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An Early Look at StarOffice 8 134

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the any-open-format-will-do dept.
polar_bear` writes "NewsForge has an early review of Sun's StarOffice 8, set to be released in mid-October. From the article: 'StarOffice 8 is not perfect, but it is an excellent value for businesses that do not depend on proprietary Microsoft formats for production work.'" And yes, for the uninitiated, NewsForge is still owned by the same parent company as Slashdot.
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An Early Look at StarOffice 8 More

An Early Look at StarOffice 8

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  • Obvious (Score:5, Funny)

    by Orrin Bloquy ( 898571 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:15PM (#13651826) Journal
    FInally, a ReaSon To consider Picking Out another office SuiTe.

  • No compelling features over OOo 2.0? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by octaene ( 171858 ) <<bswilson> <at> <gmail.com>> on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:17PM (#13651848)

    So, after reading the article, I didn't see any compelling features beyond what OpenOffice.org 2.0 promises. I saw several references to StarOffice's superiority over Microsoft Office 2003, but that's about it.

    Me, I'll wait for OpenOffice.org 2.0. BTW, when is that, anyway?

    • Furthermore, who doesn't depend on Microsoft Office documents for production work? Everyone I know has to send/receive documents in these formats-- at least Word and Excel.

      This being said I have several buisnesses using OOo 2.0 Beta 2 for production work. They do this simply because the betas for OOo 2.0 are simply so much more stable and functional than 1.1.x that there is no reason not to use them. Yes, I know-- don't use beta software for production work this seems to be the exception.

      This being said, I don't use OOo much. I find that it doesn't have applications in any are which are best-of-breed and the only value I see is that you have an integrated suite. Gor example, Gnumeric is such of a great spreadsheet I can't imagine using anything else for production work.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @02:08PM (#13652648)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • production work means you have huge excel sheets that calculate important things your company can't live without, or you have office documents with Macros that do things you can't live without. Just typing notes and letters, or doing simple excel tables is not "depending" or anything.

          I can even do VBA macros in Gnumeric. And macros in Python, etc.

          And I can do detailed financial analysis, etc.
      • They do this simply because the betas for OOo 2.0 are simply so much more stable and functional than 1.1.x that there is no reason not to use them.

        So I heard in the last thread on this subject, and a lot of people disagreed then, too. By all means try it, but don't bet your business on it; there were some pretty basic bugs in the beta I downloaded just over a week ago.

        • By all means try it, but don't bet your business on it; there were some pretty basic bugs in the beta I downloaded just over a week ago.

          Well, to be fair, for my Linux customers, I also install AbiWord and Gnumeric. These are often better applications for document processing and spreadsheets respectively anyway but people want an office suite.

          For my Windows customers, I tent to also have 1.1.x available on their fileservers and/or Abiword and Gnumeric available as well.

          So far, I have not had anyone give me
    • The beta is already out. I've been using it for over a month now.
    • The differences basically amount to:

      1. StarOffice has better MS Office support (I assume thanks to the Sun/MS Deal)
      2. StarOffice has a nicer GUI that Sun has not backported into OOo
      3. Sun provides corporate support for StarOffice. You're on your own for OOo.
      4. Extra bundled stuff like fonts, clipart, and templates. Nice if you do a lot of office documents, but not critical or irreplacible.

      Me, I'll wait for OpenOffice.org 2.0. BTW, when is that, anyway?

      When it's done. They've released betas of it as OOo 1.9.x, so you can go grab a copy whenever you feel like it.

      • Re:No compelling features over OOo 2.0? (Score:5, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:51PM (#13652074) Journal
        3. Sun provides corporate support for StarOffice. You're on your own for OOo.

        Sun also provides corporate support for OpenOffice, however since StarOffice is more or less free when you buy a support contract, it doesn't make much sense to use it.

      • I think WordPerfect support is better too - can write WP files. OOo can only read WP files.
      • 2. StarOffice has a nicer GUI that Sun has not backported into OOo

        Hrm... Based on the linked [newsforge.com] screen [newsforge.com] shots [newsforge.com] I'd say it's pretty much the same as OO.o Beta 2 [openoffice.org], which I've been using for months.

        Does anybody have any clarification on this?

    • Re:No compelling features over OOo 2.0? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      According to Sun, it's supposed to be released today.

      There is already an OpenOffice.org 2.0 review [thejemreport.com] up.

    • Re:No compelling features over OOo 2.0? (Score:4, Informative)

      by hexene ( 68121 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:03PM (#13652162) Homepage
      OpenOffice.org 2.0 Release Candidate 1 should be out within the next 48 hours.

    • From http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OpenOff ice_org_2_x.html [openoffice.org]

      Plan:

      • OOo 2.0 Beta 2 : August 2005
      • OOo 2.0 Release Candidate : end of September 2005
      • OOo 2.0 Final : Begin/Mid October 2005
      • OOo 2.0.1 : December 2005

      Beats the ??? 2005 date I saw for 2.0 final last time I checked.

  • OpenOffice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kevin_conaway ( 585204 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:19PM (#13651856) Homepage
    From the article, StarOffice is based on the OpenOffice.org source code, and is very much like OpenOffice.org 2.0, with a few enhancements

    I thought OpenOffice was originally based on StarOffice?

    • Re:OpenOffice (Score:1, Interesting)

      by dcstimm ( 556797 )
      it is, but staroffice is normally better because it has features you would pay for. Like more asian fonts or something... Blah Ill stick with abiword and gnumeric

    • Re:OpenOffice (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 )
      It goes both ways. OpenOffice was an open sourced derivative of StarOffice, and now the advances in OpenOffice get rolled back into StarOffice (don't ask me how this works; I'm sure they've got some license comment somewhere that says they can).

      So the products are symbotic now.

    • Re:OpenOffice (Score:5, Informative)

      by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [srevart.sirhc]> on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:28PM (#13651927) Homepage Journal
      I thought OpenOffice was originally based on StarOffice?

      It was. Just like Mozilla and Netscape. Serpent eating tail....

      Another way to look at it is that OOo was released as an open source version of the pre-StarOffice 6.0 codebase. OOo forms the basic foundation on which StarOffice 6.0 and later is built on.

    • Re:OpenOffice (Score:1, Redundant)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      Correct. StarOffice was originally propriatary closed source. Sun bought it and opened the nonprotected code (some of it is used under commercial license, which is one of the reasons StarOffice has to cost money) and OpenOffice branched off from that, but many of the OpenOffice developers are actually Sun developers.

      You can think that OpenOffice is to StarOffice as Fedora is to Red Hat. The current "community" developed code base that the commercial product is developed from, but having started with the cod

    • Re: OpenOffice (Score:3, Informative)

      by codergeek42 ( 792304 )
      http://about.openoffice.org/index.html [openoffice.org]

      StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of cod
    • I thought OpenOffice was originally based on StarOffice?

      Kif, we have a conundrum.

  • What is based on what? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GenKreton ( 884088 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:19PM (#13651863) Journal
    "StarOffice is based on the OpenOffice.org source code, and is very much like OpenOffice.org 2.0, with a few enhancements:"

    Not to be overly-pedantic, but isn't OOo based On StarOffice...?

    • Re:What is based on what? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:23PM (#13651888)
      From http://about.openoffice.org/index.html [openoffice.org]

      StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. CollabNet hosts the website infrastructure for development of the product and helps manage the project.

    • Re:What is based on what? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Kinda. Star office used to be a free as in beer, binary only application.
      Sun then bought Star Office. Due to much community bantering about open sourcing it (or maybe they had plans anyway? Either way, there was much bantering), they seperated out all the parts of star office that could not legally be open sourced, and open sourced the rest, under the name Open Office. They then set up Open Office.org much in the same way that red hat set up fedora.

      So, OOo *was* originally from Star Office code tree. H

      • Re:What is based on what? (Score:4, Informative)

        by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <<moc.liamg> <ta> <namtabmiaka>> on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:45PM (#13652045) Homepage Journal
        Star office used to be a free as in beer, binary only application.

        Correction. StarOffice was a commercial product that was intended as an alternative office suite. Sometime around the 5.x versions StarDivision began giving the office suite away to home users as a method of druming up consumer and business awareness. This gained them kudos from places like Lockergnome who were always on the lookout for cool new stuff. Shortly thereafter, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision and made StarOffice a free download. After the initial "cool factor" died down from that, Sun split the OOo and StarOffice projects.
        • Yep. If I recall, 5.0 was a commercial product, and then was renamed 5.0a and given out with a license key. That's when Sun bought them, removed the keylock feature, and rereleased it as 5.1, a free product. They then got busy and fixed a bucketload of bugs which resulted in 5.2, at which point they realised that even a bug-free version of StarOffice 5 was a total disaster, and started the OpenOffice project.

          I supported SO5.1 for a year or so. Worst product I ever had to provide help for.
          • They then got busy and fixed a bucketload of bugs which resulted in 5.2, at which point they realised that even a bug-free version of StarOffice 5 was a total disaster, and started the OpenOffice project.

            Indeed. The first job of the OOo team was to break out the applications from that hideous "Integrated Desktop" interface. Now it seems like a bad memory, but I remember it being THE biggest failing point of StarOffice.

  • From the article... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gardyloo ( 512791 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:33PM (#13651958)
    StarOffice developers claim better Microsoft Office compatibility with every new release, but like all programs that are not Microsoft Word, Writer will never convert every single document perfectly.

          Hm. So is the writer implying that Word perfectly converts every single WORD document? Because that's totally orthogonal to my experience.
    • You keep using that word but I don't think you know what it means!
      • I don't know about where else he used it, but in this case it's fairly OK. Maybe you are the one who needs to look up the meaning? 'orthogonal' also stands for 'zero overlap' in the sense of 'zero dot product' - and while a dot product of experiences does not make a lot of sense, zero overlap certainly does.

      • Re:Orthogonal (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        His experiences with Microsoft Word conversion are mutually exclusive of the experiences described in the parent post. Yes, a bit of a stretch grammatically, but not SO bad.

      • Re:Orthogonal (Score:3, Funny)

        by WillerZ ( 814133 )
        I always assumed it meant "Like unto an orthogon". Of course, that leaves the question of what an orthogon looks like.
    • Because that's totally orthogonal to my experience.

      According to Google Define [google.com] that would mean you had a right angle experience? or that office was right? Brain asplode.

    • error in your response (Score:1, Redundant)

      by Xtifr ( 1323 )
      > but like all programs that are not Microsoft Word, Writer will never convert every single [Word] document perfectly.

      Pardon me for playing grammar nazi, but you have a subordinate clause there (highlighted) which adds no information to the sentence, and, in fact, can actually confuse and mislead people. It's like saying, "Carol, like all people that don't have blue eyes, needed oxygen to breathe." This can leave people with the mistaken impression that people with blue eyes don't need oxygen to breath

  • Hexus link? (Score:5, Funny)

    by kosanovich ( 678657 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:33PM (#13651967)
    I heard Hexus has a review up of the new staroffice too...
  • Sorry to ask that, but why does editors always have to mention OSTG when quoting from their sites? Is there a reason or its just another annoying "Slashdot hates Microsoft" kind of thing?

    • Re:Parent companies (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gclef ( 96311 )
      If they don't mention the ownership ties between them, then /. gets accused of conflicts of interest in posting OSTG stories. It's effectively a financial disclosure statement: Yes, we might have a conflict of interest here...take this with your own-sized grain of salt.

    • Full Disclosure (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ran-o-matic ( 667054 )
      Since NewsForge and Slashdot are owned by the same entity (OSTG), some people might think there is reporting bias. Disclosure helps keep reporters honest.

  • Saucy disclosure (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    >

    Is it necessary to disclose such potential conflicts of interest in so surley a manner? These clarifications are not a "favor" for the uninitiated, they are made in the interests of full disclosure; standards that all good reporting must adhere to.

    • Is it necessary to disclose such potential conflicts of interest in so surley a manner? These clarifications are not a "favor" for the uninitiated, they are made in the interests of full disclosure; standards that all good reporting must adhere to.

      I think it is just tounge in cheek. The disclosure is there for those that want it, and the humor is there for those of us that need it. Remember, Slashdot has to compete for return visits with places like Fark and Kiro5hun.

    • You found "good reporting" on /.? Where?

      Heck, I can not find good reporting on the TV or in the papers. A whole article should be devoted to noting where "good reporting" was found. :)

  • (Slightly O/T) OpenOffice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:42PM (#13652028)
    I like OpenOffice on platforms for which it was designed to work (Win32, Linux), but it uses so many non-portable Linuxisms that it runs extremely poorly to not at all on OpenBSD, even with Linux emulation and Linux-style /proc enabled. That is to say that it runs, but consumes far too much memory and crashes frequently. And I'm too lazy to try patches from NetBSD pkgsrc or FreeBSD ports, so right now I've been using AbiWord and gnumeric in place of OO. They are fine, but don't do Office formats as well, and AbiWord generates really lousy postscript, which means that anything I print comes out looking like shit.

    (Please don't make this into a question of Linux vs BSD or free vs propriertary OS, that's not the point I'm trying to make.)

    From a usability perspective I like OpenOffice, but I wish it were more portable. In my mind, if a program uses too many Linuxisms that don't hold on other Unix-like systems and require non-trivial patches to port, it is a good sign that the code is poorly written. I.E. it's doing stupid things like relying on Linux-specific values in /proc, or not checking return values of functions that can fail, or making generally unsafe assumptions that just don't happen to come up on Linux. That's a sign of bad code. In defense of OO, it is fine to work with where it does work, and in some cases I like the UI better than MS Office. The best I can say is that it's come a long way since StarOffice 5, which ran poorly, even on systems on which it was designed to run.

    • Re:(Slightly O/T) OpenOffice (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      President Bush doesn't care about BSD people.

    • Re:(Slightly O/T) OpenOffice (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:56PM (#13652108) Journal
      I suspect that the problem is not so much Linux-isms as SysV-isms. Star Office is primarily supported on Solaris and Linux (and Windows, but that's irrelevant for the purpose of this discussion). Solaris is a direct SysV derivative, and Linux has strong SysV leanings. OpenBSD, obviously, comes from the BSD family. If the code were really full of Linux-isms then it would not be easy to run on Solaris, which was the reason Sun bought it in the first place.
  • Oh well. At least it doesn't hit Hexus' servers again.
  • I run Fedora Core 4 on an AMD 64 laptop. I had problems with OpenOffice not recognizing my JVM. After some research, I found out that OO.o is a 32 bit application and will not recognize/work with 64 bit JVMs. I installed a 32 bit JVM and was able to get OO.o to recognize it. Since Star Office is based on OO.o, I assume the problem the author had with SO and the Java installer is similar.

    I wrote a more detailed article on getting OO.o to work with Java on 64 bit platforms, it can be found here [ensode.net]
    • Maybe it is not so much not recognising it, as having native libraries or other stuff that needs to be recompiled into 64 bit mode.

      its a bit like the maxosX to macosx86 migration: All java apps will work automatically on the x86 os, but as Java itself will be a native x86 app, the PPC emulation will not kick in for any native libraries -these will all have to be rebuilt for MacOS/x86.

      Nb, java1.5.05 came out last week. Swing apps on linux appear to have better dialog box support (i.e. key entry works more re

  • Learning StarOffice is Hard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fragmentate ( 908035 ) <jdspilled.gmail@com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:13PM (#13652252) Journal
    We tried the "open source initiative" here.

    StarOffice, although complete, is too different from MS Office. It's not that people can't use StarOffice as efficiently as they can use MS Office...they simply do not want to. It was difficult to get anyone to take it seriously. Even though every single feature of MS-Office that they actually use is in there, they were hell-bent on refusing to use it because of the features StarOffice lacks that they never use.

    Talk about stifling oneself.
    • Uhmmm - If people find using any Wordprocessor hard to use, then I think you need better people. It is just a friggen glorified typewriter...

    • Re:Learning StarOffice is Hard (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:44PM (#13652460) Journal
      What you're saying is really a universal truth: Something new and unknown is harder to use than something old and familiar. Or more succinctly, people are lazy. If you give people the option, they will virtually NEVER switch to something new, even if it has significant (but not compelling to them) advantages. That's why MS won the browser wars by bundling IE into the OS, even though it's been a piece of shite most of its life. Ditto for MS Media Player and Outbreak--both utter excrement.
      • That's why MS won the browser wars by bundling IE into the OS, even though it's been a piece of shite most of its life.

        Netscape 3 wiped the floor with IE 3. Netscape 4 wiped the floor with IE 3. IE 4 absolutely shat all over Netscape 4 from a very great height.

        Netscape 4 crashed at the drop of a hat. It was a resource hog. It was slow - I remember one deeply nested table test that rendered in a second or two in IE 4 that literally took minutes in Netscape 4. It couldn't resize its window without reloading t
        • I'd agree with you on the Netscape/IE comparisons by version fairly accurately. Netscape 4.7 was finally what NS4.0 should have been, by which point they were far behind. However, I believe that Opera was out by then as well, and was a solid product. However, it was "different."

          As for Media Player, I honestly liked MS's offering until I believe 7.x That was a very simple, streamlined, straightforward media player. After that, they redesigned it into a nightmare. The current one (10?) makes me shudder. I'm n
    • I think It's like activating a new DVD player. For most of the people, activating new DVD player is something hard. For us (the geeks from /.) it's like "you know one you know them all".

      The question is how to make people less afraid of it. At work, I am using the method of pushing them into the water. Well, some swim but some drowned...
    • First, just to clarify: StarOffice is proprietary. It would not qualify as "open source" unless the OSI changed their definition of that term to let it in.

      Second, I'd like to learn of the specific complaints they have.

      As this pertains to switching to an open source program—OpenOffice.org: perhaps as OpenOffice.org is used in more schools it will become more commonplace to know how to work with OO.o, then your office can eventually hire people who are accustomed to OO.o to replace the workers who insi

    • Re:Learning StarOffice is Hard (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bigbigbison ( 104532 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @03:07PM (#13653169) Homepage
      I wonder what will happen when the new Microsoft Office 12 comes out and it has the radically different menu system? If OpenOffice.org can get some publicity out by then it might make people look twice at a program that looks kind of like the old office rather than the new office which looks so different.
    • I always find it weird when I read that an office can't switch to a more stable or less-expensive alternative to MS Office because people "don't want to". I wonder if the employees get Porsches for their business travel because they "dont want to" drive Toyotas.
    • Will Microsoft Office 12 also be too different from MS Office for your organization to learn it? It would be interesting to hear their reactions once they are forced to upgrade and re-learn.
    • If such feelings for learning new software is commmon, that really spells bad news for Microsoft.
      Their Office 12 product that is supposed to be released next year will be completely different from their current version. The menus will be gone, and there will be som tablike toolbars instead. Compared to learning all that new stuff, learning the differences in Staroffice will be very easy.

  • Clipart? who needs it? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by matt me ( 850665 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:15PM (#13652264)
    Clipart is a bane on our society. The average lame-ass user puts them onto every poster and leaflet they make, otherwise fine (unless they used MS Wordart) making them look appallingly bad. Of course, now everyone thinks my designs are professional (I can charge for theme even!) just because I either get real images from elsewhere or don't use any rather than crappy little cartoons.

  • Why categorized as Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by southpolesammy ( 150094 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:16PM (#13652277) Journal
    Surely, Sun will offer SO8 for Solaris, Windows, and Linux, and although the article referenced is a review of the new product on Linux, this seems misaligned.

    Perhaps the article should have considered a broader perspective of the new application than on a single platform.
    • I was wondering the same thing, but this is Slashdot, you know.
      StarOffice exists for 3 different operating systems, and is probably more widespread on Windows than Linux (or Solaris, for that matter), and is Sun's product. And in spite of this, the editor puts it under "Linux". I can't help but think that this is a cheap plug for Linux.

  • Startup time? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Henk Postma ( 703916 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:26PM (#13652335) Homepage Journal
    What will the startup time of such a monolythic application be like?

    Take OpenOffice as an example, the startup time scales QUADRATICALLY with the version number:

    Starting OOdraw on my laptop:

    69 secs for opening oodraw2 (1.9.126)

    21 secs for opening oodraw (1.1.4)

    So (2.0/1.1)^2 = 3.3, and 69s/21s = 3.3

    Seriously, I love linux for the fact that I can use 'old hardware', but why do I have to wait QUADRATICALLY longer to start the same basic application?

    I'll be sticking with Openoffice 1.1 over OO2 or Staroffice8 thank you very much.

    • It may be that OO2 is still compiled with a lot of debug symbols and code in it that slows things down and that a real release will not be. I have no knowledge of this, it's just speculation.
      • It may be that OO2 is still compiled with a lot of debug symbols and code in it that slows things down and that a real release will not be. I have no knowledge of this, it's just speculation.

        That's a good suggestion, I certainly hope so :)

    • I'm using debian unstable (sid) and OOo2 packages from experimental. While I still find loading time a bit slow, it's still faster than OOo 1.1 IMHO.
      • I'm using debian unstable (sid) and OOo2 packages from experimental. While I still find loading time a bit slow, it's still faster than OOo 1.1 IMHO.

        That's interesting, since I'm using Ubuntu Breezy which I think is based on sid.

        • I don't know Ubuntu very much since I've been using Debian as my main OS for more than three years and never felt like switching. Anyway, if you want to try openoffice.org2 from experimental (I assume that should also work with Ubuntu, but not at all sure of that) :

          Add to your /etc/apt/sources.list :

          deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ [debian.org] ../project/experimental main contrib non-free

          deb-src http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ [debian.org] ../project/experimental main contrib non-free

          Then apt-get -t experimental insta

    • Actually you've made two flaws in your reasoning.

      The first and most significant is that you compare *beta* version with *stable* release. I don't know how you compiled OOo2 - I assume you have'nt and used some binary packages - well beta applications are often not optimised. Often beta compiles have left information usefull for debbuging (that is what beta is for) which slows things down.

      The second flaw is that you think that everybody runs old hardware just for the sake of running old hardware. This is fla
      • The first and most significant is that you compare *beta* version with *stable* release. I don't know how you compiled OOo2 - I assume you have'nt and used some binary packages - well beta applications are often not optimised. Often beta compiles have left information usefull for debbuging (that is what beta is for) which slows things down.

        That is a good point, made earlier. The version I'm running is a precompiled binary in the preview version of Ubuntu Breezy.

        he second flaw is that you think that ev

        • > I was expressing my personal opinion, that I like the fact that I can run
          > modern apps on my 'older hardware', which in fact is a Pentium III 800MHz
          > with 256 Mb of ram.

          I am writing this from Duron 500Mhz with 512MB RAM (I could switch to something newer but I don't really see the point of doing so) and OOo2 (and 1) runs fine on this machine. By decent hardware I meant something like P3 1Ghz with 256MB - this does its job for not demanding office work.

          I work as an administrator in medium sized of
    • Henk Postma wrote:
      >
      > Seriously, I love linux for the fact that I can use 'old hardware', but why do I have to wait QUADRATICALLY
      > longer to start the same basic application?
      >
            TimeCube guy, is that you?

  • Too much Sun Java stuff in StarOffice now (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:27PM (#13652341) Homepage
    In this new release, the installer is in Java. [newsforge.com] And apparently only some versions of Java work. Guess whose.

    Each new version of StarOffice seems to have more dependencies on Sun's Java. This is not good for OpenOffice.

    It's not Java, per se, that's the problem. It's the dependency of open source software on closed source software, the evil that Stallman always warns about. You don't want someone to be in a position where they can cut off your air supply.

    • My question: Does it actually need something proprietary about Sun Java, or does it need something in the (open) Java standard that no one else provides correctly? For instance, the reason that MS Java fails at so many things is that it violates the published, open, official standard. Is that Sun's fault?

      So unless there's something that extends or violates the Java standard in Sun's Java (and is necessary for the install), then any whinging about 'closed source software' is flawed and irrelevant.
    • RMS was interviewed about that very thing, and said, "I'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you. I know you were right, believing for so long."

    • Re:Too much Sun Java stuff in StarOffice now (Score:4, Funny)

      by WillerZ ( 814133 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:44PM (#13652464) Homepage
      The license for Java doesn't allow you to use it for life-critical software, so you're violating copyright law if you're letting it control your air-supply anyway.
      • yeah, we had to revert to C/C++ and x86 assember for our nuclear powered flying hospital, the one that was to circle above major cities to provide budget medical care.

        With hindsight, trying to implement the entire fly-by-wire control system on a JSP page served up on the same low-end server/tomcat runtime that hosted the customer-accessible front end and the reactor GUI was a bit of a design error.

        -steve
    • OpenOffice now uses a well documented and standardized format by default. So, the situation is not as bad as seems to be from your comment. Yes, Sun may take away the air from OpenOffice, but we can still advocate it, because if it goes away, we'll can easily replace it. Once again, RMS is right. But we still have the documents format open, and that is what really matters here.

  • Start Office vs MS Office (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CDPatten ( 907182 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @02:01PM (#13652566) Homepage
    I know I'm going to get slapped with troll, but I am seriously "what did i miss?"

    Anyone else notice that Star Office's Menus and Toolbars are strikingly close to MS Office 2003? Down to the names and order of icon placement in the toolbars. http://www.newsforge.com/blob.pl?id=a2c2239ed1854a a07adc092f578f95a3 [newsforge.com]

    I think the anti-ms crowd is intellectually dishonest not to point this out. If/whenever MS pulls something like that you guys scream from the roof tops. Why is it different when its done to MS? Is your argument principled or not? Or is it simply anything but MS? If that is the case, your stance takes us down a more dangerous road than only MS.

    I know someone is going to scream its not the case. For those people, click on the above link and open Word 2k3. But if that's not enough then how about this for example; What happens if/when StarOffice 9.0 gets rid of the File menus and goes to the ribbon design model that MS is using with the next Office? Will that be acceptable too? I mean, I guess copying is the nicest form of flattery, but... well. go head, I'm bracing for the modding.

  • Not ready for prime time yet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tobybuk ( 633332 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @02:32PM (#13652905)
    Our company uses MS Office period. After reading about OpenOffice on Slashdot I thought I'd try it out for myself. So I thought I'd see how it handled our system spec doc. About 250 pages with graphics, nothing too clever in there but in MS Word format.

    Well, I fired OO up and loaded the file. What normally takes say 10 seconds with Word took over 15 mins! I assumed that this was a one time hit converting from MS Office format, so I saved the document in OO native format so I would subsequently time opening from the native format. Took 15 mins to save the bloody thing and the same to open it again.

    For us this product isn't an option. Its pathetic at loading/saving when compared to Office.

    Might be OK for small doc but for us it just doesn't cut it.

    • What normally takes say 10 seconds with Word took over 15 mins! I assumed that this was a one time hit converting from MS Office format, so I saved the document in OO native format so I would subsequently time opening from the native format. Took 15 mins to save the bloody thing and the same to open it again.

      I've seen that with every version of StarOffice I've used. What drastically improved it for me was saving the original Word format in .RTF or .HTML and then opening in StarOffice, saving as a StarOf

    • Please mod parent down...obviously a M$ shill.
      • I feel sorry for you that any comment in any way complimentary of MS Office is assumed to be a "shill". I have had the same experience as the parent with OO. For simple word processing and spreadsheets (e.g. your household budget) it makes no sense to buy the MS office suite. For a business user that has complex spreadsheets and word documents that are complex with graphics, MS still is the standard. I'd even pick Corel's Office suite before the Open Office one.
    • And now the obvious question: did SO at least render the document correctly?

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