Linux Office Suites

Cowculator writes: "Sun Microsystems will release the beta version of StarOffice 6.0 in October, with the development version already available. This ZDNet article has some more details, including a link to the development version..." Other submitters sent in notes about Gobe Productive and Hancom Office 2.0, not to mention KOffice and the Gnome office applications. As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

Re:The only chance the industry has against micros

[601]

-- snip --
If it's buggy, or doesn't work well with office formats (especially Excel, where it's the weakest), then MS will win. And I'm going off to live on a deserted south pacific island.
-- /snip --

You can't move to a deserted south pacific island. Microsoft already bought them all.

Re:My experience with StarOffice...

[IvyMike]

my K6 @ 266mhz with 64mb of RAM.

So you're the cheap non-upgrading bastard that's to blame for the slowdown in the tech industry...

:)

plus

[dalinian]

Also, the macro virus support of rtf isn't as complete as in doc.

Re:Just as important

[Anonymous Coward]

Old Microsoft format:

[Unintelligible memory dump rubbish]

New Microsoft format:

<XML>[Unintelligible memory dump rubbish]
</XML>

No macro import

[thomasj]

Though files can be read and written, the "macros"--small programs used to automate tasks in Microsoft Office--won't necessarily run in StarOffice, Sun said.

Sweet.