LinuxWorld: A First Look at StarOffice 6.0

“You can buy Sun StarOffice Suite 6.0 from a number of sources
at varying prices. Sun sells it online (see Resources) for $75.95,
for example. StarOffice is included with Mandrake 8.2 PowerPack
Edition. If you are a Ximian Red Carpet Express customer, it is a
free download over its high-speed pipe.

“How high speed, you ask? Well, on my 1-gigahertz AMD K7-powered
desktop box with 512 megabytes of RAM on a cablemodem, I had
StarOffice 6.0 downloaded and installed in about 10 minutes total
time. That’s quick. When it was finished, StarOffice showed up in
the drop-down Programs menu of the Ximian GNOME desktop toolbar.
The splash screen shows up about 5 seconds after clicking, and the
default word processing document appears about 15 seconds later.
Subsequent startups were slightly faster.

“StarOffice 6.0 is quite a bit different from the earlier
versions. No longer does it attempt to co-opt your desktop and want
to be your e-mail client as well. If the e-mail module still
exists, it is hidden. I could find no signs of it anywhere. What
6.0 does provide is an excellent suite of word processing,
spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, and database tools. All of
which Sun touts as Microsoft Office compatible. That compatibility
coupled with multiplatform offerings (Linux, Solaris, and Windows)
greases the skids for those wanting to cut the ties that bind to
Redmond…”

Complete
Story