[svlug] StarOFfice to be GPL'd, integrated with Gnome

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 19 Jul 2000 22:25:57 -0700 
Rick Kwan <kenobi at coruscant.lightsaber.com> wrote:

> Well, J C, in some ways I sympathize.  I'm perfectly fine with a
> few xterms, ghostscript, gimp, and a set of developer tools.

As an aside: While I wasn't fond of it for my own use I found SGI's
Indigo Magic an excellent UI for non-computer savvy users.  I walked
several secretaries and other such types thru it while I was at SGI, 
and they had very little trouble with it.

ObExample: My project's secretary needed to setup and configure a
new printer for her desktop.  She'd previously attempted this at her
last psotion and gotten horribly confused and in a mess.  She asked
me for help.  I walked over and said something like, "Well, why
don't you see if you can do it, and I'll chime in if you start
heading astray, Okay?"  A couple minutes later she had a working
Ricoh colour laser printer printing slides and memos just fine
without me saying another word.  

She was quite pleased.

> But I spend a lot of time around non-computer folks who have
> worked on Windows and are now forced to use Solaris.  There is a
> lot of culture shock in not having things work as easily as they
> would on a Windows desktop.

The default Solaris OpenLook or CDE desktops are actively user
hostile and user confusing.  Heck, CDE is just atrocious.  They are
just not usuable systems and I have no idea how they survived past
ath lonely HP engineer's cubical ghetto.  HP's VUE, from which CDE
is derived, somehow manages to be even worse.  AIX'es version of CDE
(which is pretty damned far removed from the base CDE definition) is
damned horrible, but at least *tries* (and fails) to be usable.

<shudder>

> As for myself, I have my gripes about the PostScript code that
> I've seen StarOffice generate.  And it ain't nowhere near
> FrameMaker for publishable material.  But it beats me in dealing
> with font metrics (for now :-).

I have a Postscript v1 Lexmark 4039+ which understandably
occassionally gets rather picky about correct PS.  But then it does
beautiful black 600dpi prints without any banding at all, so I'm
tempted to humour it.

I spent the late hours of last night and the wee hours of this
morning installing and attmepting to get CUPS working.  Pleasantly,
there is fairly well built and configured Debian packages for CUPS
(make sure you read the README.Debian).  More pleasantly, and this
is the reason I'm looking at CUPS, it even attempts to do a half way
decent job of supporting .PPDs.  Damn thing is, I haven't gotten it
to print a (un)bloody single fleck of toner yet.  The jobs get
queued, they get sent, the printer receives them, and throws them
away, and the bloody logs say nothing and the printer doesn't even
emit an error code (I have it set to print postcript errors)...

Don't you love good audit trails in system software?

-- 
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                               Other: coder at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/        Keys etc: finger claw at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--