Monday, January 19, 2004

Linux Notebook Adventures - Week in Review Thought I would post a summary of what has worked and not worked in my transition to live on Linux.   My issues revolve around Excel, Word, Powerpoint and IE ... this is somewhat to be expected.  1. Excel vs Calc ... all aspects of basic spreadsheet work fine in OpenOffice.  The feature I missed this week - the save as HTML doesn't give me an option to save a single sheet in a multi-sheet workbook.  I use this to save a worksheet summary of a set of projects I work on that are linked via a central project page 2. Word vs Writer ... again all aspects generally work fine.  Main issue here was not being able to see revision bars on shared documents.  This is painful as I am often sharing docs and reviewing/updating material.  Next on the pain list is simply not knowing where to go for common operations (e.g. like shrink or increase fonts: I can only do this by specifying font size exactly through a drop down list box rather than a single click icon to shrink by one size). 3. Powerpoint vs Impress ... generally happy as per my other posts.  The way you go from slide to slide in Impress is plain awkward - tabs on the bottom.  Font size shrinking and increasing is plain annoying - it works as in Write.    Make fonts work as in Powerpoint!   I suspect I will find more issues as I periodically go into Powerpoint frenzies for customer talks, visits and various talks I do. 4. IE vs Mozilla/Firebird/Konqueror - at least one Active-X control did me in for some meeting place software Oracle uses.  I was told this is being upgraded and IE shortly will no longer be required. Overall, it seems like OpenOffice is quite useable but lacking that extra "finish", "polish" and built-in knowledge that Microsoft Office brings to the table.  Enough to make me switch back ... no ... but enough to make me curse periodically!   For free software, it's pretty hard to complain as it does do the job.  It felt pretty good when I did a customer visit earlier in the week and brought up the obligatory "and it runs on Linux slide" to be doing the talk/demo on Linux for emphasis! Server side and development tools, it has been very smooth.   I have the Oracle server offering - Oracle Database 9.2, Oracle Application Server 10g 9.0.4, OC4J 10.0.3 (J2EE 1.4) and our tool JDeveloper 9.0.5 happily running.  The one I was interested in mostly was our own App Server as a ton of work was done on 9.0.4 make the install smoother than 9.0.2 and 9.0.3.  I had done a 9.0.4 install several times before on a pre-jigged Linux box before but this was my first on my own Linux machine and I have to say I was very happy ... it took about 1 hour -- 45 minutes of that was checking knobs and dials to make sure my Linux was up to snuff and the last 15 minutes to do the install itself (I just did the WebCache and J2EE). As I like to keep tabs on what our friendly competitors are doing, also installed our friends over at BEA but failed at IBM as their J2EE 1.4 offering is only available on Windows (come on guys!).   Also stuck on Eclipse to check out the OC4J extension offered there.  I'd say in this area of server side/developer tools, I am generally happier on Linux than Windows -  I am not sure what it is but it just seems overall like things are fixable, configurable and more understandable in Linux/Unix.  This may be because of Oracle's historical background or simply the nature of the Linux/Unix.  Off to Bellevue for Oracle Developer Days ... may try an e-mail post to my blog from there so if the next one looks odd, don't be surprised. comment [] 12:18:48 AM