Microsoft Stalkers!

I'm extremely new to linux, and actually just started researching it yesterday, never having tried it. I'm thinking about trying SUSE 10.1 or ubuntu on my new dell d620 when it arrives, but I'll have to do a lot more research before then.

I was just researching linux, and then "bam" this window pops up. I'll let you see it for yourself.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/default.mspx

I'm pretty sure I didn't click on anything either. It just showed up.

Anyways, I've also been researching OpenOffice as an alternative to buying Microsoft Student/Teacher edition for about $120, but in college, these programs will probably be the most used ones on my laptop, period.

Is the quality of OpenOffice good enough that I could be fine running that instead of Office? I'm thinking about compatibility with other computers and Office documents. I'll probably download OpenOffice eventually to see for myself, but I've got dialup...

Thanks

Cy

 

It's possible that you have some sort of adware you don't know about, and MS paid money to somebody to advertise them, their vendor outsourced, the outsourcer outsourced as well, etc, and the adware ended up promoting MS?

I don't like OpenOffice myself, but I suppose it's doable. You'll only know how much you like (or hate) it if you try it yourself. Set the download at night time when you're in bed, it'll be there before you have to leave the house

Malia

 

well i would go with ms office many because that is what everyone has, your files will be more compatable with other computers and if you laptop does die and you are forced to work on a computer(libary or something) with ms office you will have a harder time using that.

you get want you pay for i guess

 

This is what pisses me off. MS office is not the standard. and it is not OO that isn't compatible with MS office.

Let's review the facts:
MS office files created on a MAC MS office aren't always compatible with WIN MS office, and vice versa.
MS office documents created on an older version don't always look/work right with a newer version, and vice versa.

So for an application that isn't compatible with itself, I find it hard to believe that other apps made by other groups can be compatible with it. It is just the MS lives on marketing and false advertising, not on product quality. In fact they rely on their ****y quality to get you to buy the newer version. example office 2000, that piece of malware drove me to insanity. I would be working with a document, save, close, reopen, and low and behold it cannot be opened

Absolutely the only reason to get MS office is if you have to do presentations too often and you are forced to use a public PC that of course runs MS office cause coroporations love each others. And you would want to be 100% sure that your presentation doesn't go berserk on you in front of 10s of people.

Oh wait a second. I take that back no need for MS at all. You can get a USB flash disk with U3 support and get the free OO version for it, and kiss MS office goodbye for good (ahhh yes ). When you are on a public PC just plug in your USB drive and use your own OO and don't even worry about leaving your temp files behind.

 

that is what i have been doing for a year now, and i love it. Screw MS office, waste of time...

 

That is quite common. I was at one company where they used to keep asking me to convert MS Office 95 (IIRC) files for them to a later version. Everyone had been upgraded to Office 2003 and a lot of the old files could not be opened. Using Open Office I upgraded a number of the files for them.

But back to the OP question: I use OpenOffice for all my word processing stuff and it works very well. The spreadsheet in the OO suite is (IMO) not so great however and I'm disappointed everytime I try to use it.

So it depends on what you need.

 

I've been using Open Office exclusively in college, and have yet to have a problem

 

My D620 just shipped ... it spent several days "boxing" (I can imagine hordes of dell workers moving in very slow motion while taping boxes shut... you would think that it would be harder to build a computer [took one day] than to box it [3 days]).

I'll download openoffice tonight and see how it goes. Excel is rather important to me, because I'm sure I'll use it for a ton of spreadsheets and calculations, but we'll see how it goes. I've got plenty of word documents and Excel rocket simulations to test....

Cy

 

The total and utter horse crap corporations come up with to create perception is just rediculous.

Funny, I just finished watching a documentary on corporations, where if a large corporation is a person, that corporation would be diagnosed as a psychopath.

This dumb ass propaganda with hollow fluff like "get the facts" and all that, you can not possibly take serious in any shape or form what so ever.

 

OO is the greatest piece of office software, second to FF. My boss saw me use Impress and Writer and he was amazed by how a free office program is equal to MS Office. No need to waste money with something this good.

 

Open Office blows, but I use it because I'm a cheapskate. MS Office is so much faster, more efficient, and user friendly. I can't wait until 2007 is out, and I will buy that.

 

I have both OpenOffice and Word replacement, Abiword, and Excel replacement, Gnumeric, on my Linux laptop. For the very simple uses I have, I like Abiword and Gnumeric for one reason alone. They load faster than OpenOffice. I can't compare feature sets, but Abiword has a set of plugins which are pretty cool addons..

OpenOffice isn't your only alternative to Windows Office programs..

 

$0.00 vs. $140.00 (thats like....30 In n Out burgers!). I think you know where I stand on this issue

 

Ture, but it only happens on MS XP OS. Open Office use lot of Java stuff, and MS doesn't share its OS to boost JVM. Aha, that's why, it is because MS doesn't like Java at all.

If you try O-O in Linux, things get much faster to me(so will you). Have you ever tried how slow the MS Office in Linux before? Use WineHQ to experience that.

 

You can disable the Java bindings in OpenOffice.org on Windows if you don't use them. Makes things much faster.
And to get back to the OP, as long as you don't try to do anything too terribly crazy in your documents (try to say, do a newspaper layout that depends on being printed exactly as you see it, but when opened in Word instead of OpenOffice.org, or major formula and scripting usage in Excel or Word.), then you should have NO problem whatsoever using it in a school environment. Even better, you get easy PDF export for free from O , and it's a pain in the arse to get a PDF from Word with free tools (I've done it. Succeded, but it took like 5 steps and you had to know exactly what you were doing.).

 

No, it's because Sun's Java also blows. Thank you, Pitabread, for the tip on disabling Java bindings. That does speed things up quite a bit so it's at least tolerable.

I've used Linux enough to know that you all can keep that so-called "operating system." I will continue to use and purchase Microsoft products because I know it makes Linus' army to wail.

 

No problem on the tip. Sun's Java is the best out there, though. Ya just gotta understand the limitations of the tools you're using, as well as the strengths. You don't see the strengths because you're focused on the limitations.

And go ahead and keep purchasing Microsoft software. No skin off our teeth. Not my fault your brain doesn't work well enough to understand the power of a Unix-like system. Troll elsewhere.

 

Personally, I disagree on the whole Open Office vs. MS Office thing. Honestly, Microsoft Office 2003 is one of the best office suites I've ever used. Open Office is good, and its compatibility (and price) make it very worth while, especially to Linux users. However, it's speed (it even loads slowly in Linux in my experiences) and its tendency to lose formatting make it take a back seat to the Microsoft standard. Right now, my best suggestion for Windows users is to download Office 2007 Beta 2. It is very backwards compatible suite from my experiences, and the user interface and load times are far better than Open Office, and maybe even Office 2003. But in Linux, I do use Open Office, and I'm fine with it. Just my opinion.

 

I don't think MS Office if "so much faster". I'm using it, and it's very snappy.
There are number of things that are in fact nicer about OO than M$ Office.
There are some *very* interesting things you can do with database & spreadsheet i/o.

 

If you load a 2003 office document in 2007B2, make one tiny change, and save it, can you load that file back into 2003?

And if you have to do a special "save-as" and specify that you want the document to be 2003 compatible, if that is how it works, will everything still look ok when you load that saved document in 2003? Or perhaps things like tables get all messed up, even though that tiny change didn't involve any table changes.

My point is, I think M$ will, on purpose, create enough annoyances to get people to upgrade. It is the nature of a corporation.

 

;P Guys, Sorry about slow feeling on using O- .
To me, O- is far enough for jug down some quick notes. Or just process some simple tables. My all documentation work living on Latex, and fell in love with it.

 

agreed on latex

The problem with Word/Writer compatability is that people forgot it's a damned word processor, that includes both developers and users. If you want to do complex page layout get Pagemaker/InDesign, Latex, or even Publisher or Scribus if you're desperate and don't have time to learn a proper app. As soon as you start embedding images and formatting beyond simple columns, bullets, and headers/footers you're throwing cross compatability between apps and version out the window. If something is camera ready or just passed around for general consumption you should send a pdf.

 

Let's see, I have had good luck with O . True, the spreadsheet doesn' t have as many features as excel, but how many people really use all those features? The only ones I miss are easily adding data sets to figures and adding trendlines. The only thing I miss in from powerpoint is being able to add video clips to presentation, and I couldn't even always make that work in powerpoint- it's really picky about what codecs you can use. I haven't had any problems opening up large, heavily formatted documents (like my thesis done in MS Word), either.

 

Hehe people are actually using the M$ word in a Linux section... ;-)

 

Here's my $.02:

It really depends how comfortable you are with the programs, how many features you use, and how willing you are to learn.

My wife uses Excel and Word at work, and she loves them. Of course, the stuff she does with them is far beyond what I think most college users would do. She uses Excel for data analysis of real processes and models. Then she writes reports in Word that has to adhere to standards within the company where they pass documents around and use a lot of the markup/change management features (I've used OO's Writer's version and I didn't like it as much).

On the other hand, I'm a programmer and I just document crap, and tabularize data sometimes, so I don't use tons of the advanced features (most programmers I know that do use advanced features still have DOS based Lotus 1-2-3 laying around somewhere). Because of this I don't mind OO and find it suits me just fine. You can also save into MS formats and not have a problem when you use the basic tools set. I tried to get my wife to use OO, but she hates it...she hates to change "just because" anyway though.

I'm not saying that OO doesn't have the feature set of Office because it is certainly close, but for those comfortable with Office and don't want to migrate, stay with MS Office.

 

Now, a little off topic question.

How can I input a super large file into a spreadsheet. Use any kind of SW, MS or O-O, or others, but not database.

I have to process lot of log files that larger than 350MB, and of course larger than 65536 rows. But the structure is rather simple, only 3 columns.

Any idea?

 

Your requirement to not use a database is your problem. With that much data, you pretty much have to use one to do any kind of efficient random access.
And it depends on how much "processing" you have to do. Just looking for something specific? Can you use some text processing commands like sed or what not?

 

This made me lot of pain for a week. I tend to use perl to parse it, but it is still slow consider the file is really big.

My operations are really simple. Find several fixed text pattern(there are less than 10 patterns), and accumulate numbers between patterns. The log file is naturally sorted, I think DB will be over shot for this simple operation.

 

Well, check into just a bash script. There really isn't a "fast" way to parse it. You have a lot of data. Perl and bash will probably be just as fast as one another. Here's a simple script I wrote using bash to convert some weird data lines to a more manageable format before importing them into a database. It may help you get started at least. It at minimum keeps you from having to load the entire file into memory at one time.

Code:

!/bin/bash
# script.sh: basic text processing command to put a hard line break in place of |!| tokens
while read line
do
        if echo "$line" | grep -q "|!|"
        then
                line=`echo $line | sed -e 's/|\!|//'`
                echo "$line"
        else
                echo -n " $line"
        fi
done

You'd run it like this:

Code:

david@data:~$ cat input.txt | ./script.sh > output.txt

I'd also suggest that you tail -n 50 log.txt > logtest.txt and run the script on logtest.txt while developing it. It'll save you lots of trouble

 

techies....

8)

 

thx, I perform similar in Perl.
Finally got chunck reading works.

 

Good. Chunk/line parsing is the ONLY way that you'd be able to handle a file like that with any kind of speed.

 

Now the performance shows Linux really get advantage of 64bit dual cores. I don't think MS performs this much difference. My local Intel machine runs @2.4 GHz FC5 on parsing same data against my server runs @2GHz X2 64bit. The server runs twice as faster as local machine.

 

Donot download a LINUX product to a NEW pc/laptop until you know how to handle GRUB bootloader.

 

Being as you don't even know the difference between "download" and "install", I dub thee a troll.

 

That and pretty much every Linux distro will walk you through setting up GRUB or LILO for multiple OS's with maybe 2 or 3 mouseclicks, i second your dubbing him a troll.

 

I just don't understand why people are prone to only choosing one.

I use Mircosoft Word/Office, and I use OpenOffice. I associate files with microsoft. OpenOffice can do some tasks easier and better than MS, and Vice Versa.


I have more than one of every type of program installed. Combine is the best way to go.

 

I do know the differ, I downloaded it first then install. I think you already know that but just decided you need to correct small things for no reason.

Google "GRUB PROBLEMS" and you'll find a nation of people that have problems too. I'm not an expert on anything Linux, but is it suppose to be that hard to config? And it doesn't seem so easy to get it of your harddrive and likes to corupt clusters.

 

Perhaps you could google for "grub configuration" rather than "grub problems", which would point you to several guides to using grub? The problem with grub is that it is very (possibly even excessively) featureful, which tends to intimidate new users.

I'll be honest, I've never heard of grub causing HDD corruption of any kind... since besides installing itself on the bootblock, it never writes to disk.

 

Don't you think I've tried all of that? Can't I have a Bad experience without people being to sensitive about LINUX. No need to jump down my throat and be sarcastic about every little word.

I was simple saying in the begining, Not to download & install Linux on a NEW laptop UNLESS they know what they are doing. Would you jump in deep water if you can't swim?

I now run live cd, and install on my old desktop until I understand more.

The first set of cluster blocks were corupt, I don't know if thats the bootblock or not.

P.S .... I googled "grub configuration" and forums still came up with people having problems with it!!! If ya'll keep asking me to google everything, then what is the purpose of forums?

 

The MBR or a partition boot sector are too small to contain a program as large as the GRUB loader. Usually GRUB stage1 is installed into the MBR, and stage1.5 in the sectors following the MBR.

I've not heard of HDD corruption caused by GRUB installation either, but I have experienced problems with the disk order changing that completely confused the partitioning tools and me for a while!

Jules

 

No one is denying that there are problems.
But making a blanket statement basically telling people not to try linux just because you had trouble is unnecessary.

 

I wash my hands of this conversation. You odviously didn't read my posts correctly.