I just installed StarOffice 5.1 from a CD which was included with the
RedHat 6.1 package. After installation (which went incredibly smooth),
I executed the program. The disk whirred for a few minutes then
returned me to the command prompt. I tweaked my .bashrc file
according to the README file and tried it again. Same result. So, I
perused the README file again and discovered several other files that
would need to be downloaded (jdk-1.1.7, et al) and further tweaked
before StarOffice would run correctly.
Frankly, I think this is overkill. If I don't have the necessary files
on my system, then the thing shouldn't install at all. I'm not a
typical user, and I'm more than willing to download and install whatever
is necessary to make a program work. I can completely understand
needing to download additional packages when I've downloaded a program
from the 'Net, but to have to do this from a production-quality CD is
unthinkable (imo). But if I was Joe-Average-User, I'd give up. I think
this is ridiculous. Who ships a CD and fails to include the packages
necessary for it to run (particularly when those packages are freely
available)? The README gets convoluted when discussing jdk, jar and zip
files, and it's really difficult to know what you're supposed to do (and
again, I've been working with this stuff for more years than I'd like to
recall).
After a few attempts, I gave up on StarOffice (which is unfortunate,
because I was really hoping to start using it full-time and I was hoping
to recommend it to several of my clients who are expecting a review of
StarOffice from me next week). I think I'll just stick with
WordPerfect. It's not everything I need it to be, but when it installs,
it runs. And that's good enough for me (and just about every
Joe-Average-User in the world).
Sorry for the rant, but it's stuff like this that makes it increasingly
difficult to convince the suits to switch to Linux. And I'm sick of it.
--
steve
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