Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 07:23:51 +0100 From: Cliff Sarginson <cliff@raggedclown.net> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: software Message-ID: <20011228062351.GG12190@raggedclown.net> In-Reply-To: <3C29D88C.54F4042F@pathcom.com> References: <3C29D88C.54F4042F@pathcom.com>
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On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 09:02:52AM -0500, Frank Milner wrote: > Dear FreeBSDm > > This no doubt sounds like a naive question, but will Windows > applications run under FreeBSD? If not, what everyday word processors, > spreadsheets, utlilities, etc., can be used with this operating system? > Perhaps Star Office applications? > > In other words, is FreeBSD suitable in anyway for the standalone > desktop? > My heart sinks when I see this question, there was a debate about it on this list a while ago that went to more than 100 messages in a single thread, forcing me to adopt draconian filtering rules on my email :) The short answer is no you cannot really run Windows apps as such, well maybe you can, there is a project called "wine" that is supposed to allow you to, but last time I looked it was still in Alpha stage and has been for centuries. It is an almost impossibly difficult thing to do since Microsoft specs are secrets, their API documentation lousy, and they change the internal structure of their files with every release of Word etc. There are people who have worked very hard on producing Office type products, many of them are very good. There are word processors, spread sheets, any number of database applications, Gimp (a serious professional level graphics program), integrated desktops, more mail programs than you can shake a stick at etc etc. Much more interesting screen-savers as well :) Look into Gnome, KDE, Abiword, and Staroffice (Staroffice gets a bad press but i quite like it, it does need a beefy machine though). You may find many things that are "meant" for Linux, don't worry about that FreeBSD can run most Linux apps without problem. A lot of the word processors do understand Word formats, which unfortunately is a de-facto document standard in the big bad world. I was using Word 2000 the other day, and this little fellow kept popping up in the bottom of my screen asking me if he needed to help me. Word2000 also seems to like to capitilize words quite irrelevantly to the context. When I was a lad sentences did start with capital letters, but the previous ones usually ended with a full stop. This little rule seems to have been forogtten about in the Redmond hills. Anyway I don't think you will find too much of that in the offerings available. So i would say try it out, you are almost spoilt for choice in fact. I personally like Gnome as a heavyweight and Window Maker as a lightweight (weight here referring to machine resources required). -- Regards Cliff To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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