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[News] Star Office for Amiga? Maybe.ANN.lu
Posted on 18-Jul-2000 16:31 GMT by Gabriele Favrin16 comments
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Sun announced today that the sources of their business software suite "Star Office" will be released under a GPL licence. Who will port them for first?
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 1 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by Scott Konowal on 17-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
Yep, we should be seeing Star Office on the "classic" Amiga pretty soon now. Right after Mozilla/Netscape, Opera, GTK, and all that other great GPL'd software.
Sorry for the sarcasm. My point is, these projects start and then the developer realizes the enormous task of porting something of this magnitude with little or no help. There isn't a large enough pool of developers/porters left in the Amiga community willing to tackle these huge projects in their free time.
This may change with the new Amiga platform, but even that would be pure speculation.
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 2 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by The Great One on 17-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
This project would be too hard. You see most of the code is in the GUI and who can bothered to convert the GUI code to amiga intuition calls.
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 3 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 17-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
I don't think the poster of this news explicitly mentioned the original Amiga. But if that was the intended target for porting, I too would say fat chance, for the reasons mentioned in both posts above. Star Office *would* port to QNX's RtP though, and most likely Ami.
...This topic reminds me of the earlier-effort to port MySQL to the classic. A fair amount of work, and not really the type of app that is suited for the platform anyway since the Amiga is not built on a suitable security model. Nor does it have other things like PHP to properly leverage the use of MySQL. But hey, if developers want to bust their chops on busy work, that's their decision.
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 4 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by kevin orme on 17-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (greenboy):
The idea behind porting MySQL to the Amiga wasn't to waste people's time but to provide more choice to those who likely won't move on to the new platform (or at least will wait until there is a decent selection of software available for it, hopefully including backwards compatible emulation of old stuff).
Naturally, porting things like GIMP, StarOffice, etc. are far more complicated and may not be worth the time nor effort when done (why not just buy Lightwave/Imagine or Final Writer/Wordworth). But then again, if the classic Amiga didn't have a lot of life left in it (really!), we wouldn't even be discussing it now would we?
MySQL was chosen so as to provide another SQL-based database on the Amiga. We don't have illusions that we're taking on Oracle or IBM with it (although a big Unix shop that used it might set up a far bigger implementation). MySQL is a great database, is open source and should be made available to Amiga users, too. With the exceptions of PostGre SQL and mSQL, there aren't any others on the Amiga (other databases don't support SQL) and this is yet another 'standard' that Amiga users shouldn't have to endure criticism for not being able to use.
Kevin Orme
amiga university
www.amigau.com
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 5 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 17-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (kevin orme):
My apologies, Kevin, if I sounded overly critical of your efforts. I was attempting to draw a parallel about the Amiga architecture itself, but see that I possibly missed my mark.
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 6 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by kevin orme on 17-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 5 (greenboy):
no problem. can't have the world eating out of Amiga's platter yet (but we can dream) :)
Kevin
PS - when there is more SDK stuff going on, expect to see AmigaU have a whole section devoted to it - we're not *just* going to support people who want to run 3.1 (like those who didn't want to leave 1.3 before them!) :)
Kevin Orme
amiga university
www.amigau.com
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 7 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by Crash Man on 18-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
Well here is some one jumping the gun As per ....... the operative word here is MAY
release it to GPL , IF they do GREAT because i use it both on the windows box and the linux box :)
so it should go to the AMIGA TOO.
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 8 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by xdelusion on 18-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
Star Office is BIG BLoated, and slow... do we really want it anyhow?
Not me, I'll pass, I got Gobe Pro for BeOS, and Final Writer for Ami, I am content.
Though I do admit I do have Star Office installed under Linux of course :O)
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 9 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (The Great One):
Who said it had to use Intuition? It would be a darn site easier just compiling
for X...
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 10 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by Abigail Xartrapas on 18-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
well.. that's interesting (i already read about that from other sources).
but there's the point that StarOffice is considered bloated even by Un*x users
(64mb ram required to be usable is not what i consider a light app too).
it would be interesting if someone port that for Amiga, but there are other
office-style apps which could be ported instead.. anyway supporting native
software would be much better than bothering about foreign-OS apps.
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 11 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by Jofre Furtado on 18-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
SI think that Star Office is Great considering it's been free so far... It's also great because it reads all MS Office formats; however, I have a few queefs about it- First, it's very closed in. Now, the AmiVerse concept is not like this. This program tries to take over your screen as your main browser, changes the GUI, and does not work as a Suite of programs, but rather a program with a Suite of simple tasks- If you want to design a webpage, you click on that function, if you want to type you click on that, if you want to draw a cheesy little MSDraw-like program comes up- the tools on screen change, but the GUI doesn't. Everyone should try the x86 version of it to see what I mean-download it from SUN's site for free. I like the idea, but it's really uncomfortable to use and feels a little undeveloped. It would be great if some improvements were added...
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 12 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by xdelusion on 18-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 11 (Jofre Furtado):
I don't like the interface either, though I do install Star Office in my
cusomters machines over Microshaft Office, just for that fact that it ain't Microshaft,
also M$$$ office seems to slow down your system anyhow.
As for full M$$ Compatability... not quite, I have had a few docs it would not load
properly.
Once again, like I said before, Gobe Pro seems to work just fine for me. But then again
you have to have BeOS for that, and for some reason a lot of Amiga users are against Be,
though I don't see why.
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 13 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by nick on 18-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
The source code is supposed to be available on OpenOffice.org on October 13. This was posted on The Register today, quoting the creator of StarOffice.
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 14 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by Anthony Long on 19-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 13 (nick):
... and don't forget: the GPled code will be 6.0 (StarOffice is currently at 5.2).
Correct me if I'm wrong (I know you all will...), but AFAIK StarOffice has the best M$ Word importing/exporting of any non-M$ WP. Surely the GPLed code could just be used in part to produce file loaders/savers for other WPs (which would, of course, be GPL as well - the loaders/savers, that is)?
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 15 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by XDelusion on 19-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 14 (Anthony Long):
Are you suggesting that we barrow just the file type section of the code,
and aply it to soemthing a lot less, bloated, and what not?
That sounds like a plan, most docs did load, just not a few.
Star Office for Amiga? Maybe. : Comment 16 of 16ANN.lu
Posted by Anthony Long on 19-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 15 (XDelusion):
That's exactly what I am suggesting :) Sure, Star Office is nice (I use it on my x86 box running Mandrake 7.0),
but it is bloated, and badly so. It would not be so bad if it did not take minutes(!) to load, running on a K6-2 500.
If the individual components could be loaded separately, it would be much nicer. As somebody else already mentioned,
the way it tries to replace the desktop also sucks. Having said that, as a word processor (that's all I have used it
for to date), it's decent, and the Word export formats work fine when I take my disk into uni and load the files
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