Still... I'm impressed. Linux was built by an essentially socialist cooperative of thousands of people, donated time, and a community spirit of free invention and cooperative exchange which is the dire antithesis of everything Microsoft's noxious greed exemplifies. And it's flat out *better* than anything the Evil Empire has scraped together.
Can other Linux users out there confirm/deny/qualify these totally off the cuff impressions?
-- Dennis ----------------
Dennis Redmond,
that was pretty much my impression of FreeBSD, except it took a lot more struggle to get it up and running. This may have been more indicative of my ignorance than what appeared to be a pretty overwhelming task. In any case, I consider the BSD branch a fellow traveller. But this reminds me to ask some real Unix types out there a question.
Isn't it true that there is no such thing as Unix? What I mean is, that Unix, say UnixBSD4.4 is in fact an operating system specification, like an engineering or architectural specification. It is a very long book about each and every aspect of a virtual operating system, that when coded and assembled on any particular processor architecture, will behave as specified? Isn't that what Unix is? Well, that is what I assume it is and how I understand how you can have FreeBSD and Linux, and NetBSD and other variations on the same specification or very nearly the same spec. Some group is working on a version for Mac or the Motorola processors, but I can't remember where they are at the moment.
I've posted some notes to LBO, on StarOffice 4.0 and when you get more settled into Linux, you should look this application suite up. It is written for Linux, and currently targeted to whatever Sun uses, but as noted above, by loading a few extra libraries, I run it under FreeBSD.
StarOffice is getting a little cagey about it but I think there are still complete ready to run binaries out there specifically for RedHat Linux. It is supposed to be free for personal use. But they seem to be withdrawing it or delaying the latest Linux version (5.0). This is a straight commercial vendor so their only motive to make it free is a thank you note to the Linux community for running several beta and final versions in an evaluation and market testing scheme. Here are some sites from my notes in March:
ftp://ftp.guidg.de/pub/linux/misc/staroffice ftp://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/linux/staroffice http://www.waldhern.org/soffice
If all that fails look around for StarOffice 3.1 final found at:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/packages-2.2.7/editors/
as staroffice-3.1.tgz. This version is a little complicated to install and may need some insight into how Linux has laid out its directories. The main corporate location is:
This suite is self contained and runs inside its own window under the X-Windows system. Since it was set up to be a stand alone application that did everything, it installs itself in your /usr/Home/ directory and creates symbolic links to the rest of the system. These links and whether you can read, write, and execute in directories and files, depend on your base user permission set. Also you need to be aware that this application is a resource hog. This means that you have to configure yourself as a big generous user. I had a lot of trouble after sorting out the suite's installation because I forgot about re-setting the memory, the disk space, and the access to the processor to more generous proportions. In FreeBSD see: /etc/login.conf.
I should confess that I ultimately didn't like everything all rolled into one giant application. So, I started learning Emacs under the straight old fashioned text based black and white screen. What somebody called 'very 1990' in a review I just read off the web. But this review was not very informed, since I don't think they dealt with the more sophisticated variations of X-windows (KDE ?) and other GUI managers.
Any way glad to hear you got it up and running.
Chuck Grimes