Featured Comments: Week of 2010 October 17

There were only 2 posts that garnered comments this past week, so I'll post most of those comments.

Will KPresenter and Gnumeric Please Come Forward?

Reader murray has this to say about OpenOffice.org Calc and Gnumeric: "I tried to use gnumeric instead of openoffice, due to the fact that I need to load 40M DBF's each month, and that where incredible slow in openoffice (more than 10 minutes). More, if you take in account that gnumeric loads it in 30 SECONDS. Lately, openoffice calc gets way better, taking 2 mins. The thing is, that in gnumeric, decimals gets lost, and later I realize that was global locale settings that affects the way gnumeric interprets numbers. Thats incredible for me, and more, the way to fix it via some obscure global (reeeeealy hard to discover) command-line setting before execute gnumeric is a shame".
Commenter twitter advised against using spreadsheet programs for real heavy-duty number-crunching: "Gnumeric is a nice spreadsheet but spreadsheets are not adequate for real science. When your data goes beyond a few kilobytes, it's time for shell scripts and the specialized tools available in good gnu/linux distributions like Debian."

Preview: Pardus 2011 Beta

Reader Sylvain seemed to have more success with Pardus 2011 Beta, linking to his review of it on his blog (in French): "It rox on my computer... First with VirtualBox then in a dedicated Partition. Pardus looks great http://linuxadvantage.blogspot.com/2010/10/presentation-de-pardus-2011.html". It really does look good, so I'm wondering why I had so much trouble with it.
That said, commenter Brian experienced trouble with it as well, though he was able to make it to the desktop, at least: "It isn't too great on my PC either. The alpha release had to use KDE safe node to boot into a desktop. pisi update-repo and pisi update seemed to upgrade the system until I installed the nvidia drivers, then that failed as well.A fresh beta install attempt ends with a slew of partition errors and a traceback report with no viable option to send it back to the developers."

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's post, and remember, if you enjoy the material, please do subscribe!
On a somewhat related note, I am essentially done with my latest Fresh OS creations, so keep your eyes peeled, for I will probably upload them to the SourceForge project page sometime this week. Please do check them out and let me know what you think!

Will KPresenter and Gnumeric Please Come Forward?

This is probably one of the few times that I'm wishing that I had Microsoft Office on my computer. (As it happens, as I go to the library for at least an hour every weekday anyway, I just used Microsoft Office there.) Why?
Well, for my latest chemistry problem set, I need to plot a range of data and add a trend line. Although OpenOffice.org Calc can do this, there aren't as many options. It only gives options for linear, exponential, power, and logarithmic trend lines, none of which are what I want. Although the power regression fits well, what I want is a quadratic regression, and this is something that I just can't do in OpenOffice.org, which is really a shame. I remember when testing some distribution that included Gnumeric (I don't remember which one), I needed to do a similar thing then, so I tried to do it in Gnumeric; if I remember right, Gnumeric did offer the option of a polynomial regression line (with the order of the polynomial specified by the user). Score 1 for Gnumeric, 0 for OpenOffice.org. Also, last year, I needed to make a 3D plot (x, y, f(x, y)), which is possible in Microsoft Office Excel. OpenOffice.org, unfortunately, doesn't have this capability, and at that time (I don't know if the situation has changed much now), it couldn't even render an already-created chart properly. I tried to recreate the same chart with Gnumeric, and, lo and behold, it worked perfectly! Score 2 for Gnumeric, 0 for OpenOffice.org.
Also, last year, I found myself needing to create and view many spreadsheets with lots of data (thousands of rows). Although this wasn't problematic per se in OpenOffice.org, it was certainly a lot slower than in Microsoft Office Excel. Score -1 for OpenOffice.org? Maybe.
So what does KPresenter have to do with all this? Well, it's just that in my experience, KPresenter does a whole lot better in terms of usability and ability to create high-quality presentations than either OpenOffice.org Impress or Microsoft Office Powerpoint. That's because the whole KOffice suite is geared towards desktop publishing as opposed to traditional document creation. Score 1 for KOffice, 0 for both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.
Oracle is being rather wishy-washy about the future of OpenOffice.org, which isn't confidence-inspiring either. I would say the only things OpenOffice.org have going for it are Writer and Math. In the near (or not-so-near, I don't know) future, I may supplant Calc and Impress with Gnumeric and KPresenter. And honestly, AbiWord is a pretty good alternative to Writer as well.