New CSCE - with opensource!
To anyone at Glasgow Uni (I think this still goes out on the GUFF aggregator, barring any redirection fuckups on my part), the ‘CSCE’ (see, they can’t just call it software, it has to have gasp an acronym) has been updated again. Aside from an upgrade to Office 2003 (blah) and the removal of EndNote (again, blah, using that damn thing took longer than adding the footnotes myself), there is only one real substantive change to the software on offer. It’s a significant one though – OpenOffice.org.
Now, a part of me is hoping that OOo will eventually become the standard on CSCE, or at least that the uni will stop purchasing endless M$ Office upgrades (at thousands of pounds a time) and put the money towards something else (like balancing the uni’s finances, or student welfare, or some other more-worthy-than-Bill Gates’-bank-balance cause). There is one ‘leetle probleme’ though – they seem to have failed spectacularly at actually setting it up. Any attempt to run any of the OOo apps (remember, when you run any of them it’s the same actual PROGRAM – soffice.exe – which runs, it just uses a different mode) results in an error box:
The application cannot be started. An internal error occured.
Which is of course about as informative as your average Windoze BSOD. Clearly it is some fault with the way the uni computing service has set it up – like many people I use OOo at home and know it to be very reliable, and the uni uses a rather strange (and slow) Novell Netware (*shudder*) system to distribute the CSCE applications. Clearly, unless the network transmission was interfered with by laser-wielding gerbils, some setting or another needs changed.
When (if?) it is eventually fixed, though, it will be brilliant. I will be able to work on documents from home without either:
- Converting the file to a non-standard format, or
- Using ‘Portable’ OOo on a U3 flash drive (no chance)
All that’s needed now (apart from the aforementioned fixing of their OOo setup) is for the CSCE to include Firefox. It does work with the uni’s proxy servers (I had it running from my network storage space last year) and is a damn sight faster than IE 6 (believe me, the uni internet access is now so slow that every speed benefit counts). It is at least a start – and a recognition from the uni computing service that open source software does not have horns, nor will it eat your children.
EDIT: It turns out that the problems with actually running OOo were due to the main network filespace server being down.