[1388] in NetBSD-Development
Evaluating Applixware
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Oct 23 14:56:30 1996
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:53:13 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: linux-dev@MIT.EDU, netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
I've installed Applixware on cutter-john so people can play with it.
I mounted /dev/sda2 on /opt to make space. Run it by copying my
"axhome" directory into your home directory and then typing
"/opt/bin/applix". It needs its own fonts, so it won't run on a
remote display. (You can actually get it to work on a remote display
if you have read access in the "evaluate" locker and set the font path
in ~/axhome/ax_prof4 to point in there.)
It runs fine under NetBSD. I haven't installed it on any office
NetBSD machine because there isn't space (and it might not run on
planet-zorp anyway), but it will look the same as it does on Linux.
My observations so far:
* It provides a presentation designer, something we don't have
on Athena right now. The presentation designer doubles as a
drawing program, but I didn't see anything that looked
better than The Gimp in that respect.
* The spreadsheet looks okay. Charts are a little less
intuitive than Xess graphs, but not horrible. Whether the
spreadsheet is really better than Xess is a question for
someone with a better knowledge of spreadsheet features.
* The word processor is in some respects easier to understand
than Framemaker is, and will be easy to understand for users
of Microsoft Office. However, it doesn't have an easy way
to double space (you have to go into paragraph settings and
specify something like .17 inches in the "line spacing"
box), which will be a source of questions.
* The file dialog for saving files doesn't let you specify a
full path (it doesn't like / characters in filenames). You
have to "jump" to the appropriate directory and then specify
the filename. This is pretty bogus.
* It will make a 24MB sparc classic swap a bit, and will
probably hose a 16MB box into the ground, but it's quite
responsive on a 32MB machine.
* Man, that's a lot of clip-art.
The versions I've looked at also provide an SQL database query tool
(not interesting to me) and an application builder, which I think is
designed for making new Applixware applications. Neither seems very
high value for our environment.
My overall impression is that if the licensing price is okay, having
Applixware would be a big benefit to our environment, filling the lack
of a good word processor for Linux and NetBSD and the lack of a good
presentation tool for any Athena platform.
