Re: Open Office

On Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:57:54 -0500, Bob Giddings <bobg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:47:07 -0400, Neon John <no@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

It is exactly the same package. They simply do some FM (redirect temp files
to the right place, etc) to the app to make it work in portable mode.
Portableapps.com's official release of each package is usually a minor release
number behind but that's no big deal. They document the FM so you can do your
own if you just gotta have the latest and greatest.

John

Thanks, John. Portable apps is interesting. But Open Office
within it is incredibly slow through the USB connection to the
stick.

Yep. You ought to try it through a USB 1.1 port. Fire it off, go take in a
movie and dinner and when you return, it's ready to go :-) Still, it's better
than not having anything at all on a stranger's or client's computer. For my
clients, I'll typically copy the whole app directory onto their hard drive, do
my thing and then wipe the directory. Amazingly, copying the directory tree
doesn't take all that long.


OO on the laptop has no such problem. I'll look over the thing.
One thing I do think I'll do is avoid saving to Word 2007 format.
Since I upgraded to Word 2007 on the cheap (I think Office 2007
was something like $100 on a non commercial license) with the new
laptop, I'm good for several years. But my next laptop may be a
tiny thing running Linux, like the one Don B. and Janet are
experimenting with.

Severing the cord with Redmond, like any addiction, is difficult and painful
but once you've done it, it feels so good! OO has some problems but then any
large package does. It won't accept wheel inputs from my Wacom tablet's
mouse, for instance. At least they've acknowledged the problem and are
working on it. Try THAT with microshaft! My only other main complaint is
that they don't do patches, only new releases. 100+Mb and dial-up don't go
well together.

My two major concerns are being able to use spreadsheets that clients send me
and that I retrieve off the net and being able to send spreadsheets to
microsloth slaves, at least until I convert 'em. :-) Office 95 (no, that
wasn't a typo) xls format is the common denominator. So far I've not needed
anything that the format doesn't support. If I did, I'd move up one level at
a time until what I needed worked.

RE: linux. I've been doing some fairly intensive development work on my web
host's machine. I'm with http://www.dreamhost.com and I can't say enough good
about them. One of the features that brought me to them is that they give
each customer a shell account on their host machine. I can RSH using PuTTY
and be right there. I have a standard Bash shell login. 56k is more than
fast enough for character terminal work.

I haven't done any serious Unix work in over 10 years so I'm rusty but it's
amazing how fast it comes back.

I have a Linux file server here but basically all I did was get it up and
running, get SAMBA (microsloth's networking protocol) working, turn off and
disconnect the monitor and forgot about it. It's an old pokey 386 machine
that still can keep the ethernet pipe full (my network utilization went from
10% with Winders 98 on the box to 90% with Linux and no change in hardware).
When I turned it off to move it up here, uptime showed a little over a year.
Try THAT, microcrap!

I have Unbutu installed on another hard drive. On this Dell, the drive simply
slides in and out of a slot on the side so I can change drives in a second or
two. I do NOT like dual-boot. It probably works OK now but in the past I've
had trouble with dual boot so my way of doing it is to slide one drive out and
slide another one in. With my important data on the server, it's accessible
under either OS.

I haven't done enough with the GUI yet to have much of an opinion. I do think
that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel for going Linux only.
Especially as WINE (the windows emulator that lets you run windows programs)
gets better and better.


I'm not an intensive user any more. No desktop publishing. The
one MS app I would miss is Streets and Trips. I use it all the
time with the GPS while traveling. Or I used to. :o)

My "word processor" is still vi :-) I think that one of the greatest LOSSES
to productivity in the office is due to the pretty-print features that the
office suites have crammed in. People waste so much time making the document
look pretty after the content is complete. It's just a friggin' letter,
ferchristsake!

For letters and stuff, a plain old text editor is good enough. If I need to
print it in large text or something, I'll call it up into wordpad, change the
font size and print but the original doc remains in .txt format.

For actual publishing (I still do an occasional client magazine), I use
PageMaker or the follow-on package InDesign. I can mark up plain text with PM
formatting tags and import the file into PageMaker for final fitting to the
page and flowing around graphics.

In my effort to get completely away from payware, I'm going to change, though.
I loathe the Turd (and therefore OO writer) interface. In my Unix days I was
learning and using TeX, a typesetting markup language that is widely used on
university campuses and is suitable for book publishing. I've forgotten
everything I knew about it, it seams, but I'm going to re-learn it. I think
there is a GUI front end for it now but I'm not sure. (Only so much info one
can suck in every day :-)

Maybe there'll be a Linux substitute by the time I do this, in a
couple of years.

Could be. I've heard that Street Atlas will run under WINE. I'm going to
find out. I haven't heard anything about S&T but I'd not be surprised to find
that microsloth has intentionally sabotaged it so that it would not run under
WINE. They've done stuff like that before.

SA and Topo are the two major reasons that I still have Windows around. And
Forte Agent, of course, though I understand that it will run under WINE too.
I've tried Thunderbird but it just doesn't get it in one critical area. Spam
filtering. Agent has some sort of fancy Bayesian learning algorithm that
learns the nature of spam that you get and eventually traps almost all of it.
Dreamhost uses Spam Assassin and they way they have it configured, it traps
almost all spam. What little gets through, Agent handles. I might see one a
day that escapes Agent's filter.

Even more importantly, Agent's filter has a zero false positive rate so far.
It hasn't trapped a single non-spam message. Spam Assassin is good but it
still catches a valid message every so often, enough that I still have to scan
the daily spam report.


Funny thing. I got started with MS Word early on, because unlike
WP, Word for DOS could be entirely installed and run on 1 meg of
RAM in a Toshiba laptop that didn't have a hard drive. Docs were
kept on a floppy.

I remember those. Nice machine, as I recall. My team at Dunn and Bradstreet
wrote a sales automation package that would run on it, the Grid and a few more
DOS machines. We were working on a version that would fit in the BIOS ROM so
that the computer would boot up into the application when word came from
on-high that we were to drop everything and convert to winders 3.11.
Coincidentally, that's when I left to return to private practice as a Unix
guru.

Back then, Word was lean and mean. WP was a bloatmobile.

yeah. WP had a version for Unix way back when. One of my major clients had
it company-wide. I HATED it! I did everything I could to avoid using it.
Whomever invented that user interface had to be tripping on some REALLY GOOD
acid! I'd write with a scribe and a clay tablet before I'd use WP!

The thing that you'll have to prepare yourself for with Linux is that with a
few exceptions (OO being one), there isn't a simple setup.exe method to
install new software. yeah, there are RPMs Debian packages and stuff but
about half the time fiddling is necessary. My rule of thumb is that any
install on Linux will average 10x as long as on winders.

For instance, a few days ago I pulled down a package to process Usenet
binaries (nzbget for anyone who is interested. Works great once it's
installed.) Like many Linux packages, it comes as source code that has to be
compiled on each machine. Not that big of a deal since Linux comes standard
with a C compiler and stuff.

Supposedly the install was supposed to go like this:

$ ./configure
$ ./make
$ ./make install

"$" is the bash shell command line prompt. Supposedly "configure" figures out
the details of your machine and writes out a makefile. "make" is a utility
that automates compiling source code and a lot of other stuff. It should
build the executable. "make install" copies the binary and support files to
wherever the user binaries are located, as determined by "configure".

The first problem came when configure decided that my web host's Debian linux
cluster was really free-BSD. See, that's the problem with Linux, it still
doesn't have adult supervision so all the internecine wars that raged in the
pre-windows days are still going on. Every releaser incorporates his
religious dogma into his version of Linux and so packages have to figure out
what version is installed and then deal with all the minor differences.

OK, so I looked in the configure script and hacked around that problem.
Configure generated a makefile. Make, however, announced that two important
libraries (standard support code that many applications can use). In a
Windows setup file, those libraries (dlls) would be part of the package. Not
here. I had to go out and find the libraries, fool "configure" for THOSE
packages and "make" them. Then I made the application. That went well.
"make install" failed because configure hadn't figured out the proper place
for them. Rather than waste more time hacking around in configure, I just
copied the executable and support files manually.

I'm an experienced, though rusty, Unix developer so I knew what the obscure
error messages meant. I'd hate to think what an ordinary user would have
done. And even though I'm experienced, I still spent the better part of a day
over several sessions making the package work. I went through exactly the
same thing with SAMBA. Looking back in my log, I see that it took me about 3
days and many emails to support mailing lists to figure out the problems.

Speaking of logs, I keep a Linux journal that details everything I do. That
is absolutely vital, as many problems have very obscure solutions. I can't
trust my memory like I can when working on Windows. Windows has a LOT of
self-healing code that runs unseen by the user. That's a little bit of why it
is so slow. But it generally does prevent things like application updates
from taking the whole machine down. Not the case with Linux.

You have to be very careful about installing updates. On my server (debian) I
initially allowed its auto-updater to run. Like windows auto-update, it's
supposed to go out, pull in patches and updates and install them. In the
process it sometimes breaks things. One update broke the Gnome GUI on my
server. I'm perfectly content working in character mode (like with DOS) so I
didn't waste time looking for the problem. Had I been a user trying to run OO
or something else that needed the GUI, I'd have been pissed! I'd have
probably had to find a Linux guru and paid him to fix my machine.

IFF you install Unbutu and leave it alone it should be as or more reliable
than windows. But you can't just install (or let it install) updates. It'll
take some research to make sure that the update won't break anything before
letting it install. Installing new software is fraught with danger. It works
most of the time but when it doesn't, it can take down the machine and there
is no "restore point" feature like Windows has where you can roll back to a
previous known good instance of the OS.

All this hassle is why the paid-support business that has grown up around
Linux has become so profitable. I'd advise anyone who isn't a hacker (and who
doesn't want to become one) to buy a support package. You'll probably end up
spending as much on that as you would on windows and upgrades but at least the
money isn't going to the evil empire.

I AM going to convert 100% to Linux because Microsh*t hasn't given me any
alternative. XP is going to be abandoned. I'll NOT endure that malware
called Vista. I can stay with XP for awhile longer but eventually nobody will
offer software and especially drivers that run on XP so I'd be at a dead end.
Linux will bring me a whole new set of problems but at least they're problems
that I can solve myself if I choose to. And I won't EVER be forced to update
just to profit someone else.

All this is something to keep in mind as you start your migration to Linux.
Fortunately free Linux support is all over the net so if you're willing to get
your hands a little dirty, you can deal with problems as they arise. Once
Linux is configured and running like you like it, it'll stay that way forever
and IS reliable. Like I said earlier, my server had been up over a year since
the last reboot. That reboot was to install a new hard drive controller.
Linux will run for YEARS if you leave it alone and have a good UPS.

John
--
John De Armond
See my website for my current email address
http://www.neon-john.com
http://www.johndearmond.com <-- best little blog on the net!
Tellico Plains, Occupied TN
Save a tree, kill a beaver

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