Linux Desktop for university staff

[David Curry]

Murat Tepegoz wrote:

>SNIP
>
>Office: Openoffice.org. Write and calc are perfect alternatives to word and
>excel. Abiword always crashes abnormally. I could not try koffice yet. I use
>kile for latex.
>  
>
      SNIP

I think "perfect alternative" to excel is a bit of overstatement 
regarding oo.o calc.  Calc is limited to 32,000 rows whereas excel can 
handle larger files and calc does not have as many built in functions 
for users to draw on (date manipulations such as determining the time 
between two dates come to mind).  Gnumeric appears capable of handling 
files as large as excel can take, but the last time I evaluated 
statistical and financial functions in Gnumeric some of those functions 
did not produce output  that was directly useable for polished 
presentations.

Additionally, I have not shared your experience with Abiword crashing 
abnormally.  I also find that Abiword is capable of importing more 
formats than oo.o and can accept text/numbers copied from, say, a 
mozilla browser screen where oo.o Write cannot.

I use oo.o write and calc, abiword, and gnumeric as needed to meet the 
requirements of my projects.

The "R" statistical package (http://www.r-project.org/) is a good 
substitute for S" and should not be overlooked in your list of software.

Gretl (GNU Regression, Econometrics & Time Series Library) is another 
application worth mentioning to the university crowd and can be found at 
http://gretl.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for initiating this thread and leading with your list of apps.