Lycoris, makers of the popular Desktop/LX Linux package, released their ProductivityPak Friday featuring a highly customized and integrated Openoffice.org and PDA Sync tool. With the ProductivityPak, Lycoris has introduced features not found in typical OpenOffice.org installations, such as a spell checker, and has advertised compatibility with, among other formats, Office XP documents.
Lycoris Releases ProductivityPak
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Adam Scheinberg
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the standard stuff is god awful.
This reminds me of the time when SuSE had these HUGE ads on their site trying to advertise SuSE Linux. One of the points was 100% Compatibility with MS Office documents.
Yep, they said 100%, and were bundling… StarOffice 5.2
The site doesn’t say 100% — in fact, it says compatibility *not* 100% guaranteed.
Read first. Post second.
Are you some sort of half witt? OpenOffice.org doesn’t use qt or gtk widgets, it uses its own widget set to ensure maximum cross platform’ishness.
How about reading the OpenOffice.org SAL before making a total macaroon of yourself.
OpenOffice.org already has a spellchecker and compatibility with Office XP documents. Adam, I think you need to do your homework a little better before posting articles.
What I would like to know more about is what kind of PDA Sync tools it’s using? My experience with the Palm OS when used in combination with Linux has been less than favorable.
The Lycoris site lists file format compatibility and points out where compatibility is not guaranteed. Adam simply posted the link to the ProductivityPak…what homework is it he is supposed to do??
I just want to know why should I buy this over downloading openoffice.org and installing it. Yes, i see the bigger and more colorful buttons for options but whatelse have they tweaked to make it more usuful for that amout of money ($49.95). The spellcheck is already implimented in Openoffice.org already and the office doc format too.
That’s an excellant question. It looks, and I say looks because I don’t have all the info, that they just changed OO 1.01’s icons. Who would be dumb enough to pay $50 for something you can download for free? That or buy Staroffice and get a database program. I’m actually a fan of Lycoris, but something doesn’t add up here.
1. Many people would prefer to pay $50 rather than wait 3 weeks to d/l the .iso’s
2. Some people actually believe in supporting the Linux movement by BUYing things that will support the developers – it’s a nice way of saying we appreciate your work here’s a thankyou.
3. Many Linux n00bs (and possible corporate clients) want something that works out of the box.
It looks nice. But… No matter what they do with the icons, as long as the fonts look that ugly, it will never get mainstream. imho they should take a look at Red Hat 8 for font handling.
Adam didn’t just post a link, he wrote the two sentences at the top of the screen. OOo is extremely popular (especially amongst open source enthusiasts), and considering the audience here at OS News I do expect him to know a little about OOo. Adam incorrectly states that the Lycoris productivity pack’s spell checker and Office XP file compatibility are not part of OOo. As I said the first time, Adam needs to do his homework before posting, especially since he chastised someone else for not reading the site thoroughly before posting.
Hm, no … Adam is correct.
Lycoris has introduced features not found in typical OpenOffice.org installations, such as a spell checker, and has advertised compatibility with, among other formats, Office XP documents.
The spell checker is not part of the typical OpenOffice.org installation, it has to be installed extra (last time I checked). And if you read the sentence carefully, you will note that Adam does not say that XP compatibility isn’t in OO, he says that Lycoris has advertised compatibility with it.
monty
I did read the site Adam. I was commenting on pointless advertising. Like other people say, get openoffice.org as a download. There are not enough changes that warrant a payment. I guess Oo is fine for upto 2000 docs, XP isn’t read very well yet. And, Kimono will be coming out in a few months.
“There are not enough changes that warrant a payment”
wanna bet? they’ve done a ton of work, and using the productivity pack is a much better experience than using plain open office.
keep the following points in mind…
1) It’s only for Lycoris. Alot of the work they did was to have it integrate into desktop/lx better than the standard OO, in areas like font importing, and some others. Plus, they’ve added templates, labels, separated the web writer component…etc, etc…
2) It’s aimed at Lycoris’ target user…not a power user, not someone who will already know they have to seek out a spell checker. It’s a soloution for people that want something other than windows that just works the way it’s supposed to, with no fuss.
sure, lycoris needs to acknowledge that the product is based on open office, and I’m sure they will rectify that. they also need to give something back to OO….again, most of the changes are geared to improve the experience with Lycoris, not other distros, so many of their improvements are not relevant to the greater OO community. Perhaps some things like the separation of the web writer….I don’t know…I’m not a coder.
But please don’t bash Lycoris or it’s products becasue it’s not “mandrake”, or becasue you can’t get lycoris office for free. You can get the distro for free, which is alot more than you can get with some other companies.
BTW, I was one of the beta testers for this product….it’s a good product, and I hope they do well with it.
Which is based on their screenshots, if this is a different product from OOo, but based on it, while does Lycoris still retain “OpenOffice.org 1.blah blah blah” in the title bar?
Strange, but isn’t this a fork? I don’t think so it is right, even if it is legal, for Lycoris to retain the name.
OpenOffice.org already has a spellchecker
A terrible one, may I add (even KOffice’s spellchecker is better :-). Fairly basic, in terms of amount of words. Besides, it doesn’t have a grammer checker.
and compatibility with Office XP documents.
Adam didn’t say 100% not compatible with Office. He says SuSE doesn’t gurrentee 100% compatiblity with Office XP. Besides, with an exception of Access (which never was supported in OOo because of the lack of a database app), Office XP format is almost, if not fully similar to Office 2000’s formats.
Besides, to prove that Office XP compatiblity is not 100% in OpenOffice.org, try opening a document with a macro. Or a fairly complicated PowerPoint presentation (animation isn’t even close to prefect). It isn’t 100%. Good enough – maybe.
Adam, I think you need to do your homework a little better before posting articles.
Well, he did his homework. He was quoting Lycoris. I think you better bash Lycoris instead of Adam. Plus, both your points were rebutted.
why? open office is fully open source, and that also shows that the product is based upon it. it’s not a fork either, but a highy customized open office designed specifically for one distro…it’s not a general release for linux, it’s a release specifically for d/lx.
those screenshots were posted before their branding was complete, and that has probably been fixed now….but i’m not sure
There is a few reasons why to buy this product instead of StarOffice or downloading OOo. The first being that installation is dead easy on Lycoris. OOo’s wizard may be fine for common distributions, but quite mean on altenative distributions.
Plus, it is a little more integrated into the distribution than either OOo or SO. And this is bound to get better release by release. Right now, from the screenshots, it is not fair to judge it.
And one final reason is that OOo is community-targeted (i.e. made by geeks, for geeks), and SO is corporate-targeted. ProductivityPak is consumer-targeted.
Of course, all three points above is just hearsay. All this I get from PP beta testers.
Yes. OOo is fully open source. Yes, PP is based on OOo. But I don’t think keeping the name there is right. people would confuse the two. Would it be right for XEmacs to start using “GNU EMACS” on the titlebar, mainly because EMACS is both open source and XEmacs is based on it? Nope.
Another thing is that people would confuse the two. Both OOo and PP is headed in different directions with their UIs. Sure, technically, they are also similar, but in future releases, I expect differents to sprout out. Having OOo name makes Lycoris users expect the same from OOo, while OOo users expect the same from PP.
they don’t say 100% compatibiltiy with xp documents… careful not to add your own thoughts to a reviewers summary of their statements. they simply compare price to office xp, and mention read and write compatibility with word, excel, and power point. perhaps they could have went into more detail, but it’s not a technical document…it’s a press release. and anyone is free to ask questions to their sales department…
read the whole press release from Lycoris and judge for yourself.
go here to find it…
http://www.lycoris.org/article.php?sid=124&mode=thread&order=0
nobody will confuse them.
you can get OO for free…you have to pay for LO. OO runs on almost all platforms, LO runs on d/lx. OO is boring and dull looking, while LO is spicy!
and as i said before, the screenshots are from an earlier beta…this may have changed but I’m not sure since i haven’t used the final version yet. even so, all the icons are labled LO…this is a very minor issue as far as i’m concerned.
Although they are careful not to advertise 100% compatibility, Lycoris does say that LO works with Office XP docs on this page:
http://lycoris.com/products/ppak/formats.php
Note the disclaimer at the bottom. We all know OO.o isn’t perfect (yet), but it’s getting pretty damned close.
are you some sort of ass-hole who cannot seem to explain things without the offensive prolouge. people that are not offensive ensure maximum interpersonal communication.