The StartX Files: Word to the Wise: Writer 638C

By: Brian Proffitt
Tuesday, October 16, 2001 04:15:18 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3841/1/

Testify, Brother

I think I may have won over a new convert to the Linux cause this weekend, ironically from a discussion about Windows XP.

This all happened at a local restaurant where I was having lunch with my family and my pastor's family Sunday after church. My pastor is a likable fellow, and shares with me a passion for all things Star Trek. (And how about, by the way, that decontamination scene in the pilot episode of Enterprise? Sweet mama...) Anyway, my pastor's teenage son asked me what I had seen of Windows XP. I have him the usual spiel: based on NT/2000, more stable than Windows 9x, kind of expensive on the wallet and system resources.

The boy then said that he had seen XP pre-loaded on some store demo models, and he thought the interface looked "dorky." I told him that was the new Luna interface theme, which a colleague of mine refers to as the Playskool theme. Basically, I said, XP was just a prettier version of Windows 2000.

"Would you buy it?" he asked. I told him I already had it the gold copy, since I had done some publishing work with it. I then asked him what he primarily used his computer, and when he gave me the predictable answer of surfing the Web and playing games, I said that yeah, he should probably stick with Windows for now, but there wouldn't be a great need to jump up to XP.

Whereupon my pastor, Wayne, jumped into the conversation across the table, having noted the distinction of type of use versus operating system. "Are you saying that Windows is not the only thing out there for people who don't want to play games?"

This is where things took a better turn. I told them both that yes, while there were some games available for Linux, I would not qualify it as a gaming platform--yet. But, if general surfing and office work needed to be done, then I thought Linux would be a better choice. It was certainly cheaper and certainly less of a resource hog than Windows. I knew, by the way, that Wayne had his own, older system and really did not do much more than writing and surfing on his machine.

The teenage son was not so easily charmed. He immediately chimed in with the major objections to Linux: nothing runs on it, nothing opens with it. Whereupon I smiled and gave him the essence of last week's StartX Files column. "StarOffice 6," I concluded, "not only opens Word, AmiPro, and many other formats, it also saves in those formats and keeps track of all of the revisions and annotations."

And when I mentioned it was free, boy, you should have seen their eyes light up.

Admittedly, this was not a hard sell to do. These are midrange techies--people who use computers slightly more than enough to get by and have picked up a few tricks along the way. I knew the audience, and knew what they needed.

This approach, I think, is key to winning over converts. Admit that Linux is not for everyone. Admit that Windows isn't, either. This is not blasphemy, this is honesty.

Know what the person really needs and make a genuine assessment of how Linux can help them. Don't sell Linux to people who cannot or do not want to understand it. If they are on the fence either motivationally or technically, be ready to stand by and assist them over the real and imagined hurdles. And (the hardest thing of all), don't try to oversell Linux. All you'll do is create some frustrated users who will gladly dump Linux and flee to the perceived safety of Windows or MacOS.

Linux is getting better everyday, so it is getting easier and easier to bring people over from the world of proprietary operating systems. One great example of this betterment is the subject of this week's column, OpenOffice.

Happy Birthday... Mr. OpenOffice...

After last week's review of StarOffice 6.0 beta, a few people asked me how it compared to OpenOffice. There seems to be the assumption that there is a divergence between the two office suite applications. I am telling you now, there is hardly any difference in performance or interface between OpenOffice and its parent-child StarOffice. Certainly not in the Writer component of each suite, which is what I focused on for the purposes of this review.

Newcomers to the world of open source software may be confused--why exactly are there two seemingly identical versions of the same office suite out there? For these folks, I wanted to take a step back and explain what's going on. All you grizzled veterans can skip to the next section, where I highlight the real differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.

In the beginning, there was StarOffice. StarOffice began with a student, 16-year-old Marco Börries, who founded Star Division in 1985. Börries started his fledgling software development company with the goal of creating an effective, fast, and cheap word processing program. Starting with StarWriter, a DOS-based application, Star Division gained a lot of industry acclaim in a short amount of time.

By 1995, Star Division had added much more functionality to its flagship products. Not only StarWriter, but StarCalc, StarBase, and StarDraw were being offered to the public, both separately and as part of the new StarOffice product. While Microsoft Office began to dominate the North American market, European markets embraced StarOffice, due to its lower retail price, critical acclaim, and smaller footprint.

A year later, StarOffice 3.1 became the first version of the application adapted for use on Linux.

For the next three years, StarOffice sailed happily along, building a growing and devoted following on the Linux platform. Interestingly enough, it would be the success of StarOffice on Linux and Solaris that would attract the likes of Sun Microsystems to purchase Star Division in 1999. Not too long after this acquisition, StarOffice 5.2 was released. This would be the last completely closed-source version of this office suite.

OpenOffice was born of the source code from StarOffice 5.2 just over a year ago, on October 13, 2000, when Sun formed OpenOffice.org. The source code, written in C++, is now a part of one of the largest open source projects ever conceived. The work has been divided into several teams, with each team's manager guiding the direction of newly submitted code. Ultimately, anyone can take the open source and make anything out of it--including another office suite, if they wanted.

This is how StarOffice is the parent of OpenOffice. But StarOffice is also the child of OpenOffice as well. Since the inception of OpenOffice.org, Sun has reincorporating the efforts made by the OpenOffice teams into their own development of StarOffice 6.0. With the release of StarOffice 6.0, the first fruits of the OpenOffice project have been harvested.

If this sounds familiar, you're right. This process is similar to the Mozilla/Netscape relationship. There are some crucial differences, however. For instance, right from the get-go Sun made it very clear that while all developers were welcome to participate in the OpenOffice project, it would be they that guided the direction of the overall goals. In fact, most of the team managers in OpenOffice are employees of Sun. This differs from the potluck management style of the early Mozilla project, where everything went willy-nilly because of a lack of direction. Thankfully, Mozilla has regained its sense of purpose and is producing excellent open-source applications, not just the Netscape browser.

Parent, then child. This is the nature of the StarOffice-OpenOffice relationship. Of course, looking at the applications together might make you think they are actually twins.

Mirror, Mirror

The first big difference you will see when pulling down the latest binary for OpenOffice (which is build 638C) is that it is smaller than the binary for StarOffice 6.0 beta. Granted, a 76.9-Mb file is no slim Minnie, but compared to the jumbo 118 MB installation file for StarOffice 6.0, there is a significant amount of download time to be saved here.

Setup was virtually identical in both applications, though interestingly OpenOffice sets all of the components to be installed when you chose the Custom installation path, while StarOffice does not presume to do so. Interesting conspiracy? No, just something that I noticed. There is, however, a much more significant difference in the installations in that OpenOffice does not provide the Java Runtime Environment that StarOffice does. Presumably, that's where all the extra weight in the StarOffice installation binary is coming from.

Once installed, many of the same performance issues I noted with the StarOffice beta were present on my 400 MHz Celeron SUsE 7.2 platform. Namely, the suite is slow to initially start and only slightly faster in starting individual components after that. Function wise, one could hardly complain about the speed. Files opened quickly, dialog boxes snapped open nicely--again, very similar to how StarOffice performed.

I was also very heartened to see that OpenOffice Writer had the same file filtering capabilities I raved about for StarOffice. In hindsight, this was to be expected, but since I have not been following OpenOffice as well as I should, I was secretly worried that the ability to open and save Word documents and track all revisions, annotations, and comments at the same time was something Sun had slipped in for their beta alone and had not yet propagated back to OpenOffice. Not to worry, it seems.

Early observers of OpenOffice might remember that many of the features from StarOffice 5.2 were cut out of the first builds of OpenOffice, such as the Help system and spell checking. This was done because these tools were initially third-party applications. The Help system has been completely revamped and, while the interface is identical to StarOffice 6.0's, it seems that build 638 of OpenOffice has slightly more help entries than than its counterpart. Spell-checking, in case you were wondering, is back as well.

As you can see in the screenshot I took for this column, the interfaces are almost identical for StarOffice and OpenOffice. But there is one significant difference: font-handling. In this, OpenOffice appears to lag behind just a bit. In the screenshot, I have opened a Word document that deliberately has fonts not loaded yet on my Linux machine. While both interfaces give the Courier font a "scrunched" look, StarOffice seems to handle the nonnative font a little bit better. Also, if you look closely at the application's own fonts, OpenOffice's menu and window contents have a jagged look.

Is this enough to kill off any chance of using this application? Certainly not. In fact, based on what I have seen with these two applications, I am more inclined to recommend OpenOffice over StarOffice, especially for home and small business users.

This is a near thing, mind you, but I think that even though StarOffice has a slightly more polished feel to it right this very moment, this situation will clearly not remain static. You see, as good as StarOffice is now, it is not likely to change much after the final version of 6.0 is released. Sun, in the hopes of getting this product out to the masses, simply cannot update StarOffice has often as OpenOffice. It would drive their potential corporate customers insane, to say the least. So, StarOffice will represent a solid office suite for the corporate users who don't need a lot of version updates.

But for those of us who like to be on the cutting edge, I'm leaning towards OpenOffice. Because, even with the very minor font concerns I have with this application, I know that it will be updated with new features a lot faster than I will see StarOffice 6.1.

OpenOffice represents the future, not just in terms of the latest gadgets and gimmicks--but in the way software should be developed. And, though I harbor no ill will towards Sun, I sort of like the idea of directly helping out an open-source project.

Your own preferences will guide you, of course. But if you are inclined to use StarOffice, I invite you to give OpenOffice a look as well. You may find the choice between them a difficult one to make.

Available from: http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/build_638c/build638c.html
Versions reviewed: OpenOffice 638C, Writer component
License: LGPL, SISSL
Cost: Free