[Techtalk] Star Office 6

[Raven, corporate courtesan]

Heya --

Quoth Carla Schroder (Sun, Oct 07, 2001 at 04:03:06PM -0700):
> If, like me, you tried 5.x and loathed it, give it another try. It's had a 
> major overhaul. I'm confused by the relationship between StarOffice and 
> OpenOffice, but oh well, it'll sort itself out.

	I'll second that.  I downloaded it earlier this week, and have
been really happy with it so far.  You can read MS-formatted docs
easily, so it makes interoperating with PC users nicer.  And the
interface is so much less annoying -- goodbye, one huge workspace!  The
install was easy for me -- the downloaded file (I went with the one
large file) was blahblahstaroffice.bin, I chmod +x'd it, and ran it.
Bingo, interactive GUI install.  It will even optionally install a Java
Runtime Environment for you, if you don't have one already.

	To the best of my knowledge, the difference between StarOffice
and OpenOffice is that StarOffice is not open source.  Sun will let you
download and use it for free, but you'll never see the source code.  So
you run their installer binary rather than the more usual ./configure,
make, make install (or apt-get, or rpm, or whatever). 

	I believe that StarOffice and OpenOffice are intended to
eventually be parallel programs, but the development curve for
OpenOffice is significantly behind that of StarOffice.  So most of the
non-Open-Source-Nazis that I know still use StarOffice, because it works
better.

Cheers,
Raven
 
"Hey, do you know how to kill people?  I've been experimenting with
 Louis, and I can't seem to get it right."
 -- me to Smitty, regarding the kill function on the mush.  Only 
    later did I realize how that must have sounded.