Nicholas Petreley takes a spin at the Java-based EIOffice office suite. I also tried this software 2-3 weeks ago but it has ugly dependencies in regards to its installation routine:It requires to have installed the Gnome 1.4 subsystem for no good reason (not just GTK+ 1.2.x, it’s just that the person who coded the gui front end has no clue on how to not-link against Gnome libs your app doesn’t really need) and even then it would bail out if you have the exact needed filenames/folder names of glibc & Java (if your java folder is named differently it won’t install and it won’t even tell you about it to let you know what went wrong) and also it requires that your distro is RPM-based. I tried to install it on 4 distros (FC1, Arch, Slackware, JDS), but apparently the software was ONLY tested against Fedora Core 1 and even there it got installed after lots of tricks (renaming its .dat file as .zip and the uncompressing it and placing the files manually on the system) and some manual RPM installation (it wanted FC1 to be *unpatched*, because if you update with latest glibc from RHN it won’t install on FC1 either). The people who do EIOffice should really re-think the way their software installs (the app itself works fine –if a bit slow–, it’s just that its installation procedure is a nightmare making the whole experience very sour).
EIOffice: The good, the bad, and the ugly
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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As far as I understand, they see their primary target as being Red Flag linux and the Chinese market. Having an office suite that doesn’t require massive retraining costs from word and is Red Flag compatible out of the box is a huge advantage there, I believe.
I know that it was M$ design, but why did they replicate the ugly blue tint. It is truly an eye sore. They should have suck with OfficeXP look (which was probably the best visual design ever made by M$).
Why do so many of the Office clones only provide WordProcessor, SpreadSheet and Presentation program. They always leave of the PIM (Outlook) and Database (Access) applications. One of the reasons MS Office is popular is the tight integration of these products. At the last company I was contracting at I was surprised to find that one of the managers that wasn’t the most technical guy in the world used VBA to take Word documents that were e-mailed to him, strip out the data he wanted to store in the database and dumped it into Access, and stripped other data he wanted into an Excel spreadsheet. It was a halfway decent setup, let him run his business the way he wanted.
“One of the reasons MS Office is popular is the tight integration of these products. ”
I’m not going to go into how wrong this is. I’m just going to change it to say it is because they are bundled together. To say these are tightly integrated is a joke.
Sabon,
I could not agree more with you. Additionally, why do I need a tightly integrated email program in my word processor? Can I not save a file to a HD and send an attachment?
As far as I could see that is about the extent of integration between outlook and word, when I used those products. Oh, yeah and you could make Word your text editor and send huge bloated emails to everyone.
NO way this can compare to Office 2003 Professional, it is very polished and fast.
Time for a new C’t test, I think. Last time, Word, WP and Lotus didn’t pass the test (insert about 50 pictures and footnotes in a 200-page document) while TextMaker, OpenOffice and RagTime did.
Now the question is: to which of the two groups does EIOffice belong? Does it mimic Word’s bugs too?
Does anyone know which WT they use? I’m guessing an inhouse on (Gnome requirements & fast)?
I actually use the integration features in Office quite often. For example, with Access, I can have a form where I create a button that will open up a Word document (in Word, of course), auto fill out some information based on the current record, print, and close Word. I like this kind of integration.
>>I know that it was M$ design, but why did they replicate the ugly blue tint. It is truly an eye sore. They should have suck with OfficeXP look (which was probably the best visual design ever made by M$).
office suites are near the bottom of the totem pole of “programs i give a shit about”.
if your life is centered around an office suite to the point that you have a visual preference, then you have been assimulated and all hope is lost for you.
(snorts with disgust)
blech.
Some people work for a living, you know.
It might be a stupid question but if this program is java based shouldn’t it be able to run automatically in any OS that has JRE such as Solaris and MacOS?
Indeed, using Java Web Start!!!
Yes but it seems to use native code as well, hence the compat-libc++ dependency.