Re: [tlug] Open mouth, insert foot, defend Office.org

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Alain Hoang writes:

 > > On an Ubuntu system running from a Live CD, it took over 40 minutes to
 > [snip]
 > 
 > 	I find this a really, really poor anti-example of using OOo on Linux.

I'm not sure what you mean by "poor anti-example", but I do this with
XEmacs, TeX, R, and GAMS (another computationally oriented program)
occasionally.  This works great.  Loading takes a little bit longer,
but since XEmacs fits comfortably in 40MB, it doesn't thrash in normal
use (even once loaded, OOo took many seconds to respond to single
keystrokes, presumably because OOo and X were both "swapping" off an
mmap to the CR-ROM).  Xdvi is much smaller.  TeX, R, and GAMS are not
graphical, so they don't tend to thrash the display and they're not
noticably slower than their native counterparts.

When you apologize for the speed, the marketing target says "well I
could live with it for the functionality", you reply "this is
horrible, it's much faster installed", and the target's ears twitch
... you know you've just made a sale.

 > 	While I can understand the desire to just pop in a Live CD to demo
 > Linux in its full glory.  Asking penguins to fly higher than eagles is
 > asking a lot.  :-)

But from the point of view of selling open source on the desktop in my
environment, it's the bare minimum.  People are justifiably wary of
installing demos, especially Windows demos.  Mac demos are pretty bad,
too, because they sometimes change the file-to-application links.

 > 	How about forsaking one a new upcoming hot boxen (assuming
 > this comes from lab funds) and acquiring a couple of lab laptops
 > that resemble the student's du jour model?

I'll have to think about that strategy.  It has three obvious
deficiencies compared to the live CD route.  (1) Actual lending may be
illegal---technically we're not even supposed to take our notebooks
along when we travel abroad, or something stupid like that. :-) (2)
The penetration ratio is going to be like 4 students per year, whereas
with the live CD there's very little to keep it below millions per
year (except the attractiveness or lack thereof of the software
itself).  (3) The live CD can be shared by the recipient, an immediate
and powerful introduction to the joys of the open source culture.

On the other hand, a preinstalled notebook has the very important
advantage that the software will work properly. :-)  But I wonder if
it doesn't make sense to simply wait (cf my replay to Charles).

 > [1] Okay, okay there might be underfunded and underpowered labs where
 > beating all the RAM combined in that lab won't be that hard.  Hopefully
 > it's not yours ;-)

No, our lab is quite highpowered enough to support MS Office and Open
Office at the same time.  That might be the route to go except that it
requires convincing people (the computer committee, to whom the cost
of computational resources is irrelevant) to permit use of inferior
software (by the standard of MS compatibility, which both
Monkeyshow[1] paperwork and parents demand).

Footnotes: 
[1]  "MonbuKagakuSho."  "MonKaSho".