[317] in Software_Announce
Star Office office suite installed on Athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Thu Sep 23 19:31:47 1999
To: software-announce@MIT.EDU, cfyi@MIT.EDU, facdev@MIT.EDU, nschmidt@MIT.EDU,
wdc@MIT.EDU
Cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, thg@MIT.EDU, tfitz@MIT.EDU, nolan@MIT.EDU, jmorzins@MIT.EDU,
zacheiss@MIT.EDU, owls@MIT.EDU, 3partysw@MIT.EDU, aurora@MIT.EDU,
aw-info@MIT.EDU, web-agents@MIT.EDU, fizz@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 19:31:09 -0400
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
I have installed The Star Office office application suite on Athena for Suns
and Linux machines (glibc2). To launch it, do:
add soffice
soffice
from the Athena prompt. In more detail:
Star Office 5.1 is now available for Athena Suns and Linux-Athena machines
running the latest (glibc2-based) Linux-Athena release. There is online
documentation through an internal help system- the interface is fairly
intuitive and has a strong "Microsoft look-and-feel".
Please consider Star Office to be "in testing" and subject to configuration
changes without advance notice. We have not yet tested it extensively and
may run into bugs or configuration issues that may require changes. Please
also note that it is installed under the recent free distribution from Sun.
If they should discontinue it or charge license fees we are not prepared
to pay, we may have to discontinue it on Athena (although if that happens,
we will most likely be able to keep the last version installed).
You will need about 3.3 meg of space in your home directory to store
required configuration files for each platform- the launch script
looks for these and puts them there if they are not found. They go in
a vendor-specified location, Office51, at the top level of your home
directory (on Athena, this is an AFS @sys link to the "real" location, a
directory .Office51.sun4x_56 for Suns or .Office51.i386_linux3 for
Linux). These are separate by platform as the files they contain are
different (though some may be identical, there are definite
differences in somes cases and this makes it infeasible/unsafe to
merge the two directories). Star Office documents created on one
platform appear to load properly into the other, but identical input
on each platform produces different document files- it is probably
safer to keep them separate as currently done on Athena.
I installed most of the optional extras, including all the conversion
filters.
You will most likely find Star Office painfully slow on a machine with
less than 64 meg of memory, and you will almost certainly need to close
all other applications on machines with 32 meg of RAM (most Athena
Sun Sparc 4s and 5s and in this category) to get it to run at all.
Please read the section of file /mit/soffice/README.athena titled
WHAT TO DO IF THE STAR OFFICE INSTALLER STARTS RUNNING WHEN YOU LAUNCH:
for instructions on what to do in case this happens.
The Mail function has been removed from the command menus as Athena uses
a separate mail system not directly compatible with Star Office's.
Please send questions/comments/complaints to the 3partysw@mit.edu mailing list.
Enjoy,
Alex
