[15345] in Athena Bugs
Why don't we install WABI?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Sun Aug 3 06:43:55 1997
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 1997 06:43:38 -0400
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Cc: suggest@MIT.EDU, sipb-staff@MIT.EDU
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
So, after Barr3y had observed on -i help today that there didn't seem
to be any facilities on Athena for dealing with Microsoft Word 8.0 (or
Word97) documents, I spent some time trying to deal with this problem
(somewhat half-heartedly).
It seems a reasonably important problem to solve, since (much as one
hates to admit it) Microsoft Word is pretty much the leading word
processor in the outside world, and it's pretty frequent that users
receive Microsoft Word files and would like to view and edit, or at
least print, them on Athena.
(for reference, FrameMaker can read Word 5 and some Word 6 files,
Applix can read Word 6 [when it works], and that's about it.)
Since Athena has seen fit to add support for Mac emulation, I tried
running MAE, and found the results to be quite similar to what I found
on SIPB's Power Macintosh, namely, that Microsoft Word for the Mac cannot
read the documents in question, and unlike Word for Windows, a convertor
is not available.
Anyhow, I'm wondering why WABI, the Sun Windows Application Binary Interface
(or something), isn't installed on Athena:
application SUNWwabi Wabi Demo Application to run Microsoft Windows Applications
Sun ships a copy with Solaris 2.5.1, and I don't have the license text in
front of me, but I assume that that includes right-to-use.
http://www.sun.com/solaris/products/wabi/index.html#features
claims:
Note: Wabi 2.2 ships with Solaris 2.5.1 and supports Solaris 2.4 and 2.5.
I suspect that it's on one of the non-primary CDs that come with Solaris,
and that's why it's not installed on Athena. It would be nice if someone
could look into this, anyhow.
I downloaded the demo version of WABI from
http://www.sun.com/solaris/products/wabi/support/distribute/wabi22demo.html
and installed it on portnoy (an 8.1.7 SS5). Realistic use of WABI
requires installation of Microsoft Windows underneath it. I did so
(with Windows 3.1.1), and then downloaded the Microsoft Word Viewer from
www.microsoft.com, and was able to view the Word 8 file in question.
Unfortunately, I also was able to crash WABI from the Word Viewer, so it's
not as robust as you might like; also, presumably there are licensing issues
with Windows.
Nevertheless, it seems like some effort should be made. Particularly
given the relative popularity of the Windows platform, it seems like
more attention should be payed to it than is done now, at least compared
to the Macintosh.
--jhawk
