[wplug] Win4Lin Qs

[John Harrold]

Sometime in April Russ Schneider assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| 
| 
| John Harrold wrote:
| 
| > we use vmware here at the office, and it's not too shabby. my roommate uses
| > win4lin and it seems faster than vmware. i mainly use it to get data from
| > excel sheets that people send to me and to test out changes in the samba
| > configuration on our server. i personally think vmware is a bit pricey.
| 
| I don't know if you have a specific reason why you don't/can't use it, 
| but I use OpenOffice to open and use Excel files.  Has worked flawlessly 
| for me.

right now openoffice will do most of that, but when we started using vmware
it wasn't quite there yet.  even though openoffice has come quite a ways, i
still have issues with it.  my advisor wanted me to configure vmware for
one of the other grad students so he could keep track of grades.  to wean
the people here from microsoft i suggested he try openoffice. he agreed and
i started playing with it so i could help out. these were my expirences...

first:
it is really slow. excel in a virtual machine can be
faster than openoffice. 

second: 
it stopped running for some reason and the only way i could get it to start
again was to delete the configuration and have the user reconfigure it
(i.e. remove ~/.openoffice)-this happened two or three times. it also
crashes frequently.

third:
another issue i have is printer configuration. i did a little looking, and
i couldn't find a way to install printers that would be available for the
entire system (i.e. stick something in /etc). so each user would have to
configure printers itself. personally, i think this is ridiculous.

fourth:
the fonts in spadmin are next to unreadable. see screenshot below.

http://sage.che.pitt.edu/~harrold/tmp/images/ss_oo.jpg


i understand some of these issues could be system specific. perhaps redhat
has something horked which makes oo slow and unstable. i tried to compile
oo myself once; this was not pretty and eventually i failed.  the printer
configuration issue is something that really needs to be fixed, at least
for me. so until open office becomes as stable as excel running in a
virtual machine, we're probably going to stick with vmware. this is not
ment as a slant toward the openoffice folks. they have put a lot of work
into their product and it has come quite a ways. 

i should probably state that i'm not a big fan of office suites. i write
almost everything (papers and presentations) in latex using vim. i also
don't do much stuff in spreadsheets. i normally use matlab/octave for tasks
like this.


-- 
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                                               | /"\                      
 john harrold                                  | \ / ASCII ribbon campaign
      jmh at member.fsf.org                    |  X  against HTML mail    
           the most useful idiot               | / \                      
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 "Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of
  the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to
  drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship,
  or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the
  people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is
  easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and
  denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country
  to greater danger."
  -- Herman Goering 
     as related to Gustave Gilbert at the Nuremberg trials, 
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