[geeks] Desktops

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 9 May 2002, Ryn wrote:

> What are folks using for free office suites. Star Office, Open Office or
> something else?

I'd like to use OpenOffice, but it flat doesn't work on IRIX.  They're
planning to get it there someday, though.  I used StarOffice on Solaris
back when a SPARCplug was my primary workstation.  It was slow as hell,
but they've supposedly fixed that in OpenOffice.

So, currently, I use LaTeX for document processing, and a weird
combination of DrScheme and LaTeX's tabular environment for a pseudo-
spreadsheet[1].  For a database program, I've got PostgreSQL, which beats
Access to crumbs--if you happen to know SQL.  For presentation graphics, I
use xfig.  For raster graphics, I use GIMP.  For editing text and HTML,
I use either vi or XEmacs, depending on my mood.  PINE handles email, but
I'd gladly use GNUmail if I could get GNUstep to build.  I browse the web
with Nutscrape 4.79 and read netnews with gnus.

As it is, I'm pretty happy.  The only holes in my toolset are a -real-
full-featured spreadsheet and a symbolic/numerical computation environment
that isn't as much "fun" to work with as DrScheme[2].  Excel and
Mathematica are the only "work" applications that I still use Windows for.  
OpenOffice would/will replace the need for Excel.  I keep hearing good
things about Maxima as a replacement for Mathematica, but I haven't gotten
it up-and-running as most of the LISP dependencies expect IRIX 5.x instead
of 6.x, and, sadly, a lot has changed between the two.

FYI: under Windows, I used LaTeX, Excel, MySQL, PowerPoint, GIMP,
gvim/XEmacs, Eudora, IE, and XNews, respectively--I guess I wasn't a
typical Windows user.

--Jonathan
[1] I guess I could use straight LaTeX and even have cell-references, so
    long as there were no forward-reference, but I'm not quite -that-
    sick.
[2] Which leaves me doing the calculus by hand, anyway.