RoboGeek

Last day @ Sun

There's probably going to be a few of these goodbye's posted on blogs.sun.com.  Today is the big day when many of us are being set free to our fates, to roam the wastelands that exist beyond employment.  Wish us luck.

I've been informed today is my last day of employment at Sun.

You can follow me at other blogs:  davidherron.com, www.7gen.com, peaceguide.com,  wwwatts.net, visforvoltage.org

(2009-01-22 09:06:31.0) Permalink Comments [7]

A tour of the gen's (gen.com's, that is)

Simon Phipps put up a link to 10gen.com and said something enigmatic about the founding team.  Normally I would ignore such a thing because it's probably another of these boring startups full of leading edge buzzwords .. geez I'm such a curmudgeon today.  Hmm, I was right, it's about cloud computing.  Sheesh.  Anyway my interest is because I own 7gen.com and it struck my curiousity who owns the other Ngen.com sites ...

1gen.com - it's a registered domain but no web site answers to my browser.  The registration is pretty curious.

2gen.com - it's registered and a placeholder website comes up.  Interestingly it's hosted on pair.com, interesting because that's where I host 7gen.com.

3gen.com - Not exactly good company I'm keeping.. they're providing database etc services to the 'Direct Mail Industry' (a.k.a. the snail mail equivalent to spammers except the fine people at 3gen.com would likely bristle at this association)

4gen.com - well, I can't say it any better than they:  4Gen helps companies transform complexity and confusion in IT business management into collaboration and clarity. With our suite of proven services, we allow you to integrate the IT disciplines that are essential for achieving your business goals—and that results in greater predictability, better value and improved IT performance.

5gen.com -  It's registered and there's a placeholder site written in German.

6gen.com - 6Gen Services offers computer services in Staten Island.

7gen.com - Again, this is one of my sites and a domain I've owned since 1996 (?1995?), well before I even dreamed of working for Sun.  There are perhaps 3,000 pages of postings on subjects ranging from politics, calls for the impeachment of the current U.S. administration, the yearning for technological sanity, electric vehicles, alternative energy and more.

8gen.com - There's something there, a flash animation with catchy music, and some text in a language I don't recognize (?Danish?) ..

9gen.com - Another placeholder site this time with a simple file listing.

10gen.com - See above - cloud computing - ho hum.

11gen.com - Does a redirect to 11gen.de and that site is full of German but it's clearly for "11Gen Design".

I'm going to stop there because 12gen.com is a search spam site.

It's not a real stunning neighborhood my site is occupying, none of my neighbor domains are all that hot.  It does make me wonder what drives someone to choose an '#gen.com' domain name and perhaps my reasoning for 7gen.com might be illustrative.

At the time I registered 7gen.com I was hanging out with a Reiki teacher who also had a strong connection with native american spiritual traditions and routinely talked about "7 generations".  At the same time I was a happy user of products made by the Seventh Generation company.  The whole idea of 'In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations' appeals to me in multiple ways, which is why I'm a happy user of their products.  However they did not invent that slogan, it's part of the bylaws of the Iriquois Confederacy.

In any case, back to why 7gen.com ... simple, 'gen' is short for Generation or in this case to keep the paradigm of "seven generations" front and center.  I suppose the owners of the other #gen.com domains have some generational reasoning behind their name choice.  Maybe.  Who knows. 

(2008-06-10 11:21:15.0) Permalink

Dopplr? Huh?

So, um, on the bloggers mailing list there was a request that we from Sun sign up with Dopplr.  I went to the Dopplr site and it was yet another of these services that are so cool they don't have to explain what their purpose is.  That is, there's somewhere around zero information describing what they do or why I might want to use their "service".  But I signed up anyway, only to find out it's a service for sharing information about trips I'm taking.  Namely, sharing that information with other people and there's a hint that by knowing about each others travels you can more easily hook up while traveling.

Having done a bit of traveling I do think it would be helpful to connect with people.  Traveling alone is, sometimes, lonely.

But I don't get what the big deal is.  It seems like much ado about something that's not entirely useful, and I just sent them a request to cancel my account.  Seems that being so cool they don't have to explain themselves, they're also so cool you have to beg and plead to cancel the account. 

(2007-10-23 11:16:23.0) Permalink

Freedom of choice?

I'm reading a CNET article .. Democrats criticize AT&T's exclusive iPhone deal .. It's talking about a U.S. Congress committee meeting that was supposed to be about "wireless innovation and consumer protection".  But iPhone-mania hit the Congresscritters with Republicans claiming the iPhone is an example of consumer choice in action ...

I dunno about you, the reader, but I'm more than astonished.  I see Apple's move with this phone as a way to interfere with consumer choice.  And in general the cell phone market is all about interfering with customer choice.  Want to switch providers?  Nope, you're in a locked in contract.  Like your phone but want to use it with a different carrier?  Nope, the phones you can buy are locked to specific carriers.  And the iPhone is even worse because it's design, while using GSM under the covers, has specific features that are only going to work with Cingular.  This all goes together to prevent the customer from having choice.

I think in other countries customer choice is free-er, in that you can buy phones and SIM cards as separate objects, and can insert the SIM card into phones based on your free choice.  Since I don't live outside the U.S. my exposure to this is limited, but a few months ago I was in St. Petersburg and my colleagues there bought a SIM card for me to try in my U.S. Cingular-locked phone.  Unfortunately the experiment didn't work out in that the phone didn't recognize the SIM card they bought.
 

(2007-07-11 11:43:15.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Revisiting the Declaration of Independence Earlier today I had an inspiration to compare the Declaration of Independence with current events.  It's spooky the parallels, and just makes me wonder all over again, where's the rage?  Why aren't people more in arms over the current behavior and actions of the U.S. Administration?  Revisiting the Declaration of Independence. (2007-07-04 14:52:24.0) Permalink

Safari on Windows?

Huh?  Can someone explain why ??  Safari is such a crappy browser to begin with.  Why would anybody want to use it at all?

UPDATE: The first comment received was "First step to iLife on Windows" and that's kind of where I am with it.  As a mac user I'm having fear that Apple is getting distracted by the huge income they get from iPods/iTunes, and potentially huge income from the iPhone, that they're going to ditch OS X and focus on their real money maker(s).

 But then I found A Suggestion for Apple in 2007 which suggested, last January, that they release Safari on Windows.  That it would give Windows users a peek into the life of Mac users, and it would give web developers who use Windows a reason/capability to test their web sites on Safari. 

Hurm.. The first reason is suspicious to me.  I know dozens and dozens of Mac users who ignore Safari because it sucks.  So, Safari is not a very good demonstration of the life of Mac users.  The second reason works pretty well for me.  Maybe web sites would more often work well in Safari if the web developers suffering from using Windows were able to test their sites on Safari.  Hurm...

(2007-06-11 11:15:21.0) Permalink Comments [7]

3 years of Blogging @ Sun

This grand experiment in corporate blogging at Sun has been going for three years now.  Looking back it seems I got on this bandwagon early, in June 2004 with a pathetic first post.  I know there are a lot of blogs who contain only that kind of posting as their first and only entry, fortunately I kept up at it.  It helps that I publish several web sites of my own, and one of them has a 12+ year history.  But looking back what helped the most to feel comfortable with blogging is having been a Usenet denizon during the 1980's.  Around 1986 I was a system administrator and student at the University of Kentucky, holding a student job working for the Mathematical Sciences department working on system admin to a network of Vax's running 4.2BSD.  It's wasn't quite a typical student job in that we supported those systems from the bare metal on up, because DEC didn't quite like people running anything other than VMS on their hardware.  Yeah, the technical support guy from the local office would come out and swap boards etc, but he wouldn't do any of the operating system maintenance, which left that to us.  One thing I managed was to learn about Usenet .. one of our gang had graduated and gone to work for Bell Labs, and sent back a tape full of postings from the Unix-Wizards mailing list as well as several others.  From those I gathered that this thing called Usenet existed, figured out what UUCP path addressing was, and around that time I had the job to set up a UUCP link between our system and a system at the ANL-CMS lab in Chicago.  Using those pieces I found my way through Usenet to land an email to Mark Horton and managed to get our systems connected to Usenet.  And then proceeded to totally enjoy life chatting with people all over the world ... until our university was connected to the Internet at which time the enjoyment skyrocketed.

In a large way the blogosphere is very much like Usenet but with even more autonomy.  What I mean is the very personal style of writing, because clearly a blog owner generally is writing in their very own and usually highly controlled space.  I very much think of my Usenet experience as giving me experience with and exposure to writing that would be astonishing considering my history of English/Writing classes during school.

My most interesting moment blogging for Sun was when Tim Bray called me at 11 AM on a Sunday morning.  There had been a slashdot article about Kodak's lawsuit against Sun, where they claimed we violated some patents.  The suit was still in the process of being settled, but I had a bee up my butt about software patents and posted some opinions which were probably pretty good .. but .. as Tim pointed out when he called me, it's in violation of my employment contract to talk about ongoing court cases.  And so, I pulled the posting grumbling about corporate interference with freedom of speech.

What to make of that ... well, there's several angles to this.  First, is some aspects to freedom of speech by an employee.  Employees have traditionally been told not to talk to press at all, to not talk in the open at all, and to leave that for the professional PR and Marketing people who have the specific training to know the right things to say.  That leaves most employees of a company mute and unable to speak.  But what about an employee who is witnessing some illegal or immoral act.  Their employment contract probably forbids them from speaking about company proprietary stuff.  Further the employer is the one giving them money, so the employee has an incentive to keep quiet, or their flow of income will stop, as will the food, shelter and other primary needs provided by that money.  ..etc.. so all those things and more go together to to maintain an air of employees not speaking out.  But if a company really is doing something illegal, shouldn't an employee have the freedom to speak out about whatever their employer is doing?  Isn't this harming society by keeping employees beholden to and muted by their employers?

Another is the sensitivity of negotiations that happen between corporations, especially when there are court cases involved.  The stakes can be quite high, in that case with Kodak it was many many millions of dollars.  So there is a real need for many types of information known by an employee to remain quiet.

Another is the sort of gamble our company management has taken to allow everybody in the company to do this blogging thing.  It represents a sea change in the mindset of the typical role of employees.  That stereotype of employees unable to say anything is gone, replaced with a "use your best judgement" guideline.  Corporate transparency is a good thing, I believe.

 

Thank you to the blogs.sun.com team, and to the management at Sun for having the bravery to do this. 

 

(2007-04-27 14:25:19.0) Permalink

Data center in a box?

Sun to unveil data center in a box  We are?  That sounds cool, I hope that really is what we're unveiling later today.  The article claims we'll be demonstrating a standard-sized shipping container containing racks of computer gear, water cooling system, air filtration system, etc.  It's a box you can quickly deploy just by dropping it (literally?) into a vacant piece of land, run power, water, and network connections to it, and you're good to go.

Sounds cool.  I remember reading a rumor-story of Google working on a similar idea.  And in the article they liberally quote from Gerald Murphy, a Robert Francis Group analyst who six years ago designed shipping container-based computer systems for customers performing classified work.  He said:  "If they're thinking they invented it, they're wrong".  Heh, howzabout if you wait until the announcement to see if we claim to have invented this.  Okay?

And speaking of spooks (er.. classified work) and deployable computer systems.  The scenario that came into my mind was ... is this meant for, say, military operations where they're invading a country and need to quickly parachute in a bunch of equipment?  The modern American Military Machine depends on high technology and what could be higher tech than a rack of computer servers deployed onto the battlefield?  Yeah, the military has gobs of servers back home and they can more easily deploy sattelite communications to give access to the computation resources.  Maybe they will want the computation on the battlefield?

The article says the gizmo can withstand a force 9 times the force of gravity, and equates that to a six-inch drop.  Hmm, doesn't sound like a parachute drop to me.  Who knows.  Certainly this gizmo could be attractive to rapidly growing organizations.

For example in my organization (Java SE, and in general the Santa Clara Campus) we're having trouble with crowded lab/server areas.  At the same time there's some underdeveloped land on the campus where we might erect a building or two later, but if we had one of these blackbox gizmos could put some servers on campus without having to erect a building.

What's amuzing is this video clip that Sun StorageTek published on YouTube.  I linked to that video on an earlier blog posting (click on the second of the videos).  Coincidentally (?) the video shows capacity being expanded by dropping big boxes into neat columns in a warehouse.  Hmmm...

And that video raises a couple interesting points.  If you react to expanding needs with the idea of "I'll just add more" then what of the environmental consequences?  The more computational gizmos you deploy, whether it's in a traditional data center, in an office environment, or whether it's in a black box in the parking lot, the more capacity you add to your system the more power and energy you've expended.  So far humanity has only found methods for making electricity that involve introducing poisons into the environment.  When you say "I'll just add more" you're also saying "I'll just poison the environment some more".

The CNET article doesn't discuss whether this portable data center gizmo has any attempt to optimize power usage per unit of computation capacity.
(2006-10-17 07:16:06.0) Permalink

I don't get the attraction to bittorrent The other day Mandriva announced their new release, the 2007 version of their distribution.  I've been wanting to try their system out so I went to the download page.  A couple days prior I'd downloaded the RC2 ISO's and those were done with an FTP arrangement, but today the final bits are downloadable only with a bittorrent thingamajob.

Bittorrent is one of those gosh wow technologies that has the geeks glowing and saying it's the neatest thing since sliced bread.  Supposedly bittorrent is a technology that would, if deployed by the media companies etc, revolutionize the distribution of multimedia entertainment.

Well, as a user of this technology I am completely and totally underwhelmed.

The mandriva distribution .torrent file specifies the downloading of four ISO's plus a small number of related meta files.  I started the download yesterday afternoon, and 20 hours later the bittorrent client (qtorrent running on Ubuntu if that makes any difference) says it's only 50% downloaded, and there are 18 hours left to go.

Just a few days earlier when I was able to grab the prior ISO's using FTP they downloaded within an hour, and within two hours after that I had the ISO's burned to CD.

Seems to me that as a user of the two technologies, FTP (or HTTP "get" or the like) is superior over bittorrent, because I get quicker satisfaction.

So can someone explain the superiority of bittorrent?

Oh and to toss a few more worms into the pot ... Last year sometime I was curious what all the rage over the Azureus client was about.  So I installed it, ran it, and to get some .torrent files I found the torrentspy web site.  Good golly what a flashback to the unethical sharing of copyrighted content.  Is that what bittorrent normally used for?  The unethical sharing of copyrighted content?

(2006-10-04 11:10:10.0) Permalink Comments [6]

Thumper Contest What workloads can you thump with thumper?

Seriously - what's Thumper?  It's the X4500, a server with serious data storage and computation in one box.  Speaking for myself I don't understand why you would separate storage from computation, since computation often requires data to back it up, and you get the best bandwidth to your data if the data is on the same server.  But there's a lot of brilliant minds who came up with the separation between storage and computation, so there must have been a reason.  In any case, having storage and computation in the same box ought to fit some large number of application types.

Seems we've launched a contest asking y'all to think about what kinds of applications work well with Thumper.




And as long as you're here... I found this other video that's pretty funny.
(2006-09-14 12:09:31.0) Permalink

Linux inconsistency and resulting confusion I'm thinking of setting up a "webcam" on my Linux system, and the runaround with the howto's is reminding me of what really gripes me about Linux.  It's so bloody inconsistent.

I thought it would be simple ... just google for "linux webcam" and do whatever the HOWTO's said to do.  But the problem is half the information I'm seeing doesn't apply to the specific system I have (ubuntu 5.10 ... I'll note in passing the ubuntu wiki has a page that looks helpful, but I want to demonstrate the general problem).

The first result is Debian Linux Web Cam Server Configuration, and since ubuntu is debian maybe that's the best for me.  Nope.  Okay, it says that for Sarge you can probably just plug the camera in and it will work.  I think 5.10 is based on Sarge, but really don't know that (all these code names tend to obfuscate matters).  In any case the document doesn't describe what to do if the camera isn't automagically recognised.  The document spends a lot of time talking about stuff that isn't on my system, and/or not appropriate for my system.  e.g. modconf doesn't exist on this system, but lsmod does exist and does what the author of that document says modconf would do (I think).  And the problems with the article don't stop with modconf but go on to a a whole slew of low level device configuration, module configuration, trouble shooting and whatnot.

Next is WebCam under Linux which also focuses on Debian Sarge but has a completely set of advice, and focuses on one specific driver.  Why?  It does mention an application at http://motion.sourceforge.net/ which automatically detects motion, which looks like a good security camera feature which I hadn't thought of.

At LinuxDevices.com they have an announcement of a live demo webcam run by someone with an office in Manhattan.  But since the announcement is from 2000, I doubt it's still there.

There's some Webcam Installation Notes which don't mention what Linux system they apply to.  It just dives right into installing software.  My experience with Linux systems is the various distributions are so completely different from one another that you really need to know which one you have, versus the distribution a specific HOWTO author had, so that you can interpolate their instructions for your system.

There's an announcement that development of the PWC driver has halted.  This is important because the PWC driver figures heavily in one of the documents above.

linux.com has a howto on webcams.  You'd think a site named linux.com would have a definitive howto, and it probably is.  Again it dives right into low levels, talking about installing modules, drivers, and whatnot.  Oh, and a large part of the document is about identifying which camera you have, and what drivers will be suitable for it.  This is where I learned of the lsmod command I mentioned above.  But the examples list usb-ohci as a module, whereas on my system this module isn't present, and I don't know whether to be alarmed that it's missing.

The ZC030X Webcam Linux Driver Project page has a warning that this project is inactive, and you should use a different one instead.  Over on that page it has a "Jan 1, 2006" date which gives me a feeling it might be actively maintained.  But I'm beginning to feel like I'm in a maze of twisty passages all alike, but there's no treasure to be found.

The Video For Linux Resources page looks to be a great overview listing the dizzying array of choices.  It's more than a little displeasure that it starts with a long list of driver projects.  I mean, with so many different drivers, it looks like a daunting task to figure out what's what.

And then after that the google results become even less useful so I'm stopping here.

My point is that none of the results I found did a really good job of describing simple steps to take to get a webcam running on Linux.  Most especially none of what I saw gave me a clue to solving the specific thing I want to do, which is videoconferencing.  Instead most of the verbiage I had to wade through was about low level grunty driver talk, and very little about what useful purpose you might have for having a webcam on Linux in the first place.

Along the say I did learn about one idea I hadn't had before ... so this excercise hasn't been a total loss.  The idea of using Linux to run a security camera setup is very interesting.

The results only confirm what I've said before.  The thing hampering Linux's success is the wild differences between linux distributions, the lack of simplicity in using and configuring linux systems.  The differences and inconsistencies only create confusion when someone tries to do something.  e.g. Which HOWTO do you believe?  What resource do you look at for advice?  And why does the HOWTO I'm looking at talk about files and commands that aren't present on my system?

I've been using Linux off and on since 1993.  Most of the time I've been not using Linux specifically because of these problems.
(2006-01-19 12:18:26.0) Permalink

Corporate IT security at Sun There's this slashdot posting I found interesting:   KoshClassic asks: "What is the right balance between security and productivity, in the corporate IT environment? Looking back at my company, 10 years ago, our machines were connected directly to the Internet, no proxy, no firewall, no antivirus software. Today, my company's proxy server blocks access to: 'bad' web sites (such as Google Groups; our 'antivirus' software prevents our machines (even machines that host production applications) from carrying out legitimate functions, such as the sending of email via SMTP; and individual employees are forced to apply security patches with little or no notice, under threat of their machines loosing network access, if they do not comply by the deadline. On one hand, you can never be too secure, however on the other hand, have we become so secure that we're stifling our own ability to get things done? What is the situation like at other companies?"

Since it's usually pointless to reply on a slashdot thread (you almost always get lost in the noise) I thought to toot a horn or two over here.  What's IT security like inside Sun?  It's really pretty good, a low level of burden, the requirements are very transparent.

I think the main thing keeping Sun from major problem is we simply don't have many Windows machines to begin with.  (Fancy that)  They do exist, especially as some parts of Sun actively develop software for Windows.  They do cause problems from time to time.  (the typical virus attacks)

The IT security team requires we run a script ("XP Neuter") at every bootup which fiddles with some settings meant to keep XP "safe".  I don't know off hand what those settings are.  Maybe they turn off some of the default IIS instances that Windows likes to start.

The other thing IT requires is we use a virus scanner package, and that it automatically update.  There's a corporate license with one of the virus scanner makers, and we get the automatic updates through that arrangement.  However they (IT) aren't as draconian as the slashdot writer describes in that Sun's IT doesn't breath down our necks to make sure the virus scanner actually is up-to-date.

I don't remember there being a requirement to run a firewall or block access to specific ports (e.g. SMTP) etc.  There is a corporate firewall and I haven't been able to determine if they block access to specific sites, since all the sites I look at are available.

The IT security department also checks Mac OS X security, and occasionally issues security advisories for OS X.  The advisories for Windows far outstrips the OS X advisories, however.  There are a surprising number of OS X users inside Sun.

In my case (as is common) my laptop/PC runs Linux ... there is an XP partition that I occasionally boot, but the majority of the time it's in Linux.

(2006-01-18 22:21:31.0) Permalink Comments [2]

web2.0 has something in common with web 1.0? Yesterday Hal Stern posted a simplified definition of web2.0:  'read/write web'

I happen to disagree.  As proof he claims that everything in Tim O'Reilly's list has embedded in it "read/write web".  But, how is AdSense read/write?  Or Search Engine optimization?  Or cost/click?  Or syndication?

In other words, I think Hal is missing the part where web2.0 is about aggregating services offered by others.  e.g. the Google Map mashups.  In general there's a number of services that expose an API (google, yahoo, amazon, ebay, paypal, del.icio.us, etc), and other people build something off that API.

Adsense is not read/write, but it's clearly an aggregation of services.  Syndication is also an aggregation of services.  I don't understand why SEO and cost/click are on Tim O'Reilly's list, since both are simple extrapolations of web marketing.

But what has me going to the blog right now is:  Yahoo gobbles up Del.icio.us

What this has me thinking of is partying like it's 1999.  Namely, in the late 90's there were a bunch of startups that founded web sites but didn't have a business model that would gain revenue.  I think del.icio.us falls squarely in that camp.  It's given away for free and there's no clear way for them to charge a fee.  What would you charge for?  Hence, the only way del.icio.us is going to pay off is for them to be bought out ... which is what Yahoo has just done.

That's what I suggest web2.0 shares with web1.0 is the people involved still aren't thinking about how do I make this a self supporting business.

(2005-12-09 16:11:36.0) Permalink Comments [2]

CNET: Power could cost more than servers, Google warns

Here we go: Power could cost more than servers, Google warns

The CNET article is referring to an article published in ACM's Queue: The Price of Performance (ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 7 - September 2005, by Luiz André Barroso, Google) An Economic Case for Chip Multiprocessing

His point is that as system performance is going up, power consumption increases to match.  Hence as system performance increases lets you cram more and more into your data center, the power needs for the data center will increase dramatically.  Eventually, his numbers say, the cost of powering your computers will cost more than the computers themselves.

As I wrote before I'm just happy that the new systems we're selling have lower power needs than previous systems.  I am very interested to have the world I live in be clean, and I know that the more power we humans use the more polluted our world becomes (because of the way we get the power).

I know that one can often do the same work (e.g. light your room) while using less power (e.g. using compact flourescents or LED lightbulbs), which makes me itch for the rest of the humans around me to catch on that they don't need to use as much power as they're using today.

It's about efficiency and I like the way Luiz puts it in his paper.  Performance per watt.

It's also about coming up with the right measurement to capture the desired end goal.  See, the results one gets are always based on the question you ask.  If you ask simply for "give me more processing power" then the easy answer is to make the CPU run faster and faster.  But we've seen with Intel's CPU approach how the faster you make the CPU go, the more power it consumes, the more heat it dissipates, the more you have to spend on cooling systems and the more you spend on power.

But if you ask for a broader picture of "more power at lower cost of ownership" that changes how you approach the problem.  And if you toss in "oh, and it would be nice if it saved the planet" the approach is changed again.

I'm a software guy and if I say anything more I'll probably get in trouble.

(2005-12-09 09:45:07.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Installing Star Office 8 on Ubuntu 5.10 A couple weeks ago I made a couple postings about having a new-to-me laptop, and wondering what OS to use.  I've been using Ubuntu the last couple weeks, and am relatively pleased.  The overall system works well, and it's especially impressive how the update system automatically detects new module versions and offers to download/install them.

Being a Sun employee, Star Office is important to my health.  We use Star Office, of course, as the preferred documentation format and all sorts of company documents and presentations and spreadsheets use Star Office documents.  For example I'm reviewing the Sun PLC (Product Life Cycle) materials, and all of them are in Star Office format.

Unfortunately installing Star Office turned out to be nontrivial, not hard, but not trivial.

First, I should point out that in Ubuntu 5.10 you can easily install Open Office 2.  Run the Synaptics package manater, and you'll find it in the editors section.  Select the package(s) and install just like any other package.

With OOo2 why would I need Star Office?  Well, I have two reasons.  First is there might be some special juju that's in Star Office that isn't in OOo2.  Second is a known example of the special juju, namely the Sun-specific fonts.  Sun has some special fonts we use in presentations, and when using Impress if those fonts aren't available then presentations that require the fonts will be a little screwy.

I could have downloaded just the fonts and worked out where to put them.  But then I would have missed out on any other special juju, plus there wouldn't be a blog posting to write.

Now let's start the process:

Get Star Office information here.  Click on the Get It button and it offers you several ways to get it, including a download.  The download is very large, but the Internet is fast now so it evens out.  This is a paid product so if you keep using it beyond the free trial you'll have to pay some money.

You download an installer.  The System Requirements do not mention anything other than a minimum kernel version number.  So you'd think the installer would just work on any Linux version, yes?

I ran the Intstaller and while the GUI came up and did a few things, it crapped out.  Turns out the installer requires an RPM system, and Ubuntu is a Debian system for which RPM is alien.  When the installer crapped out it left me with a bunch of RPM's in a temp directory.  And that left me wondering what to do.

Inside Sun we have an excellent Linux oriented mailing list to which I turned for help.  The following steps came from there.

Ubuntu has a command, alien, which allows you to install RPM's.  It's not installed by default but a few clicks of the excellent Synaptics Package Manager got it onto my system.

Next you do this: alien -i -k RPMS/*.i586.rpm

Quickly the RPM's turn into installed bits, which you can verify as so:

But then, it didn't automatically show up in the Applications menu.  Further it didn't show up in the "Add Applications" window.  So, how to run the application and where did it get installed anyway?  This part was a little klunky, but there's a decent solution.

First was to find the installation.  I know that one file which is installed is named 'soffice' so that's what I looked for:


Then I tried running it directly from the command line, and it worked fine.  Next the question was how to nicely integrate it into my environment on this computer.

First I right clicked on the top menu bar and select Add To Panel.  The next window gives several sources of things to add, and I selected Custom Application Launcher.  That switches you to a different window into which you enter the Name (e.g. "Star office 8"), the Command (the path found above) and the Icon.  For the Icon a useful one is included with the Star Office installation, just click the Browse button, go to the directory found above and search around for the icons.

That gives you a clickable icon which launches the application.  This is around 90% as useful as entering choices into the Applications menu.

I don't know how to tell Nautilis to associate Star Office with the Open Document file formats.  There isn't any preferences for associating applications with given file formats, and the Preferred Applications system preferences window doesn't cover this issue.

I did get Firefox to remember an association with Star Office.  When downloading a file with Star Office, select the open in application choice, click on Browse, browse to the application as found earlier, and select that.  From then on Firefox will open the Open Document files using Star Office.

BTW, the new OOo/Star Office user interface is fabulous.

(2005-11-17 00:54:20.0) Permalink Comments [6]