Petar Tahchiev's Blog

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OpenOffice vs. MS Word

Hi guys,

just a brief note on what happened with me yesterday. Me and a colleague of mine were having really great trouble with a Microsoft Word document - after opening the document (which, by the way, was about 500 pages and is confidential, so I cannot post it here), MS Word just hanged. We were trying to read it many times, but every time we tried the MS Word program hanged and eventually crashed. Hopefully we had a VMWare software with a Slackware linux installed, so after we opened the document with OpenOffice, not only it didn't crash, but also we were able to export it as a PDF and an HTML+CSS. Nothing more to say, but: Thank you guys - you rule! :-)

OOXML Objections And Sun's Position About It

I just found a really interesting discussion going on in Bulgarian open-source communities about the Microsoft's OOXML format and the fact that it was approved by some national committees.

So I would like to present here to you some thoughts on this "specification" and ask if someone heard what is the official Sun's position on this. So the history goes in very brief like this: on first of February OASIS published the 1.1 version of the ODF specifications and recognized it as a worldwide standard. Right now, what is currently happening is that Microsoft are trying to make another standard: Microsoft Open XML (OOXML), or ISO/IEC 29500. On one hand the ODF format was created with the idea of a complete independence of the application that uses it, the Microsoft format has some requirements that only the Microsoft Office applications can provide. Further enough there are some really strong arguments against the Microsoft standard, some of which are: no need of a second standard, OOXML is not even implemented already, the given specification is not complete, more than 10 percent of the examples given cannot be validated as a standard XML, the whole "specification proposal" is more than 6000 pages and misuses terms like "open" and "standard".... (and many others).

In spite of these objections many of the national committees, that have the right to vote for the proposal, voted "for" the proposal.

Now my question is: what is the official opinion of Sun about Microsoft's proposal? Also, if the new proposal is accepted as a specification will it be supported in the OpenOffice, and will we have an OOXML filter?

Some links that might be interesting to you:
http://www.noooxml.org/
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections
http://linux-bg.org/cgi-bin/y/index.pl?page=news&key=395779536(in Bulgarian)

Solaris First Impressions

On Monday I got the server (x86 platform using Xeon Server Dual Core) I had order, and I immediately started installing it. My desire was to set up on it some king of a Unix (say Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc). I downloaded the Solaris image, burned it and was ready to start having fun. My server doesn't have a DVD, God only knows why since I ordered it explicitly with a DVD. So I started planning of using an external DVD. I bought the external DVD player, placed the disk inside and installation started. I was following this tutorial:

but strangely enough, I didn't get the windows that are shown, but instead, I got a nice blue linux-like-installation screen. After the few questions about the Language, Network, Date/Time, Security and Remote Service Management I got a really strange error, saying "No disks were found". After this a new terminal appeared and, indeed the Solaris couldn't recognize my hard disks. Although, they seem like a pretty normal HDDs: "Western Digital Caviar SE 80 GG, SATA II 300, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache". So my next guess, was of course to google a little bit, and after a while I found that the problem was caused by the fact that my disks were not formatted, and so didn't have a solaris label. So I installed Slax on my USB and booted the server with it. I formatted and partitioned the disks. Then booted the Solaris again, but the same thing happened again. So I started googling further. Another suggestion that was made was that my RAID controller wasn't recognized. So I disabled it from the BIOS, and tried again. This time the problem was something else. My disks were recognized, but the install program replied that the disk I was using wasn't a Solaris installation disk. And again the sh prompt, which by the way, is really hard to cope with. I checked the /cdrom and it turned out that Solaris couldn't mount the external DVD on the hard disk for some reason. So I had to do it all by myself.

after which the installation went smoothly. So to sum up, everything seems really nice with this OS, but probably the guys from the Solaris dev. team should really think about:

• improving the hardware support (for instance the RAID support and the external DVD).
• maybe improving the documentation a little bit.
• using the bash shell instead of the sh shell.

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