Today is the 11th of August (just) and for a reason that escapes me this has been designated by the IBM/Lotus blogging community as “YellowDay”. In celebration of this event I thought I would test out some of the software mentioned in the recent announcement at the Linuxworld conference:
“IBM and leading Linux distributors Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell and Red Hat are planning to work together with their hardware partners to deliver Microsoft-free personal computing choices with Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony in the <Dr Evil voice>one billion-unit</Dr Evil voice> desktop market worldwide by 2009.”
So far we are not one of the ‘hardware partners’ but for those curious about what the Lotus Symphony office suite looks like, here it is running on the webbook.
This is the wordprocessor:
and the spreadsheet:
and surprise surprise it does presentations too:
It wasn’t the easiest thing to install. In fact it took ages and I had to install it from the command line. The point of Symphony is that it is an office suite inside an Eclipse framework. If you don’t know or care what an Eclipse framework is then you probably don’t need Symphony and you are better off with the OpenOffice.org suite that comes with the webbook.
So there you have it, IBM’s “Microsoft-free personal computing choice”, running on the webbook.
Tip: Don’t eat yellow snow, even on YellowDay.
do you know when proper graphics card drivers will be available? if i managed to get windows xp on here instead, would that have better driver support?
also how do you disable the touchpad click?
I will publish a timescale for the graphics drivers when I know it myself. They exist, but we can’t deploy them yet. I will do an article on disabling the touchpad click, a few people have said they like to turn that off.
There is something wrong with the download for the XP drivers right now. I will try to get that fixed. Personally I wouldn’t downgrade to XP. Ubuntu rocks!
I agree, Ubuntu rocks!
I do have to wonder what the point of this is though. I’m all for innovation and FOSS, but something that’s that difficult to install, and doesn’t really have more fuctionality than something like OpenOffice, you do have to wonder…
I don’t think there is much point to it on it’s own, but you can integrate more stuff into the same Eclipse framework. Basically what they have done with Lotus Notes, it lives in the same window and can do some tighter integration with Symphony. If you have loads of big business applications that have Eclipse based clients I can see some value in having an Eclipse hosted Office suite too. IBM have ditched a lot of Microsoft licenses with their internal Symphony rollout. I expect the whole Symphony project paid for itself in these savings so it was probably worthwhile to IBM even if nobody else ever uses it.