Friday, February 16, 2007

Thank You, NeoOffice



Finally!

I am one of those who refuses to buy Word. Having found Open Office several years ago for my PC, I have been unable to justify the expense since. Open Office is an open source, free office suite that has most of the functions of Word, and allows you to read and create word documents, so your unenlightened colleagues can share information with you.

Unfortunately, open office on the mac OS with Intel chips runs off something called X11. As far as I understand, this provides a bridge between the old macs and new, so that a program can. Unfortunately, it was limited: it would not print or find print drivers, so I had to create pdfs every time I wanted to print. It had drawing problems and was crash prone.

Finally, however, I found NeoOffice. Based on Open Office source code, it runs natively in mac OSX aqua. Which means I have the word processing I've dreamed of for my macbook. Glory, glory, all hail NeoOffice.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

X11 is actually a link between the Mac OS and the unix hiding within. What X11 is really doing is letting you run a very-slightly-modified variant of the Linux version of OpenOffice on a Mac.

How much memory do you have on your MacBook. I have 1GB, and I'm thinking of upgrading to 2GB. If I upgrade, do you want my old memory?

beckett said...

I have 1G now. If I remember correctly, 1GB is two paired cards. That must be what you are upgrading from. I hope you will let me know how much the added memory boosts performance.

And TYFTIAX11.