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StarOffice 5.1 released 135

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-needs-a-word-processor-when-I-got-vi dept.
Thomas Leineweber writes "Stardivision has just released the new version 5.1 of its StarOffice. You can download it as usual for free for non-commercial use. "
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StarOffice 5.1 released More

StarOffice 5.1 released

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  • Oh NO! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I *really* hope there is a diff for this one ;-) I just finished downloading that monster!

  • Hm.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At least Star Office now detects a SuSE Linux distribution and doesnt complain about missing glibc2 anymore.

  • Re:Applix or StarOffice ? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've had good luck with Applix. The word processor is so-so, but the spreadsheet rocks. And it allows me to integrate sql and a lot of other cool stuff. Applix has been pretty quiet lately, but they have a solid product. Pretty stable, too.

  • StarOffice 5.1 ENGLISH download/reginfo... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You can download the English version from: http://sunsite.unc.edu/ StarDivision/unxlnxi/so51_lnx_01.tar [unc.edu] and use the following info for registration...
    Registration Data

    Product: StarOffice 5.1
    Operating System: Linux Intel
    Language: English, US

    Data to be filled in the User Data Dialog:
    Company:
    First/Last Name: bob test
    Street/State: 8734 hgdfhjgsdfhjg
    ZIP/City: 90210 sdf
    Country: United States of America

    Phone Home/Work:
    Fax/eMail: sdffg@sad.com

    Data to be filled in the Registration Key Dialog:
    Custumer number: 8017663
    Registration Key: 68L9-1RVX-7308RP-0L46C7-EJYX-YA0J

  • Re:StarOffice in the workplace (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The file format has been deliberately obfuscated in order to protect the Office monopoly. I tried StarOffice on my Windows machine at the university to test it out. I don't put garbage onto my home machine. Unfortunately, it choked on several documents and the equation editor sucked. Plus, there were problems with the TOC and cross-references. I've experienced problems even with Word 97!

    Secondly, the Word 97 format is unstable. I've had several documents with large figures, numerous equations and linked tables/spreadsheets. Word can take several minutes to load and repaginate the document. And I run into problems with the embedded equations several times. Fonts are missing and the greek symbols revert to their Western language equivalents. Integral signs, etc.. disappearing. The figures in various formats sometimes become elongated and I've had the stupid red X problems several times.

    I would prefer Microsoft adopt a standard format like TeX or LaTeX. At least, if the frontend chokes on it, another editor can be used to complete the document.

  • I prefer Applix (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    StarOffice has lots more features, but it's way too slow and
    bloated for my tastes, plus I can't stand the way it takes over
    the whole desktop with its Win95 look-and-feel. It also tends
    to crash occasionally.

    Applix ($79 - $99) is smaller, faster, and quite stable. I've
    done a couple long presentations with the graphics program,
    and was quite happy with the results.
  • To read-only word8 (office 97) try mswordview,
    though often strings is adequate. mswordview
    converts the .doc to html (several files)

    http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/MSWordView.htm l

  • Re:Glibc 2.1? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From the german requirement page:
    Glibc 2.07 or higher supported.
    I guess that means 2.1 support, it would be
    totally stupid to release something not working on current caldera, RedHat, debian.....

    Fredrik

  • Review the 5.1, not slam the 5.0! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, I tried SO 5.0. It didn't _perfectly_ translate Micros~1 Word 97 files (failing on bullet points and Symbol fonts, in my case). And there was no mention of immunity to "macro viruses" or "macro trojans".

    But the 5.1 version has been out for hours and what we see is criticism of 5.0. Gang, give reviews of 5.1 here, esp. since improved compatibility is supposed to be a feature!

  • Re:Review the 5.1, not slam the 5.0! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @01:12PM (#1886568)
    Don't waste your time on either.

    Linux doesn't have a word processor. The best thing is Lyx - very fast and work can be imported to several formats. Conversion to html is not bad unless there are math formulas which get translated into messy gifs, etc.

    The 60 meg. Star Office download says it all. Tired, ugly and bloated imitation of MS Office. Word Perfect is even worse - terrible motif interface. Try to change directories with the file selector and constantly "filter" to go to parent directory if you are lucky. Very intuitive, folks.

    There are several gtk based work processors that looked promising but they seem to be dead in the water. KOffice seems to be trying to imitate MS in using CORBA in the place of COM - nobody really wants or needs embedded objects or "in-place editing" which increase bloat and instability geometrically. Linked objects - all right. You don't need CORBA or COM for that. What a way to ruin the K Desktop Environment, one of the few Linux desktop apps or systems that is really useful.

    People just want an attractive, modern Word Processor that can perhaps also be used as a WYSIWYG html editor with images and tables. Not even frames, thank you. If we want to edit our images we can use a separate application. We don't want or need Office compatibility either. If you want to load and save Office files, use Windows and make sure you have the same version of Office that the files require. Most of the Slashdot visitors are using Windows anyway even though they also may have Linux installed just to impress other geeks.

    It's not happening. 10 years ago I had much better word processing and desktop publishing software at very low cost with an Amiga. Regardless of the hype, Deluxe Paint 10 years ago was better for most drawing and painting tasks than Gimp - which is really an image or photo processing factory that can also be used as a paint or drawing program in a very round-about way. Like writing a script to draw a circle.

    Linux is a server system, with lip service being paid to its usefullness as a desktop productivity or home system. Servers don't need browsers or word processors or paint programs.

    If you want to have fun with a desktop system use Windows 9x, MacIntosh or even get out that old Amiga 500 or Atari ST you have in the closet.





  • Applixware has a lot going for it. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @01:16PM (#1886569)
    I've been using applixware for a while and I'm pretty happy with it. There are lots of pluses.
    • Pretty easy to use. My kids (6 and 8) use it all the time. The 8 year old had no trouble going through the tutorial.
    • Macro programming language (ELF) does networking and you can extend it with C.
    • Database integration. Not quite as slick as access, but it does work. PostgreSQL, MySql (if you can call that a database), Oracle ? Solid, and Adabas, (Informix?).
    • Applix Anywhere -- access your applixware system via a java applet in your browser.
    • They just released their OLAP product, TM1. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it sounds pretty slick.
    • They have open-sourced their extension language, including the drag-and-drop app builder.
    • Typical office suite integration -- put a chart in a document, update the underlying data in a spreadsheet, and the chart gets updated. This might work between users, I'm not sure.
    • One of the *first* companies to port their suite to Linux. Must be at least 3 years ago by now. (Hellloooo Island!).
    • Ported to Alpha and Power PC.
    • You can get a win95 version for something like $75.
    Down sides
    • Not as many wiz-bang surface features compared to ms office.
    • Mail client is kinda not so great.
    • HTML editor needs some work.
    • Non-anti-aliased fonts (but is this just x?)
    As for dealing with Microsoft Office, RTF import/export works ok for simple documents. The Microsoft Input filters are a lot better, but Applix doesn't currently generate native ms word -- only rtf.

    The mailing list is pretty active, with a bunch of the engineers constantly answering questions, often in the form of macros that do the trick (Hi Eric, Hi Mark!).

    If you have the $99 bucks give it a try.

    -- cary

  • Re:StarOffice in the workplace (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @12:02PM (#1886570)
    Well, hmmm ... I am an MBA, a CPA, and a CMA, and have managed a number of projects with >200 people in the oil business for the last twenty years. I have about 200 people in my department. I report to the CFO here. So I think that I know my way around the "management decision meeting" business. I have one question: What's the weather like on your planet?

    "Other side?" What "other side?" The only side that I am aware of is the "how much does it cost us" side. Try the "other side" crap at Phillips, Shell, Mobil -- er DoubleCross --, BP, or any of the other majors and your ass will be out the door that afternoon. Did you learn that in "Business School" -- that sounds like the stuff that kids these days keep trying to pull in interviews. I have been wishing for one of those hooks to come out and drag them out of my office when they say stuff like that (my secretary is not interested and claims osteoporosis) because when they start talking about "other sides" and "third options" and "new paradigms" the interview is basically over. It means that they cannot add or subtract and/or have never met a budget in their life. And they think that they know something about real technology. Which is even more dangerous.

    The only thing that is important is the bottom line, son, and I think that you have never been responsible for one on your life. AIX stays up for 1000 days at a time. Solaris is almost as good. Even HP-UX and OSF will do 200 days. Jesus Christ on a pogo stick -- IRIX will do more than 30 days. NT won't stay up for two weeks under load. Office is a pox and is restricted here because of the support budget that it alone uses up. We restrict the availability of Powerpoint (what the technicians refer to as "Powerpointyhair") for the same reason. As far as I can tell, Linux is just another UNIX, just a lot smaller. I have been working with UNIX for years (and Linux for the last four years on the advice of some of the younger staff members), and I have never seen an advantage to NT and Office and Windows before that (and OS/2 before that, and Macs on and off -- lately IMacs). Perhaps it is the CPA in me coming out -- it's all about ROI and cost of ownership and it doesn't get any better than UNIX and mainframes (more so now with IBM's price cuts). It is amazing (and reveals your fundamental lack of experience) that you would actually suggest that NT/Office is a good value proposition! I have tried Star Office once. I wasn't impressed -- a lot of the machines here are older Pentiums with 32MB and Star Office would not run well on them. But as a value proposition you are suggesting that a system that runs us about $6500/seat in support and licences PER YEAR EVERY YEAR costs less than one that would be free+$300 (last I checked) once. ONCE. That is why we are seriously considering Applix (smaller) or a freeware suite (LyX, GNUmeric, and some others -- but that is enough and exmh is quite nice -- we have menus for setting up procmail automatically) for the new systems as we replace them and/or using X as X terminals on the old systems (with new monitors and video cards). All of this is driven by cost. Period.

    "Other side?"

    You shouldn't have slept through the accounting classes -- they were part of your curriculum for a reason.

    But hey -- I know who we have (I hired most of them) and I know that you aren't working for me -- I only hope that you are working for one of our compeditors.
  • I think it may work.

    I don't have a key# yet to install it completely but I did get to the setup screen. I didn't even get that far with SO5.0 on RH6. So it looks encouraging.
  • I actually like MS Office. I use WP on Linux at home exculsively, and I miss the way I could have Excel handle tables, etc... I'm anxiously looking forward to the gnome and KDE office suites, becuase they look to have the interfunctionality and customization I am looking for.
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
  • Guess that makes MS an unprofessional company.
  • Well, I do think SO should be split up in smaller modules, it is a hog.

    Wordperfect is a wonderful wordprocessor. Cosmetically it is dog ugly, they should have used GTK or QT - that would even save them development time compared to that awful and huge (bloated) Motif API.
    However functionality is everything, good cosmetics just a nice to have (in my book). So for now I use WP.
    Sometimes I start a Windows98 up in a VmWare VM just to use Excel (with 128M RAM and a K6-III it is smooth) ;-), but as soon as I get the time I will start to test Linux spreadsheets to se if any fits my needs, the KOffice one seems interesting.

    KOffice is coming along nicely and I like the way they do it, as for what people want in an office suite, please speak for yourself. I want more than you it seems. MS Office is bloated yes, but that does not mean that any implementation of object models will be bloated. Yes ofcourse they will be bigger, but with good programmers and SW designers - not neccesarily bloated.

    It is like a desktop environment, it WILL use more memory than a TWM, but well written it will not use more than absolutely neccesary for its targeted functionality.
  • Well, a wordprocessor and a text editor are really two different things. I do not understand this comparison. Yes - there is LaTEX which somewhat blur this distinction, but I do not like LaTEX myself.

    I use a text editor for programming and a wordprocessor for e.g. reports and letters.
  • They said they would, moments later they "promised" they would "enhance" the XML format they would use in Office - how utterly annoying, not to mention transparent.
  • This is the only thing keeping me back from installing RedHat 6.0. If it works on RedHat 6, I'll be very happy.
  • Because 99.999999999% of the time, the format doesn't matter, the text matters. And if that's the case, plain text is a far better way of doing things. I'm sick and tired of getting a 12 Mb Word for Windows file that consists of two pages of 36 point text which could have fit into a 1K text message. Especially when the idiot manager in question includes a Word Macro Virus.
  • I use StarOffice on my computer at work. The machine is dual boot, and I'm allowed to use Linux most of the time because we're doing Java development. When some idiot^Wmanager sends a document in a Microsoft format, Star Office can handle it 99.99% of the time. When Star Office can't, I have the option of either asking for it again in RTF, or booting back into Windows NT and using Office. But a few weeks ago our idiot VP of Product Development sent out a document that included a Word Virus, and I was one of the few people not infected.
  • After negotiating through a maze of pages that seem designed to do nothing but make it hard to reach my goal, I come upon a page with a link ("accepot the license agreement?") to http://support.us.stardivision.com/registration/do wnload/unxlnxi510.html. Click on it. 404.
  • You might as well let them collect their info about you, since their giving the office suite away for nothing. Let them count the names of the people that use Linux. If you download the Windows version of SO use that fake data stuff.

  • The previous version (5.0 for all of you who don't know about it) didn't really impress me. Yes, it had tons of features, but it was really slow and unstable. I downloaded this thing and expected a few bugs to be fixed to give me a little bit more stable application. Boy, was I wrong. All of a sudden, they have tuned the previous glob of lard into something... well, faster. The install was speedier, and the same thing goes for just about everything else. The interface has also been improved. After a few minutes of usage, it feels like Star Division might have gotten it right this time.

    Note: I tested the OS/2 version and not the one for Linux, but I'm pretty sure the same thing applies to every single other version out there.
  • I wouldn't be too confident in your arrogance.

    When you are sitting on the other side of the fence in the management decision meetings you start seeing some major flaws in the whole idea of a Linux/StarOffice migration.

    I can see no positives from migrating away from WinNT/Office97 and plenty of negatives.
  • At Apple executives were trembling when Microsoft threatened to withdraw their Office port. In an office environment where certain people and clients have the nasty habit of sending you Word and Excel documents it is important to deal with those formats, unless you are prepared to deal with the education of the people sending them.

    StarOffice, WordPerfect and ApplixWare are really a boon for those running Linux in a hostile environment. I never touch the stuff to produce anything, but I love to be able to run Linux at the office and still be able to communicate with the rest of the folks.

    Using the StarOffice "filter update" now and look forward to 5.1.

  • 19:16:31 (461.34 KB/s) - `so51_lnx_01.tar' saved [74072576/74072576]

    Woo hoo! Of course, now I have to wait until I go into the lab tomorrow to put it on a zip disk. The heck if I'm gonna try to get it to the home machine via my 56K modem.
  • | Lastly I don't care if it looks like windows.
    | An office package is a tool and this one works
    | for me.

    My biggest beef with SO5 (and SO4, for that matter), some might consider silly. But I absolutely *hate* the way that SO doesn't integrate at all with the window manager. I would love it if each edited document got its own "real" window. C'mon, Star Division! At least with Applix I can use my preferred window manager to manage the windows!

    So, it's not that it "looks like Windows" - it's that it doesn't play nice with the X window system!
  • Or buy vmware, and set it up to boot your NT partition in a linux window, so you can run Office without rebooting...
  • The question I have is whether it supports glibc 2.1 or not. (For those of us using Debian unstable...)

    So far I don't see it listed on the stardivision.com pages :(
    /*He who controls Purple controls the Universe. *

  • Download URL here! (Score:3)

    by Disconnect ( 5083 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @10:29AM (#1886590) Homepage
    At ftp://ftp.stardivi sion.de/pub/staroffice/unxlxni/so51_lnx_01.tar [stardivision.de] you can get the english version. (Change 01 to 49 for Gernam, 33 for French, and 39 for Italian.)

    Its loaded (took me about 5 mins to get in) but seems to be going pretty quick (20k/s to the East Coast USA)

    /*He who controls Purple controls the Universe. *
  • Funny that you mention the colour purple in your tagline. In The Netherlands the governing coalition is associated with the colour purple - red for socialists and blue for the liberals (and transparent for D66). But purple doesn't seem to rule anything anymore, because it just fell down when a member of the senate (also a member of one of the parties in the coalition) voted down a proposal. It's perhaps a bit more complicated than I wrote it down here.

    If you rule purple, you rule almost nothing anymore :-)

    More related to the real subject: I'll give it a try tomorrow. Does anybody know if SO5.1 runs under FreeBSD? I'd like to run it at home as well.

    Intosi

  • I prefer running 3.1 on my OS/2 box to SO5 on Linux....SO5 reminds me too much of Active Desktop.
  • Finally, I get around to putting 5.01 AKA 5.0FilterUpgrade onto a CD, and the very next day, lo! a new version appeareth!

    I hope it's as fast (relatively speaking) on Linux as the OS/2 bloke above intimated. My 5.01 runs usefully fast on a K6-II-300 with 64M, and only crashes about as often as Word, but got about a D from me for importing things from Word (2, 6 or 8).

    Mind you, Word 8 gets only a C from me for importing from Word (for windows) 2. I see on their website that SO claim to have been working on that, so perhaps they'll get at least a C as well. S-:

    Oh, well... at -f grab-staroffice-from-aarnet.sh now+10hours...

  • But it's not compatible (Score:3)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @11:30AM (#1886595)
    Yes, it has MS Office 95 and 97 filters, and in my experience it does a markedly better job than WordPerfect Office at opening MS Office files. But it's not really compatible. It won't touch fast-saved documents, has trouble with longer ones, requires macros (if your business uses any) to be rewritten, and it's an even bigger memory hog than MS Office.

    All this said, it's a decent office suite with a lot of great features, a nice interface, and damn fine cross-platform support. But it won't coexist comfortably with other office suites any better than any other office suite. A business or institution really can't mix office suites; for all the filters in the world, their file formats are still too far apart for everyday use.

    A word processor that can "usually" open Word files is useless. When you're sent a Word file, the only acceptable word processor is one that can always open a Word file, even with clipart, drawings, equations, a glossary, embedded spreadsheets, and so forth.

    You're not smarter than the people you work for. You're naive. There are a lot of things I dislike about MS Office, but even if StarOffice were suddenly so free that it was GPL'ed, it can cost a fortune to migrate a running business from one office suite to another.

    If you have a department running Linux or some other such OS on the desktop and you need access to the company's standard office suite, WinFrame might make sense. And if you're on one of the major commercial Unixes, there's always SoftWindows.
  • If only I can convince the people at the place of my employment that StarOffice in a Linux environment is compatible with their Micros~1 Office suite that everyone else uses. Its hard to be different when you know more than management and they won't listen to you. ;)
  • Hi, I hope this comment isn't too redundant, I just thought that I should plainly post that I just installed SO5.1 on my RedHat 6 box with NO PROBLEMS, it was A-OK.

    Ben
  • Firstly, MS Office is not a standard, standards are properly documented open formats that are usualy (but not always) well thought out, sensible and portable. HTML, XML, ASCII text, TeX, Ansi C, HTTP and XPM are all "standards", a crappy, proprietary, backwards and forwards incompatible, binary document format is not a standard.


    I'm sorry to add fuel to the fire, but you left out the important words de facto from his post. Look them up. ;-)


    Ethan

  • sunsite.unc.edu still works, but we prefer that you use MetaLab.unc.edu instead. it's our non-vendor-specific name.
    so that would be
    http://MetaLab.unc.edu/ StarDivision/unxlnxi/so51_lnx_01.tar [unc.edu]

    Thanks
  • Please use MetaLab instead of our old name, sunsite.unc.edu. MetaLab is our non-vendor-specific name--tho sunsite.unc.edu still works.
    http://MetaLab.unc.edu/ StarDivision/unxlnxi/so51_lnx_01.tar [unc.edu]
    Thanks
  • .. When one have to read/review a lot of lengthy documents, proper formatting and just plain good look is essential. TeX does not cut it - DVI preview is bad looking, plain TeX, or even LyX rendering is not good.
    ..HTML is adequate (and superior to Word or RTF) for most cases. It lacks formulas and some other useful doodads now. After XML (an MathML and the likes) support appears in all major browsers we are saved....
    In your case - ask your boss to buy full Acrobat (with distiller) - it adds a button to Word - print to PDF. Works very well.

  • I agree that there was a definite improvement in the registration process...but did you ever think that a company could so totally and utterly screw up something so simple in the first place?
  • I personally don't think you sounded like an ass at all. I don't think people realize the actual support cost involved in Microsoft products. I actually truely believe that most people don't even purchase and maintain support contracts for their Microsoft software. If they did, they would realize how expensive it is. That cost, multipled over the number of seats you have, can offset the cost of a competent Unix admin (including benefits).
  • I'll be downloading it soon, but I hope that they have fixed the tilde and cedilla problem that occurs since version 4.0 (3.x haven't any support for dead key composing). Please, if anybody can set the keyboard to Brazililan International and language to Portuguese, test the sequences: (acute)(c) for a ccedilla "ç", and (tilde)(a) for "ã", and (tilde)(o) for "õ". You must have the XKB extension of XFree working.
  • You know, they annouced the MacOS Star Office last year. Never ever saw it released. Any news on MacOS or LinuxPPC ports that EXIST?
  • Gee, I had no problem getting all my windows hot keys working in linux, in fact I have more hotkeys in linux than I do in windows. It took about 10 minutes with xkeycaps to configure X so that the windows key is mapped to one of the Meta modifiers, and the context menu key is recognized in the 104-key layout as a key. So, I go into the WindowMaker menu config (substitute whatever system you use to assign hotkeys to commands) and start mapping keys...
    lets see...
    context menu key gives me the menu I get when I right click on the title bar, windows-space shades the window, windows-F4 closes it, windows-x toggles maximize, windows-n minimizes it, windows-h hides it, windows-t brings up a terminal, windows-e brings up an editor (my current favorite is joe) in a term for quick jotting of notes, windows-q exits the X session, windows-1 through windows-5 switches to a particular virtual desktop, windows-leftarrow and windows-rightarrow moves to the previous and next virtual desktop, respectively...

    need I go on? Or have I blabbed at the mouth enough?
  • As someone mentioned above, StarDivision used functions from glibc 2.0 that weren't meant to be public and are not available with glibc 2.1. It's SO that is/was broken.
  • Curious question. What *WOULD* you recommend? ApplixWare? Something else? I would seriously like to know, as this may matter to me greatly in the near future.
  • I've only tried the Window$ version of StarOffice 5, but I was unimpressed enough to keep it off my Linux partition. The UI did not please me, and though it is customizable, the whole thing is a huge memory-sucking beast. I didn't find much of the program to be intuitive, and the integrated browser and email functions are useless.
    As to using my favorite text input software--Wordperfect with linux, my attraction to linux (besides stability and quality) is being able to custom configure and compile apps. Neither Wordperfect for Linux nor StarOffice let me do that. And I really missed my Windows keyboard hot-keys, the mouse may be nice for the brain but not for my hand. Anyway, my dish is that Staroffice looks cool on their website (no screenshots!?!) but lacks usability. It is free though. That's worth considering.
  • thanks for the tip on hotkeys to the previous poster...

    I haven't used applixware, but as i tried to indicate in my rant, I haven't found a linux wp that I like, so I use windows.
  • I have no idea if they solved it in 5.1.

    For 5.0, RedHat 6.0 has an RPM of Star Office which works just fine. It's not installed by default, it's on the Applications CD.

    I wish I could find out if 5.1 works or not on my RedHat 6.0 system, but as another /.er already stated, the download area says that its closed.
    ----------

  • I've used ApplixWare (AW) and Star Office (SO) 5.0 before.

    Between the two, I'd recommend Star Office, **IF** you have gobs of RAM (minimum 64M) and a fairly speedy processor to go with it. It's more polished, and I think it deals better with fonts, though given that it's running on X (the "it's 1999 and I still don't have built-in TrueType font support by default" window system), there's only so much you can expect.

    I'd be curious to hear other people's opinions on this too...

    P.S. Yes I know you can get TrueType font renderizers for X, my RedHat 6.0 XFree86 came with one installed. But it was an extra feature RedHat was nice enough to through in, and even with that X doesn't have a great way to deal with such fonts, or font scalability, transparently.

    P.P.S. On ONE occasion Applix nuked the file I was editing when I tried to save it... only once over a period of about a year, but still, fyi...
    ----------

  • An alle Microsoft Internetexplorer 3.0x Benutzer.


    Die Star Division Homepage sehr aufwendig. Zuaufwendig für ihren Microsoft Internetexplorer 3.0x.
    Damit Sie diese Seiten aufrufen können brauchen Sie ein StarOffice 4.0/5.1, Netscape 3.x/ 4.x oder MSIE 4.x.

    Wir bitten um ihr Verständnis.

    I hate it when this happens...
  • just a minor correction - yes, aarnet's mirror
    project primarily serves aarnet members, but we
    do make archives available to australian connected
    networks for the australian 'net community.

    we can't make this available to networks outside
    australia due to the high cost of international
    traffic

    -jason
  • As an occational user of StarOffice 5.0 (whenever I need to interact with the Windows world or write a presentation) I have seen no real problems with it. It is quite fast an useable (on a P100 32 megs -- admittedly it takes about 45 seconds to load, but that's the ONLY slowness I have seen).

    Secondly, most of the problems people have relate to "ease-of-use" and "it looks to damn much like windows, so it's from hell." Ok, I have almost never used MS-Office, but I found StarOffice Trivial to use, I reciently wrote a nice looking presentation with all of the "useless" imbeded objects, and my time was spend thinking about the presentation, not the software -- perfect. The result is nice too.

    Lastly I don't care if it looks like windows. An office package is a tool and this one works for me.
  • If you want to write a "nice looking" presentation, report, etc. have you considered using LaTeX?
    I know some people might feel it's hard to use, but as of a couple of weeks ago I'd never used LaTeX or TeX in my life, or even seen sample source for it. With the aid of LyX I wrote a 10000 word dissertation in it, including tables, diagrams, contents pages, etc.. And it looked substantially better than I've ever seen someone achieve with something like Word. And it only took me about 5 days (last time I wrote a project of around 8000 words in Word, it took me about 8 days, because it kept crashing / misnumbering figures / messing up bibliography references etc..)
    I agree that you shouldn't be thinking about the software - but should you be thinking about the presentation? Surely the software should get the presentation right for you, and you should be worrying about the content! The software industry shows what happens when people worry more about presentation than content... Mentioning no names...

    Microsoft is not the answer, NO is the answer. Microsoft is the question.
    - Andy

  • Re:But it's not compatible - but neither is MS (Score:3)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @12:01PM (#1886618) Homepage
    it can cost a fortune to migrate a running business from one office suite to another

    Yep, and that includes from one version of MS Office to another.

    Sure, you can retrofit filters and such so that your department still using Office 95 can open docs than some other branch that's using Office 97 sends you - maybe. But what about those old Word 5.0 files you've got around, or the Word documents from the division that used to be all-Mac? Yeah, you can open them (if you jump through the right hoops), but you'll lose the formatting. (Voice of experience here.)

    Yes, it's an effort to switch from one office suite to another -- and each one still insists on its own internal format as well as supporting (to some degree or other) several other "portable" document formats -- but you're going to face that cost every time - or at best every other time - Microsoft comes out with a new version of Office, so you ought to look at all the long term costs involved.

    Hell, a halfway competent manager will have already looked at these factors and decreed some standard -- as in really standard, not just what's most popular -- document format (or subset of document content) for the company, so that last year's contract boilerplate is still recognizable in next year's version of Office -- whoever's Office it is.
  • Do the macros work in this version?
  • too late.

    there are already 65 anonymous users at ftp.stardivision.de.
    There is no capacity to support more than 65.

    mirrors?
  • I could not agree more. Lyx is excellent for writing documents, the GUI is though not very nice, for instance I would like to be able to split the window and atleast have more than one window up at one time. Therefore for long documents I started using xemacs (tex)

    However unfortunately we need one more thing and that is the capability to read M$-word files of all stupid versions. Still I think only wordperfect reads my Mac word 5.1 files but it does not even read rtf correctly.
  • What's "idiotic" about using the world's de facto document format? You may not like the fact that Microsoft Office is the de facto standard, but that doesn't mean it isn't so.

    Firstly, MS Office is not a standard, standards are properly documented open formats that are usualy (but not always) well thought out, sensible and portable. HTML, XML, ASCII text, TeX, Ansi C, HTTP and XPM are all "standards", a crappy, proprietary, backwards and forwards incompatible, binary document format is not a standard.

    Why can't I buy or download a WYSIWYG word processor for Windows or Linux that has a nice open standard (like TeX), it would be so much nicer (and more refreshing) than these crap formats in word/wordperfect/*office etc.

    --
  • Just installed the english version of 5.1 from sunsite.utk.edu/pub/ StarDivision/unxlnxi/ [utk.edu]. My mashine is running rawhide from about a week before 6.0 came out - should be pretty similar.
    SO works with libc-2.1.1 ok with about 5 minutes of testing. It still slightly munged a test M$ Word 97 doc I had laying around. Abiword did a better job of importing the same doc.
  • If Vmware seems expensive to you, what's the source you suggest for obtaining Word97?
  • You're going to have a lot of convincing to do, for two reasons.

    First, StarOffice lacks a lot of features. One example: Word's revision marks. SO doesn't have this feature. Word does. It is pretty common to want to mark different revisions of, e.g., a contract.

    Second, SO's import feature isn't 100%, and sometimes it isn't even close. If people are passing around Word files, a lot of formatting will be missed.

  • As part of the M$ plan to take over the internet, I seem to remember there being talk of making the file formats of Office 2000/Windows 2000 based on XML. If that were to happen, then it shouldn't be a problem to hack together a parser or to write the tags.

    Anyone know about this?

  • I only hope I never have to work with you. I could get by with just a text processor and SC for a spreadsheet. But I would just be getting by. Heck, I could get by with a pad of paper and a calculator.

    You claim that StarOffice would be $0 to support versus $6500 for Office? Do you have little elves who come in at night and do the maintanence for free? Part of support costs is training.

    You sound like the skinflint boss from h*ll, to be blunt. (which you do so eloquently)
  • Yikes,

    I thought only Microsoft "forced" users to upgrade from IE 3 to IE 4.
  • There are some historic roots to the 'bloat' in StarOffice, in comparison to ApplixWare. StarDivision comes to Linux from the Windows world (most of their earlier products are for Windows/DOS machines. Applix comes to Linux from the Unix world. I purchased a copy of Applix about a year ago, and it's pretty good. The apps are separate, linked by a common toolbar, not one big "Aircraft Carrier" deck that takes over the whole desktop as with StarOffice. ApplixWare is resource-light enough that I used it successfully awhile back with Linux on my 486-50 laptop (28 MB of RAM). I'll expose my bias however, by saying that my favorite "Office Suite" is Microsoft Office 4.3. MS hasn't made a thing since then that wasn't a pig, and less reliable. The company I work for still uses Office 4.3 throughout the company, but is soon switching to Office 2000, which I really don't look forward to.

    I'm a technical person, though, so I don't "live" in a "Office Suite" environment. Our programming people still work in OS/2 with Emacs. (the main product my group works on is part of an Embedded OS/2 product) And we're rated one of the top 30 companies to work for in the US.

  • I wouldn't be without vi for quick in-and-out work. Half the time I'm telnetted into an OS/2 box and just need to quickly edit one config file or script. vi does stuff like that great. However, for longer editing sessions I prefer Emacs or Textpad (a product for Win machines). For quick and simple when generating new files the best thing is cat > filename.txt on Unix, or copy con > filename.txt on DOS or OS/2.

  • The last version of StarOffice used some undocumented glibc2.0 calls that disappeared in 2.1, which meant that StarOffice was broken for users of some recent distributions, including RedHat 6.0. Does anyone know if they resolved this problem in the new release?



    --
  • Looks like only the German site [stardivision.de] has the news, the U.S. site [stardivision.com] still has 5.0 only. From what I can make out using BabelFish (ugh! too many friggin' frames!), the English port is still not available yet.
    #include "disclaim.h"
  • I don't know, I have a TB Montego in my system which has that damn Aureal chip in it. It was the first piece of hardware I ever bought knowing there was no Linux support. It was brand spanking new at the time and I figured it was only a matter of a couple of months before it would be supported, judging from TB's other cards. I was unaware of the Aureal thing at the time, I just wanted a good card, comparable to my GUS (still in use in a "multimedia/router" Linux box hooked up to my home theatre system).
    Then I found out about the Aureal connection. I was pissed.
    4Front now supports my card for US$30 until 2002. It was sad that I had to do that, but it wasn't 4Front's fault, it wasn't the Linux community's fault, it was only partially TB's fault. The blame is on Aureal for continuing to be a pre-Linux-hype Diamond or an (until recently) ATI. 4Front had to pay Aureal to get support for Linux, so I don't really mind because I like my sound card and an old GUS is hard to find (few people part with them, such as myself).
    A somewhat happy ending though, the driver is still in beta and there are a couple of issues, like sound playing too fast. I filled out the support form and got an actual intelligent response in less than 5 minutes. It explained pretty much exactly what was happening and that they were working on it.
    I was impressed. I'm so used to being given the "corporate finger" by many companies, especially after my response to the inevitable (which version of windows are you running). "We don't support Linux," they say matter-of-factly. Even when OS is completely irrelevant (broken switch on Toshiba notebook).
    So 4Front is on my good list along with Matrox, Iomega, ZWorld, and Epson, all who have been very good to me regardless of what OS I use.
  • Red Hat is just staying current. Any professional company knows not to play with undocumented fnx's.
  • AARNet Mirror Project - Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Please note that this mirror is not available to addresses outside Australia - it's intended for use by Australian Academic Research network members.
  • I'm afriad it doesn't. I downloaded it from my local mirror (took around 11 seconds - Bwhahaha!) and it claimed it couldn't find glibc 2.0.7 or higher. It comes with a lump of glibc of it's own you can shell up and use, but it's not pretty.

    I don't think SO are completely insane, and I'm sure they'll release a glibc 2.1 version, but it would have been nice to get this nailed for 5.1 once and for all. libc funkyness is what keeps me from giving it a good burl.

  • Hmmm...... Star Division online (.com) advises that "The dornload area is currently under construction. Please be patient. It is expected to re-opens the area on wednesday this week.".

    It's a good job they put the news about 5.1 on the front page of their site tho', or nobody would know about it ;P.
  • When some idiot^Wmanager sends a document in a Microsoft format

    What's "idiotic" about using the world's de facto document format? You may not like the fact that Microsoft Office is the de facto standard, but that doesn't mean it isn't so.

    Cheers
    Alastair
  • Has anyone managed to get Star Office running on a Redhat 6 machine? I had problems with 5.0...I'd really like to try it out so I can blow away NT alltogether.

    Matt
  • Hey,
    i used lynx and skipped their inital page.
    Now i had the right url for MSIE 3.x
    and it worked fine.

    So why should you call that page "large-scaled" ???

    Bye AlexS.
  • Two things I don't like about star office:

    1) forcing us to use their integrated, windoze95ish environment.

    I don't mind this as much under linux as I do under OS/2, as linux doesn't really have a common feel to all of its apps anyway. But having to run that big program just to launch a single program (even if it's the mail client) really blows. You can integrate the apps to talk to each other without forcing what equates to a separate 'desktop' Might be good for people who do nothing but do word-processing/spreadsheets/etc but sucks for the rest of us.


    2) creating their own scripting language.

    Why not use PERL, REXX, Python, TCL, or anything that is already there? Or better yet, hooks to an API so that you can use the scripting language of your choice with it. REXX under OS/2, for example.

    Other than that, it is a good suite once you get used to it...although they try to be too much like word in the wordprocessor. The drawing program is on the order of coreldraw and is great for doing flowcharts and such. I haven't really played with the other apps yet.
  • I can't make it work with my RedHat 6.0 system.
    I downloaded it, and tried to install it, but
    when I run the setup program, it insists that
    I don't have ld-so-2 and glibc-2, and when I try
    finish the install, it crashed the X-server.

    Does anybody know what's up?
  • I'm one of those dolts that dont upgrade my OS unless I have a need to, so I run the extremely old 5.2 (I know im so 1'st quarter 1999) and I plan on running 5.2 until I either upgrade hardware, blow up something, or have a real need to upgrade it (GASP! a geek not running Kernel 2.3.9.8.555.4.5.alpha9) If star office's install is as crappy as it was 6-7 months ago (download it and it complains about libs that RH5.1 dont have) then they will stay wayyyy behind real software like Corel...

    Gimmie Kernel .93 and glibc.99 and I'm a happy guy!
  • Found no probs with these:
    Linux:
    ftp://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/mirror/StarDivisio n/unxlnxi/so51_lnx_01.tar

    Windows - still have to use this for the printer :(
    ftp://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/mirror/StarDivisio n/wntmsci/so51_win_01.exe

    They let me in first time at 200Kbps to the UK.
  • Yes, XML for MS Office 2000, and when you publish it online which browser do you think will render it correctly?

    (haha!)

    Incidentally, has anyone else noticed what happens when you view a .doc file online with IE5?

    (and i was wondering why my hdd was churning so bad)

    It's change for the sake of change, on microsoft's part, the file size increases and Office2000 can't nearly do as many things as whatever their last version was (not that it matters too much). What's good though is that after a while they'll find ways to implement everything and then as it's so open 3rd party can make their own tools. Silly Microsoft!! you've gone and slipped up there, you were only be temporarily evil.
  • Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday May 19, @03:06PM EDT
    from the who-needs-a-word-processor-when-I-got-vi dept.

    damn right.
  • I just got my Official RH6.0 two days ago.
    Third (applications) CD-ROM has Star Office 5.0
    in RPM format. But this RPM contains just an installation of Demo thirty days version. I was surprised how easy it was to register this version. I just clicked on "Star Office registration" and after a moment it says - "Registartion Complete!" That's all. Word "Unregistered" dissapeared from the window' title.

    So what i want to says that it works pretty good
    with Red Hat 6.0
  • You've sure hit upon the biggest problem out there.
    Is there no way to guide people into using some form of steady standard? The OS wars are not yet over and this problem looms over all us as an even bigger problem. I have to process files from all versions of Office and Word and the incompatibility of the various versions is one of the biggest time wasters known.
    Does any one know of an association that is looking into this?
    Something must be done before W2000 adds another layer of inefficiency to an already screwed up situation.
  • try staroffice.com

    or click on the globe at staroffice.de

  • Ive been wondering if its redhat 6 thats the problem or a latest version of kde. ive been running RH 5.2, and when i upgraded to the latest version of kde, i had to upgrade glibc, which broke star office.

    since RH 6 seems to come with KDE, im a little suspicious.

  • glibc2.1 (Score:4)

    by buller ( 374442 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @10:50AM (#1886653)
    Looks like it works with my Debian potato (glibc2.1) based system. There is also an AppIcon in wmaker, which was missing in 5.0.

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