xls document 4 seconds faster, since it takes me a good 25 minutes to reconfigure all the graphs formating that it lost from MS Office??
Is that 25 minutes taken into factor? ... That's right, I didn't think so.
Re:Who cares about CPU speed if it slows your work (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. ... Who cares if OpenOffice opens a .xls document 4 seconds faster, since it takes me a good 25 minutes to reconfigure all the graphs formating that it lost from MS Office??
Is that 25 minutes taken into factor? ... That's right, I didn't think so.
That's just silly.
If you need Excel, why would you be running OO? If you've got all kinds of graphs and formatting and whatever else that's going to take 25 minutes to fix in OO, why wouldn't you be running Excel? That time adds up pretty quickly and before long it becomes very easy to justify the cost of a license for Excel.
That's like the folks who switch to Linux or OS X and then load up their machine with some kind of VM and run everything in Windows anyway. If you need Windows, why not just run Windows?
Of course the best solution would be to get everyone working from some kind of open format, so it didn't matter what software you were using. So there was absolutely no vendor lock-in. But that won't be happening any time soon.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not really running OO, for the exact resons you listed.
I'm just saying I tried using OO, and my response was a criticism of all the advice I got from linux zealots who love to rub in your face how OO is perfect and can do everything Excel can do. Bullshit.
Re:Who cares about CPU speed if it slows your work (Score:5, Interesting)
Open Office is a replacement for M$ office for 95% of the use cases. Still the proprietary formats of M$ Office made it difficult to port. Since those standards are now published [microsoft.com] I think cross program support will improve.
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Re:Who cares about CPU speed if it slows your work (Score:4, Insightful)
the people that care are the one using open standards. If you use .xls, you better stay on ms office.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. I personally would love to have open formats all the time. Heaven knows that it would make my job easier. But, the fact of the matter is, most companies/people/etc use MS Office. You must have that compatibility. It's nice to hold to ideals, but you can't shoot yourself in the foot while doing so...
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Plug-outs or Pluck-outs in OpenOffice? (Score:3, Funny)
I feel OOo is slow both on Linux as well as Windows. Most likely this is due to the bloat and mindless copying of MS Office features. I have a question: Is it possible to weed out the redundant or useless features in OOo and make it sleek and quick? Since this is completely open source, theoretically this should be possible.
In similar vein, I'm also looking for pluck-outs from Firefox which is also bloated. Rather than running extensions called NoScript, AdBlock, FlashBlock etc.; why not remove these products from the installed version itself to make it lean, mean and less resource hungry?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How exactly are you going to remove the ad-handling code from Firefox? It's not as if there's special code in Firefox just to display ads...
As for NoScript and FlashBlock, people use them because they offer better functionality than just disabling the features in the browser itself (which is possible); the idea's to have control over what scripts run and flash is shown, rather than just blanket-disabling everything. (For instance, I block JavaScript on most sites, but not Wikipedia or Slashdot, or a few oth
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I feel OOo is slow both on Linux as well as Windows. Most likely this is due to the bloat and mindless copying of MS Office features. I have a question: Is it possible to weed out the redundant or useless features in OOo and make it sleek and quick? Since this is completely open source, theoretically this should be possible.
It has been done long time ago. It's called pico.
Did I read the summary right? (Score:5, Funny)
Because...well, I didn't read the article, but are we benchmarking Word Processing applications now? How fast a spreadsheet can calculate the sum of a column? Whether there's a pause between fade-in transitions in a presentation?
I'm trying to think of a good car analogy here...maybe how fast your passenger side door closes?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're not kidding. Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS was released 20 years ago. It was snappy as all hell. What has 20 years of progress gotten us? Bloat.
wtf is go-oo? (Score:5, Informative)
For others (like me) who are familiar with OOo but never heard of "Go-oo", Wikipedia says [wikipedia.org],
Go-oo is a concentrated set of patches for the cross-platform OpenOffice.org office suite. Go-oo is also one of OpenOffice.org variants created from these patches. It has better support for Office Open XML file formats than the official OpenOffice.org releases produced by Sun Microsystems, and other enhancements that have either not yet been accepted into the upstream Sun version, or will not be because of business or political reasons. Some of these changes or enhancements will eventually be part of the Sun version, too; the process of assessing patches, "upstreaming", just takes time.
It's a shame that even the Go-oo website does a poor job of explaining this on the front page (doesn't mention OpenOffice.org until nearly the very end) nor on the "about" page.
OOo is not a native Windows application, though. (Score:3, Informative)
OpenOffice.org is a unix application rigged into running on Windows, sort of like Pidgin or GIMP on Windows.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Windows [openoffice.org]
And if you go over each of the official build services, you will find that one of the big differences between go-oo.org, StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org vanilla is simply build engineering. Specifically, if they're building with cygwin, it provides some major performance issues. Although Windows has some native POSIX support, you don't use it quite the same way as you do in Linux or Solaris- rather than accounting for these differences, OOo uses a POSIX emulation layer in order to avoid extra work. Despite the fact that Windows is the primary platform for distribution, it's simply too much trouble for Sun or Novell to screw with it. I know Novell is trying to move their build service (go-oo) into a straight GCC cross-compile solution, so the speed issue will not get any better on Windows.
My point is that this is built with Visual Studio 2005 as more or less a standard Windows application, not a Vista/7 application- it's not using the NT 6+ API's, so it's invalid as a true performance test. This would be similar to us testing Microsoft Office 2003 (I don't think OOo is quite feature comparable to 2007) on Windows vs. Wine and then declaring that Windows is the hands down superior platform.
So let's talk about Platform inequities. The Microsoft optimizing C compiler is a better compiler than GCC-- but GCC is really not half bad anymore. Visual Studio's really superior because of its debugging, refactoring, and profiling tools, not so much JUST its compiler. I think this is part of why Firefox runs faster in Wine than in native Linux. In fact, by writing your application in like vim and debugging with gdb then just using Visual Studio as a build slave, you're really getting the short end of the stick in both directions. But I digress, a native unix application like OOo is a native unix application, and I wouldn't expect you to get tremendously better success in Windows unless you're running it on Interix or something. Of course, that's not to say Windows doesn't do unix tasks like NFS better than UNIX, just that it doesn't necessarily run direct unix code better.
But this is all fluff, the fact of the matter is that OOo is not a Windows application and most people are Windows users, so let's look at some logical alternatives:
So... if you're running Windows and you just need to type a paper for school for free/cheap.... why not just use Softmaker Office 2006... or Softmaker Office 2008 if you have 20 bucks. Just use Office 2007 if you're doing long reports- the bibliography handling alone will make the 60 bucks to get it through ultimate steal worthwhile when writing something long and arduous. Consider the time you save on formatting and grammar checking and such over a semester or two- it's worth it. If you're paying thousands a year for your education, the least you can do is not waste time with shitty office software.
Personally, I use OOo on my linux netbook and Softmaker Office 2006 on my Windows box and just keep my documents in ODF. It's the cheap-ass pro solution.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:5, Insightful)
Who runs OO on Windows?
More people than who run it on Linux, that is for sure. We have it on all the computers here that didn't already have Office preinstalled (meaning most of them). I have both on my computer, although I use OO most of the time, as I like their spreadsheet app better than office.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
OO.org is a surprisingly good Office replacement for a small non-IT business. Most often all they need is a text processor to write simple 1-2 page letters, and a spreadsheet for the accountant (no fancy macros etc). OO does that - and I had OO successfully adopted in such an environment. There was no way of replacing Windows with Linux (a lot of legacy third-party apps for making orders from suppliers, one for each, most of them written for Windows, and some even for DOS), but OO - no problem with that at
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:5, Insightful)
> It's slow, and it doesn't work for anything beyond a very trivial subset of Office functionality.
SURPRISE! That's all most people actually need.
You know.... "my requirements" versus "your requirements" beyond just the basic vendorlock thing.
The rest of us shouldn't have to buy a certain product just because you have a Microsoft fixation.
This includes the Mac users with their copies of iWork.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We have four computer labs totaling 21 computes, soon to be bumped up to 27. These are all three or four year old Dells with OEM XP licenses, but even with educational pricing, I have little interest in spending my budget on any version of Office. OpenOffice.org 3.0 opens most of the major formats, is free (as in "no licensing headaches") and is a helluva lot more like Office 97/2000/2003 than the horror story known as Office 2007.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience from the various people I have to deal with as their IT manager is that they loathe Office 2007. Maybe, all things being equal, it is superior, much as the Dvorak keyboard is probably superior to the Qwerty keyboard, but things are not equal. I deal with a staff, some of which have over a decade of experience using Word versions starting with Word 95 (and some earlier versions than that), where each new version wasn't really that big a leap, and suddenly they're plunged into the world of ribbons, and take five minutes just to figure out how to print a document.
There's this thing called a learning curve, and OpenOffice, while hardly perfect and certainly not a clone of Office 97-2003, is significantly closer in layout than Office 2007. So bravo to your Aunt Nancy for catching on, but I have to manage systems in a real live workplace, where retraining means loss of productivity until the learning curve has been matched. Taking the path of least resistance seems for many of the people I work with to be the way to go.
Microsoft should have, at every least, put in a "Looks Kinda LIke Office 2003" mode, much as they have done over the years with Windows itself.
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Anyone who wants documents readable in 10 years? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh wait. It was a rhetorical question. Sorry.
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Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:5, Insightful)
Who runs OO on Windows?
A lot of our home user and student clients use OO instead of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Office isn't cheap. It's several hundred dollars depending on what kind of discounts you get and what version you need. It used to come preloaded on a lot of systems, but these days they frequently give you some kind of 30-day trial of Microsoft Office, instead of the full version.
Business folks don't generally care. Most of our business clients have some kind of volume license anyway, so they throw it on whatever new computer they get.
A lot of our home users have a hard time justifying spending $100 or more just so their kid can type up a paper at home.
So we point them at OO, and it generally does what they need it to. We've made a lot of people very happy by giving them a free alternative to Microsoft Office.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you looked at the machines in many offices recently? Many companies are on a four or five-year computer lifecycle, which would mean that they very well may have machines about as powerful as that Athlon XP 3000+. Many businesses run even older machines as they want to continue to run Office 2000/XP/2003 on Windows XP and don't want to pay to replace perfectly functional machines. Machines with a 2.0-3.0 GHz P4 and 512 MB-1 GB RAM running Windows XP are very typical; newer Core 2-based (or Athlon 64-bas
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If the locked down root really bothers you that much do a "sudo su -" and reactivate the account. The same trick works in OSX if anyone has ever wondered. As long as your sudoers file gives your account ALL(ALL) it should work fine.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it means "I'm too lazy to install Gentoo and have better things to do."
As a Gentoo user, I should know.