E-Musings Mon Immorata

New OpenOffice.org 1.1 compatible with Microsoft Office 2003 plus new Knoppix distro and free RAM optimizers My favorite Office suite -- OpenOffice.org -- just got better courtesy some support from Sun Microsystems who own the original code base, and spun off a somewhat feature-limited version for open-source development. Sun's pay version is called StarOffice and includes a PIM (personal information manager) for about $70. To compare features available, there's a downloadable PDF here. Sun's inputs are noticeable in the latest OpenOffice.org 1.1 (62 MB, Windows, free) release. Besides a slicker start-up interface complete with Sun branding logos, there are improved icons with a more structured look and feel. But what really makes OpenOffice stand out in the crowded office suite market are its advanced features. Plus an ability to continuously innovate to remain ahead of the pack. New innovations include support for Microsoft's to-be-released Office 2003 (aka Office 11) document formats including XMLST. Of course, OpenOffice file themselves are native XML packaged into a compressed wrapper file. This suite also saves documents as PDF files. The competition need third-party printer driver add-ins to do so. And OpenOffice presentations and drawings too can be saved as Flash files; a trick the competition has yet to include! Other new productivity features include support for macros and third-party plug-ins, saving documents as popular PDA formats including DocBook. The new version can also work with dual-boot systems, uses MySQL databases as a mail merge resource and has improved accessibility features for handicapped users. A full list of features is available here. But I still don't understand why OpenOffice.org's Quickstarter is anything but that, besides remaining a resource hog. And the spell checker too may add a wavy red underline (Office-style) to mis-spelled words yet often fails to offer corrected alternatives. Nor do I understand why OpenOffice Writer loves Times New Roman 12 point so much. Times is not a particularly beautiful screen font and Georgia is far more elegant. Wouldn't it be great if we could automatically setup a screen font for viewing and a print font for hard copy? Meanwhile reader Anand is still busy updating about new software. And pointed out FreeRAM XP Pro, a free system resource optimizer for Win 9x/NT/2K/XP that also works with Windows Server 2003. The interface is quite easy to use. And although the software itself is a good optimizer, its a case of over-kill for Windows 2003 because this OS includes excellent resource management: Microsoft finally got lots of things right. But when I compare FreeRAM XP Pro (556 kB, Windows, free) with RAMPage (173 kB, Windows, free) in terms of utility vs. Windows resource use, I find the latter uses less at an average 1800-2000 kB vs. FreeRAM's 3000 kB or more! I've also been quite busy playing with the latest Knoppix distro (distribution) on CD. For those coming in late, Knoppix is customized Debian Linux build that you download as an 744 MB ISO file then burn to CD-R. The bootable disk is an excellent way of testing Linux waters without actually needing to drink any of them. Besides Knoppix, there are other Linux distros available in a commented listing. Unfortunately, it seems that some rather Draconian European Union controls requiring the copyrighting of open-source software's is affecting developers on that continent. And the first victims of the new laws regarding copying information and digital right management have already taken out Elby Software, developers of the Clone-CD disk copying software. The new Knoppix 3.3 build certainly improves on its predecessors in terms of features, speed, and ease of configuration although migrating this to the hard drive is anything but simple. But if you have a floppy drive installed you can setup a boot disk to load custom settings every time Knoppix boots. Or you save your configuration to the computer's hard drive and recover it on the next boot up; a not altogether fail-safe method. I managed to setup 6 consecutive but separate boot configurations because in each case I was unable to modify the root password that hard-coded into the distro. Plus you naturally can't modify a read-only disk! Of course, make sure the disk has a free FAT-formatted partition. The FAT32 format used by Windows 2k/XP isn't supported nor is NTFS. Of course, I'm still trying to understand why Knoppix like to grab a specific IP address on my internal network and cause cross-LAN upsets and anarchy. Thanks go to Mala Bhargava of Living Digital for having first pointed me to this software. That's all I have time for. Until we rap again next week. Click Here to Email Me