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Re: StarOffice 5.2



Hi Sunil,

Sun recently decided to join the GNOME foundation, and also released
its StarOffice code as open source.  This is now known as OpenOffice
and is available at http://OpenOffice.org.  Staroffice on Unix runs
pitifully slow for everyone, and Sun is aware of it.  

While OpenOffice is still far away from reality, you can try out
Abiword (http://abisource.com), which is a GPL'd multi-platform Word
Processor.  It can read Word and RTF files.  It is very small,  though
it is not very feature rich.

There are (IMHO) two main reasons why SO runs so slow:

1. It is a big monolithic application wishing to replace everything on
   my desktop (why? It even has it's own Start button!).  
Problem: This is against the general UNIX philosophy of "Do one small
thing and do it well" which goes with shells and pipes.  This is one
   of the high priority work at OpenOffice.

2. It implements its own graphics toolkit (I think) (resembling
M$-Windows). 
Problem: This does'nt help, because every program on my machine loads
its own toolkit, taking more RAM, reducing cache, and slowing
performance.

For e.g., suppose I'm running Emacs, Netscape 4.75, StarOffice,
gnapster, and Opera:

Then, I'm using the following toolkits:

Emacs: Athena
Netscape: Motif
SO: it's own toolkit
gnapster: Gtk
Opera: QT

However, this will probably change as OpenOffice will be Gnome
Compliant, so probably it will use a lot of Gtk.

In the meantime... just try Abiword!

Bye,
Lokesh.

>>>>> "Sunil" == Sunil Dhaka <lindel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

    Sunil> I have tried out StarOffice and encouraged people to
    Sunil> migrate from MS Office.  However, what lets me down is the
    Sunil> extremely slow pace at which StarOffice loads even on a
    Sunil> fast machine (P3 / 128/64 ram and more than 128 swap).
    Sunil> Shutting down SO is so slow that it goes on forever. At
    Sunil> times one has to kill X. Do you think that breaking up SO
    Sunil> into individual modules would help out and in anycase who
    Sunil> needs their browser while we have Netscape.  I would like
    Sunil> to have the list's views before writing to Sun.  Regards,
    Sunil> Sunil Dhaka