Prioritized StarOffice Issues for MIT/Athena

Prioritized StarOffice Issues in the MIT/Athena Environment

This is a work in progress!

Priority 1: Barriers to Basic Level Support.

Priority 2: Barriers to recommending StarOffice and putting it in Dash.

Priority 3: Barriers to making StarOffice the default document preparation environment:

Priority 1: Barriers to Basic Level Support.

Provide a procedure by which an end user can be instructed to change their printer name. In our school-wide environment we will be pre-configuring StarOffice to support a few officially sanctioned printers. Departments will have those printers, and will not need to load drivers. It is EXTREMELY unclear how to most simply change the printer name from the $(PRINTER) Athena default, to a second printer without exiting and restarting StarOffice.

Provide instructions such that imported Excell spreadsheets will get a printer default page size of Letter 81/2x11 instead of UserDefined of .61"x1.93". (Note that a New StarCalc spreadsheet opens with the correct page size.)

We have had a long-standing but erratic (i.e., non-reproducible) problem in printing, whereby occasionally a document prints 256 times the number of copies requested. No specific unusual behavior on the part of the user has been identified in this connection. [fixed in 5.2? check with cfox for reproducible case -amb]

In the File > Open/Save dialog boxes, typing a path name starting with /afs causes StarOffice to report that it has lost contact with other AFS cells, and the program must be explicitly killed. Also, while it is possible to go from an AFS to a different directory off the root (/var/local, for instance), it is not possible to go in the opposite direction. [cfox]

Priority 2: Barriers to recommending StarOffice and putting it in Dash.

Users at MIT are given a fixed amount of network storage space. StarOffice as we currently have it set up leaves a footprint of about 2.8 MB, or over 5% of the user's quota, with about 2.4 MB of that space taken up by configuration files. It would be extremely desirable to reduce the size of the local configuration directory to an absolute minimum. (See Bill Cattey's email to Sarah Bate, 8/17.) We believe that some of the configuration files are read-only, but we have no way to be certain in each case.
Our enterprise-wide filesystem has fine grained access control for directories. We have directories that users can list, but for which no files are readable. Pointing the StarOffice file open command at such a directory causes pauses of up to 30 seconds. Why does this happen?
Local configuration files should be fully platform-independent. Currently the same StarOffice version sets up separate local configuration directories for Sun and Linux. It looks like there are many file differences between them.
When a file-readin hangs, currently the only recourse is to use the ps command, find the highest numbered StarOffice process and hand kill -9 it. What is a procedure to get StarOffice to gracefully give up on a file readin that has hung?

Priority 3: Barriers to making StarOffice the default document preparation environment:

StarOffice currently takes on the order of three minutes to start up. It should start, ideally, in well under 30 seconds.[wdc]
It would be very helpful if StarOffice could automatically find the right driver for a given named printer, instead of having to configure each by hand. In an environment with dozens of printers of different types that change dynamically, this becomes unmanageable.
We want to give users preset configurations for any feature we want to set or disable. At present, the only way we can figure out for doing this is for the installer to configure the program, apply the desired settings, and turn his local configuration files into a "template" that is piped through sed to generate configuration files for other users when they launch StarOffice.
Local configuration directories should be at least upwardly compatible across StarOffice versions. It would be very nice if the local configuration directory for 5.1 could also work for 5.2, for example, perhaps with some additional files added to account for 5.2 enhancements.
The GUI design should be compatible with emerging desktops: Gnome, KDE, etc. (Perhaps the OpenOffice project handles this.)[what does this mean? -amb]
It would be desirable to reduce the machine resources required; it shouldn't be necessary to have 256 MB of memory for performance to be acceptable.
We have a PowerPoint presentation that uses an "Uncover from left" effect on several slides. Its behavior is very erratic when converted to StarImpress. Sometimes the text moves onto the screen quickly; other times it is a very long while in coming, during which the presentation seems to have hung; and sometimes the movement of the text is extremely jerky.[fixed in 5.2? must check. -amb]
In an "equation-rich" environment like MIT, we could wish for better translation of equation objects between Star Office and Microsoft Office. The appearance is just fine; but an equation object created in one environment cannot be edited in the other.
Problems have been reported in translation of special characters (bullets and the like) between Microsoft Office and StarOffice. [fixed in 5.2? check with les -amb]
Installation instructions need considerable improvement. For the 5.2 release, instructions for converting the binary download to a form suitable for a network installation had to be found by searching through Internet newsgroups, for example.

Desired changes in StarOffice:

Some sort of indicator of StarOffice being in a busy state and unable to accept input would be nice. For example, the canonical hourglass cursor.[wdc]
We would like improved coupling to Java, particularly for Linux. It should be possible to use any sufficiently recent JDK or JRE release, not just certain "special" ones like Linux JDK 1.1.8. Alternatively, what is needed should be built into the installation archive so that users don't need to install a separate application.
I [wdc] have an Excell spreadsheet in hand which used to read fine into StarOffice 5.1 which hangs StarOffice 5.2. (And the end-user would just have to know to do ps and kill -9 the highest numbered StarOffice process to recover.)
I [wdc] have an Excell spreadsheet in-hand which, if I change ONLY the page size, when written back out as an Excell spreadsheet has ALL the formatting completely trashed. Significant amounts of pre-existing formatting are just discarded.
Word documents and Excell spreadsheets imported should print the SAME as when they are generated under Windows when the printer is PostScript. Although this may be tricky if the exact fonts are not available, basic page layout and character placement and spacing should be correct. Where do we send examples of failed files so that they can contribute to the effort to reaching this goal? [wdc]
Our enterprise-wide filesystem has fine grained access control for directories. We have directories that users can list, but for which no files are readable. Pointing the StarOffice file open command at such a directory causes pauses of up to 30 seconds. Desired: make it stop.

Issues since resolved

We don't want users to see registration requests, even if they are optional. [was p1; removed 18sep2000 by virtue of alexp's custom install]

A user reports that a StarWriter file created under StarOffice 5.1 for the Sun platform cannot be read by the Windows 5.2 version. (However, a Windows 5.2 text document can be read by Sun 5.1; and when saved under Sun 5.1, it can then be read by Windows 5.2.) [was p1; now moot since 5.1 is deprecated by all, even us.]

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