Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 08:40:53 +0200 From: Szilveszter Adam <sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: rpm and WordPerfect Office 2000 Message-ID: <20000516084052.A12672@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> In-Reply-To: <200005160032.KAA09256@amor.wcs.uq.edu.au>; from garyr@amor.wcs.uq.edu.au on Tue, May 16, 2000 at 10:32:49AM %2B1000 References: <200005152346.QAA11498@freeway.dcfinc.com> <200005160032.KAA09256@amor.wcs.uq.edu.au>
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On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 10:32:49AM +1000, Gary Roberts wrote: Well I have used StarOffice in the past some time on FreeBSD 3.x and 4.0, now I am giving it a whirl on -CURRENT... I did not notice any big show-stopping problems with it this far, apart from the fact that it is *huge*. It easily and comfortably fills up my 64M of RAM and even uses swap most of the time. This is bad because I am not going to upgrade the RAM on a desktop machine just for StarOffice, so I do not use unless I definitely have to. > 1. It was slow, noticeably slower than she was used to. Yes because it loads one big executable into memory and tries dealing with that. MS Office is at least modular in that respect. > 2. It caused W98 to crash more frequently when she was trying to `push'. Hmmm I cannot comment on this one, the w9x line is fairly easy to crash... all you need is sometimes to take out the floppy disk when it thinks you should not do this... on the other hand, I suspect we have some of the highest uptimes on w95 boxes here at the dorm because we do not turn them off every evening, just log off:-) > 3. She wasn't able to produce documents that our clients could open > correctly under Office97. Since we send a lot of documents as email This is something I do not understand. During the summer I used to work on a document in the following fashion: I went into the office in the morning, used Office97 there. Went home, fired up StarOffice, worked some more. Then next morning continued with Office97... and had absolutely no problems with it. Sometimes Word thought it was an RTF file, but so what? I also noticed that the same file, when saved in StarOffice, became considerably smaller, because I suspect much of the bloat was removed from it. This I think is a plus:-) Sure, the document I was working on was just big but had none of Word's more special features, so no pictures, tables, absolutely no OLE or scripting... but if you go cross-platform, scripting and OLE are out of the question anyway... What's more, I even did this just last week: I wrote a document in DocBook in FreeBSD, compiled RTF from it, then used StarOffice to add finishing touches and next morning I took it up to the machine room because I do not have a printer here and printed it with Word. And the big thing was that this text was in Hungarian, so it used characters from the Latin-2 charset. StarOffice did not know what to do with those, it displayed them wrong, but did not spoil them, Word was able to see them on the Win95 machine just fine. I think integration is quite good these days. (although not perfect, of course.) The problem is sometimes that for example Word might ask in the beginning, what format is your ".doc" file and you can become confused... but mostly it is RTF then. Word orients itself too much on the file extensions. So the only complaint I have against StarOffice is that it is so huge that I will not bother starting it up unless absolutely necessary. (I use mswordview/catdoc instead, for reading.) I have not tried MS Office with Wine yet, but I have a general complaint, that it takes Windows to install those apps most of the time. I do not have a Windows partition on this machine so opportunities are quite limited. Winamp eg installs under Wine fine, works also, so does Opera, but anything bigger is almost bound to crash even if it reported as "working" in the wine database. But I still prefer DocBook or LaTeX... Just my $0.02... Regards: Szilveszter ADAM Szeged University Szeged Hungary To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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