Recently in Free software Category

I know that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Question: Why another Web browser? While Windows and Mac users overwhelmingly use Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smattering using Apple's Safari, there's plenty of room for other entries in the browser space.

I don't know about you, but I'm in a Web browser about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, both for the traditional task of looking at Web pages but increasingly to use Web-based software.

And for something so important, choice is key.

Users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems are used to having lots of browsers to choose from, among them Firefox (and its non-copyrighted Iceweasel offshoot in Debian), Epiphany (the GNOME browser created from Mozilla's Gecko engine), Konqueror (the KDE browser/file manager from which Apple took code to create Safari), Seamonkey (the Mozilla-created Web suite that's modeled after the now-dead Netscape Communicator, offering browsing, e-mail and Web design in one application), Dillo (a very lightweight browser), Netsurf (also lightweight), a few more that I'm probably forgetting, plus text-only browsers that include Elinks, Links, Lynx and W3m.

I'd never used Opera before, mostly because of its closed-source status, although I have been "forced" to use Internet Explorer -- also closed source (hey, it's Microsoft -- what do any of us expect?), and besides, IE runs only in Windows and not in Linux (without difficulty, meaning use of WINE or a virtual machine) or Apple's OS X.

And our main Web application insists on IE not for all, but for the most "advanced" operation.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I saw staff artist and Flash guru Jon Gerung using the Opera browser for the very task that usually demands IE.

Since then, I've downloaded Opera and have begun using it to work on Dailynews.com -- and for everything else, too.

There are a few instances where the CSS drops out, one situation where a link won't open, but for 99 percent of my work on this task, Opera does it as good as IE, often times better -- and always much, much faster.

That's the best thing about the Opera Web browser -- it's very fast. And that matters a great deal when doing Web-intensive work. You want to wait as little as possible for the software to do its thing so you can ... do your thing.

The company that makes Opera -- called Opera Software -- provides versions for many platforms. It's a pity you can't get the source and compile it yourself for Linux/Unix, but the speed and functionality of Opera is too good for me to pass up at the moment.

I'll still use Firefox -- probably a lot -- since it's the go-to browser for just about everybody out there, and I need to use the Web Developer add-on, but there's no denying that Opera is simply one of the best applications I've seen lately.

Zack Whittaker's iGeneration blog has quickly become a must-read. His post on The Killer Apps of Academia is well worth bookmarking for future reference.

He mentions quite a few apps I use every day, from the obvious (Firefox, OpenOffice) to the less-so (Notepad++, Audacity).

Among the ones I hadn't heard of but want to try immediately are LogMeIn Free, which, if the description is correct, is like GoToMyPC, letting you control a Windows PC from a remote location, but without the costs involved. There is a "Pro" version with more features, but the fact that there even is a free version warms my cockles considerably.

As one of the ways to keep track of my journey through the world of Linux and BSD distributions, on every CD I try to write the date I burned it. I can't remember how I found out about my first Linux live CD, Knoppix 5.1.1 (some Web story must've gone on about how great it was to run a full Linux without doing a hard-drive install), but the date I wrote on the case is Jan. 29, 2007 -- soon after the 5.1.1 release came out. And it wasn't just my first live CD, it was also the first Linux CD of any kind I made -- and my first experience with a Unix-like operating system since leaving adm3a and VT-100 terminals behind after my college days in the 1980s.

I remember running that Knoppix CD on my Dell box. I didn't know what Debian was. I had no idea that KDE was Knoppix's desktop environment -- or that there were many alternatives. I didn't know why the Web browser that looked like Firefox was called Iceweasel.

Since then I've spent considerable time running Puppy and Damn Small Linux from live CDs (and in hard-drive installs, usually of the three-or-so-file "frugal" variety).

I recently burned both Puppy Linux 3.0 and Damn Small Linux 4.0. On the one hand, I'm thinking about doing reviews of both. On the other, I think it's time to replace the Debian setup on the $15 Laptop, a Compaq Armada 7770dmt. I've been running it for months with a very basic Debian Etch install. I started with the "standard" install, then added X and Fluxbox, along with the apps I wanted. It's been running fairly well, but the problems with various applications have been piling up. I know that if I use Puppy or DSL, the apps I want should work perfectly from the get-go. Of course I could also do a fuller Debian install -- say the Xfce version -- which would include many more applications ...

So before I dive back into live CDs, here's what's been troubling me with my Debian Etch install. The laptop is so old (probably circa '98) that it doesn't have USB ports. I have my trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card installed -- it works with just about every Linux distro out there -- and I have the CD drive plugged in. The floppy drive is dead, but who needs it? I have the original 3 GB hard drive, and it's pretty full, even though I've got nowhere near the full Debian install on it. I really should buy a new hard drive that's way bigger and less prone to failure.

Anyhow, the 233 MHz, 64 MB system probably could run Xfce, but I've been conservative, running both the console and Fluxbox as needed. Maximum memory for the Compaq is 144 MB, but I've been too lazy and cheap to buy the RAM. The CMOS battery is dead, and I've really been too lazy to crack the case (TORX screws aplenty) and see how to switch it out. I have the network time server app installed, and that resets the clock at each boot.

I originally wanted to handle my work e-mail over IMAP with Mutt and MSMTP. Never mind that to get a Mutt setup seems to be the height of geek competence (a height to which I do not reach), but since my original push to get the .muttrc and .msmtprc files just right, something changed and I can no longer send mail. I could never figure out how to handle multiple mail accounts over IMAP (POP is easier, since you can POP all the mail down and filter it ... and by "easier," I mean harder but doable).

So I installed Sylpheed, which I figured would be light enough for the 233 MHz box. I've always liked Sylpheed, although I've migrated over to Evolution and Thunderbird on my other boxes.

On first launch of Sylpheed, I got an error message that some parameter in some file (I confess, I didn't recognize any of it) was missing. So I went ahead and configured Sylpheed. It didn't work.

I have AbiWord installed -- my go-to lightweight word processor -- but the graphics of the laptop just can't keep up. I type, and the letters appear seconds later. Ted might work better, but it's broken in Etch. You can neither create a new file nor open an old one.

On the brighter side, the Dillo browser works great (although the fonts are better in Damn Small Linux and Vector), and I also have had no problem with Iceweasel (aka Firefox), Lynx or my favorite light image editor, MtPaint (which should be an official Debian package available via apt-get but for some reason can only be found at Sourceforge and on other distros like Vector and Zenwalk). I've also been very pleased with Mousepad as a text editor, with Nano and Vi as backups. (I'm more of a Nano users because I just don't spend a lot of time in console editors and have ragged Vi chops).

So I'm able to get my work done in Etch, but I have a feeling that I'd be better off -- especially at 64 MB of RAM -- with Damn Small Linux.

And with the release of version 4.0, what better time to re-evaluate the distro, which has been in or near the Distrowatch top 10 for quite some time.

So I pulled the CDs for Puppy 3.00, DSL 4.0 and Knoppix 5.1.1. I'm not ready to break out the Compaq laptop just yet, so I used my main test box, the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client that runs a VIA C3 Samuel 1 GHz processor and 256 MB of RAM.

I plugged in a USB drive, with my hope being that I could then unplug the hard drive, boot from CD and then have no drives whirring for the duration.

That worked with Knoppix, Puppy, even with a Vector SOHO live CD I burned a week ago (and let me say that just as Vector excels with the Xfce desktop, it also does remarkably well in KDE).

But Damn Small Linux? No, it wouldn't boot with the hard drive disconnected. I tried versions 3.3 and 3.2 as well. No go for any of them.

My USB key is a little unsual. It was a freebie, and has a CD advertising image (detected almost always as drive sr0) as well as a 256 MB flash memory. Puppy found the flash just fine (I've always had great luck with hardware detection, especially of drives, with Puppy), and I was able to boot without a hard drive, run entirely in RAM, and save my settings and files to the pup_save on the USB drive. Brilliant, as usual.

Neither Knoppix nor DSL could find the USB flash drive, but I suspect with a "pure" USB drive the results would be different.

Even so, I've done quite a few Puppy reviews, and I wanted to start out with Damn Small Linux. So I plugged in a hard drive, booted DSL (using the dsl toram boot code that loads the whole distro into RAM) and was off.

Quickly, things that are better in DSL 4.0: network configuration is smoother than ever. Once I entered my static IP, DSL guessed the rest of the info pretty darn well. I entered my local name servers, but the gateway and broadcast addresses were correct without me doing anything. I was able to get printing working with apsfilter (I could never replicate my success in Etch, by the way).

The default window manager in DSL is now JWM, and the thing I miss most is the menu that used to come up with a right mouse click. It's easy enough, however, to change window managers to the old DSL's Fluxbox, and then everything is the way I like it. But I'm getting used to JWM (Joe's Window Manager) in DSL, and I like the clickable folders on the desktop -- it's easier and more intuitive than using the file manager.

Anyhow ... I'm not ready yet for a full DSL review, so let me just tell you that to me -- and many others, I suspect -- Puppy, DSL and Knoppix are VERY important distros in the Linux universe. Going from Windows or Mac to the world of Linux might not have happened for many of us if we didn't have live CDs that actually work that way with which to experiment.

And in many cases, working with a live CD or frugal install that allows files and parameters to be saved, either on the hard drive or on removable media, can be an easy, secure and preferable way to use a PC. Especially when it comes to DSL and Puppy, upgrading can be as easy as downloading and burning the latest ISO. And if you don't want to upgrade? No problem -- just use the version you want.

I did spend at least half a day running Knoppix with no hard drive. As I said above, Knoppix didn't find my USB drive (a situation that might be remedied with a more standard flash drive). As the king of live CDs, Knoppix, which is not one of those distros that is continually coming out with new releases, runs very, very well. Even when not running it in RAM, Knoppix is surprisingly quick, even with KDE. And if you do have 1 GB of RAM, I highly recommend running it with the toram boot option. I definitely plan to get the book "Knoppix Hacks," which has a new release slated for this month, as well as the new Damn Small Linux book.

And this thought has crossed my mind: I just might hack together a PC with 2 GB of RAM, and either a Compact Flash card or USB flash drive for storage, with no hard drive at all, to run Knoppix entirely in RAM.

(By the way, Puppy seems to know when it has enough memory to run in RAM -- I don't think you have to pass that information in a boot code).

And while the live CDs of Ubuntu, Mepis and others are helpful in terms of evaluating hardware detection, they're not designed to be used day-to-day in that manner. But DSL, Puppy and Knopix are -- and they all can be installed to the hard drive if you wish.

Before I wrap up this entry, I want to say that everybody should try Puppy, DSL and Knoppix. Download the ISOs, burn the CDs and start experimenting with all the boxes you can find. I've had more fun with live CDs than in anything else I've done with Linux. After a few months in Debian, Slackware and Ubuntu, it's a nice change of pace (and yes, I've tried Slax -- which I like -- and I plan to give Wolvix a spin soon).

So burn yourself some live CDs -- and make a half-dozen or so extras to hand out at will. It's the best way to get people started on exploring the non-Windows world of computing.

The Daily News isn't known for being on the technological bleeding edge. Not three years ago, we were all cursing Windows 98 for crashing with a single Explorer window open. We were running 400 MB Celerons (not bad) with 32 MB of RAM (very bad).

When we got a new publishing system a couple years ago, that meant new PCs to go with it. They are Dell Optiplexes with Pentium 4 processors at 3 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. Not even a full GB. But I can't complain. With XP, everything runs great. Except for those unexplained instances where everything slows to a crawl.

Aside from our networked publishing system (Unisys Hermes, for those who follow such things) and the antivirus package (can't remember what it is at the moment), every last thing is freeware or shareware.

The company installed OpenOffice. I added The GIMP and IrfanView for image editing and EditPad Lite for text editing. That's pretty much it.

So much of what I do happens via Web interface (software applications as services) that at this point I don't really need to run any applications that aren't available in better and freer versions on the Linux platform.

The exception is one of our Web-based apps that, for some reason, requires Internet Explorer. Even on Mac. Yes, you have to use an outdated, security-compromised browser that Microsoft abandoned years ago in order to make the application work. I'm glad that most of my SAAS work is now on the Clickability Web publishing system, which supports both IE and Firefox.

My big revelation this week is that Clickability works much better on Firefox than on IE. Now even on Windows, where I've continued to use IE heavily even up until this very week, I'm migrating over to Firefox (and away from Outlook and toward Thunderbird as well). See, all this use of Linux just makes you want to use the same apps, even when you must work in Windows.

And it goes both ways. I always say that the best way to get people using free, open-source software is to give them applications on their current platforms. OpenOffice, AbiWord, Thunderbird, Firefox, the GIMP -- use them in Windows and Mac OS X, and it's that much easier and way less foreign to switch to the Linux or BSD operating systems and still be using your new, free favorites.

Only the Daily News' Unisys Hermes publishing system has no open-source client solution. (The product was recently purchased from Unisys by newspaper-system giant Atex, I just learned. I don't know what effect that has on anything. But I bet SAAS is even coming to the print-publishing world, and future newspaper systems will be even less reliant on specialized client software and run on any system that has a compatible browser.)

Since this blog has a category called "The $15 Laptop," you know the following:

a) I love keeping old hardware running
and b) I'm cheap.

The $15 Laptop itself -- a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz processor, 64 MB of RAM, an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver wireless card and a 3 GB hard drive running Debian Etch -- has been a trouper. I did the standard install of Debian and used apt to add X and Fluxbox. It's been great for Web browsing with IceWeasel (nee Firefox), Dillo, Lynx and Elinks. I handle mail with Sylpheed. I use AbiWord, Leafpad and Nano for writing.

Every time I boot the $15 Laptop, I want to party like it's 1999, because that's the year it reverts to each and every time. I could set the system clock at the command line every session, but who wants to do that? I'd replace the battery, if I only knew how. I'd be $10 poorer, too. But there's really no need: Enter the Network Time Protocol.

The Debian Admin site had all the info:

apt-get install ntpdate

That's it. Now my Debian-equipped laptop grabs the time over the Internet every time I boot, and I can stop thinking about where in the hell the CMOS battery even is, let alone how many screws I'd have to remove to get to it.

P.S. I bet ntpdate is a great thing to have even if you're CMOS battery is just fine.

Seen via LXer and written by Dave Gutteridge for the Tokyo Linux Users Group, Windows Is Free gets to the heart of the problem:

The fact is that there's a distortion in the idea that Linux can't be given away. There's something wrong in the idea the price difference between Windows and Linux is representative of the actual quality difference. There's an elephant in the room that no one is talking about.

Windows is free.

I'm not talking about the fact that Windows comes pre-installed in most computers, with its price hidden in the cost of the hardware. That contributes to the idea of Windows being free, but that's not the elephant in the room.

"The elephant in the room that no one is talking about is cracked software." The elephant in the room that no one is talking about is cracked software.

People treat Windows as being free not because they didn't have to buy the copy that came with their computer. People think of Windows as free because when they need a copy, they can get it from a guy they know. Someone has a copy they can just burn to a CD for you.

For me, this is a prime motivator steering me toward free GNU/Linux and applications like OpenOffice, AbiWord, the GIMP, Thunderbird and others.

I don't want to steal. But I don't want to pay, either. Especially for the stuff that Microsoft, Adobe and others are selling and at the prices they're asking. Hell -- a copy of Microsoft Works, which includes an ancient copy of Word, is $99 at Target. MS is about to release a version of Works for free, but you can bet that Word will not be included.

Just about everyone I work with thinks Photoshop, at $650 per copy, runs rings around the GIMP, which is free. For what they're doing -- and for what MOST users need to do -- the GIMP does an excellent job. And for the simplest of tasks, IrfanView in Windows and mtPaint in Linux load about 20 times quicker and do the job just as well.

Yesterday, a co-worker tried to use an old, legit copy of Photoshop to size some images, and it wouldn't open half of the JPGs we threw at it. The GIMP did them all. And upgrades of free software remain just that -- free.

As the article describes, people think that since their computer came with Windows, they have a lifelong license to use any future version without paying for it. I've done it. Now I'd rather not -- and I have an alternative, so I don't.

And just because it's easy to exchange pirated discs of MS Office, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and the like, the whole thing makes me feel more than a little squirrely. And if I'm not comfortable shelling out what would amount to thousands (and hundreds more every year for "upgrades") just to make my PC do what I want, why should businesses be any more comfortable with it?

And what if that $200 upgrade of Windows Vista runs like crap on my current hardware? Do I get my money back from MS? If SimplyMepis is too sluggish, I can just install Debian or Slackware over it. I can buy more memory if KDE isn't running so well, or I can use XFCE or Fluxbox to make things work on an old computer that won't run XP or Vista and would never load a new version of Photoshop.

One of the great, liberating things that comes with using GNU/Linux and other free, open-source software is the moral high ground. I don't think what Microsoft is doing is right -- abandoning old products so we'll all buy new ones every other year or so. Most respond by using pirated software, but it's better to reject the Microsoft model outright and use free, open-source applications as much as you can.

Don't steal from Microsoft, Adobe and others just because you don't like the way they do business. Take the other road.

The beta version of RealPlayer 11 is out and it's free.

Among the new features, RealPlayer 11 allows users to burn videos
to CDs in the VCD format. (You will need to buy the $29.99 RealPlayer Plus to burn to DVDs).

RealPlayer 11 is also capable of recognizing video content protected by DRM (digital rights management) and blocking it from being recorded.

RealNetworks is also planning additional features - such as allowing video content to be downloaded to iPods and other portable devices.

Huh? What? Why?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, what you've all been waiting for (or perhaps not), the Safari browser that Apple bundles with each and every Macintosh computer sold is now coming to a Windows desktop near you. (Stories here, here and here).

No longer content with Microsoft orphaning its IE browser (no doubt because of the initial development of Safari at Apple), the folks in Cupertino are bringing Safari to the masses -- the Windows-using masses.

You might inquire as to what Steve Jobs is smoking? But he's Steve Jobs ... so whatever it is he in fact is smoking, he's using $100 bills as rolling papers.

Again, why?

But Jobs and Co. have a plan: You will use Safari, O Windows user, because it will be the only way to run Web-compatible apps with the soon-to-debut iPhone. And you will also use Safari, you Windows XP and Vista users, you, because it will be distributed with the wildly popular, culture-changing content-pushing engine known as iTunes.

Jobs cites a 5 percent share of the browser market for Safari, 78 percent for IE, and 15 percent for Firefox.

As for the iTunes connection:

(Jobs) noted that there are a million downloads of iTunes a day, with 500 million of those going to Windows machines.

“We know how to reach these (Windows) customers,” Jobs said.

And Jobs says Safari is faster than Firefox and IE. Want to find out for yourself? Download the beta.

My 2 cents: I was initially a big fan of the Safari browser in OS X. IE on the Mac was dead, killed by Microsoft (for reasons that continue to escape me -- the development of Safari itself not being sufficient), and I thought that Firefox just took too long to load. So I got used to Safari, and it was running pretty well ... until most "sophisticated" Web apps started breaking like crazy. Blogger never worked that well, even before it had a total Googlized redo, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets wouldn't even try to work. Notice that it's Google in both cases? I don't know what that says about the whole deal, but I want to use both Blogger and Google Docs (formerly Writely), and Safari just can't do it.

So I started to use Firefox on the Mac, and I'm pretty darn happy with it. Once you load it (yep, it does take a long time on my iBook G4 1GHz), you can just leave it running and open a new Firefox window in seconds. Now if Safari for Mac "catches up" to Firefox in terms of sheer functionality, I'd be inclined to give it another try. (I'm on 10.3.9, and the Safari developers abandoned that platform long ago ... if Firefox does the same, I'll have to upgrade to 10.4, I guess. But for Mac at least, Safari is in pretty big trouble, in my opinion.)

On my Windows XP box, it's a bit different. I have Firefox loaded, but I rarely use it. I'm pretty happy with IE 6 (I haven't yet made the leap to IE 7 -- I could use the tabbed browsing, but I'm loathe to give up something that "just works.")

Safari for Windows? I'll probably try it. But as I've said before, if Steve Jobs really wants to shake this shit up, he'll release OS X -- IN IT'S FREAKIN' ENTIRETY -- for PC and knock Microsoft and the rest of the computer industry on its collective ass.

So while Safari for Windows is something, it ain't everything by one gigantic, bare-assed longshot.

Dell and Canonical have made it official -- the PC-making behemoth will install the No. 1 desktop distro, Ubuntu, on select models. The full interview on video with Mr. Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, is on the Direct2Dell site, which recently asked users what they wanted in their next Dell (most said Linux, and most of those said Ubuntu). But if you don't want to watch the video and would rather read it, go to Ed Burnette's ZDNet blog.

Here's one question and answer:

How did this relationship between Canonical and Dell come about?

I think both organizations have been eyeballing each other for some time. Ubuntu has grown very rapidly as a desktop platform, and many of our users are running Ubuntu on Dell computers. On the Dell side, I think folks have noticed they were hearing about Ubuntu more and more. Michael Dell picked up on the trend of adoption. So, over the last couple years we've slowly been engaging. With the results of the Dell IdeaStorm there was sufficient critical mass for the idea, effectively, to take another step and turn some of those discussions into a project. The team has been working fast and furiously on that for the last couple months.

George Ou, who writes the Real World IT blog for ZDNet, did a lengthy analysis of Microsoft Office 2007 vs. the free Open Office 2.2 suite. Not surprisingly, Open Office continues to be a resource hog, although the situation is improving over previous releases. Go to the entry for all the numbers, but here are some of his findings:

Office 2007 base memory consumption went up significantly compared to the Office 2003 I measured last year, but it's still significantly less than OpenOffice.org 2.2. Some of the OpenOffice.org applications, like Base, require Java to run, and the memory consumption spikes over 70 megabytes as soon as you start navigating in the interface. However, the difference between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org base resource consumption has gotten smaller.

... we can see that the OpenOffice.org ODF XML parser (while vastly improved) is still about 5 times slower than Microsoft's OOXML parser. OpenOffice.org also seems to consume nearly 4 times the amount of RAM to hold the same data. While OpenOffice.org continues to have fewer features than Microsoft Office, it continues to consume far more resources than Microsoft.

... It would appear that OpenOffice.org 2.2 has gotten significantly better than version 2.0, but it still has a lot to work on. ... So while I may still consider OpenOffice.org a resource pig, the pig has definitely lost some weight.

Since this is an open-source vs. MS issue (and, to some extent, a Linux vs. Windows issue, even though OO has both Linux and Windows versions), there are dozens of comments in various states of support and anger. At least one points out that once you open one Open Office app, it's quicker to open another one.

It's hard not to notice that Microsoft Office apps open extremely quickly in Windows (and, of course, they don't open at all in Linux, unless you're doing so under Wine). I have MS Office 6 on my old Mac Powerbook 1400, and that version is a real, honest-to-God dog, it's so slow. But on a modern Windows box, MS Office is, if anything, fast as hell.

On my Windows box (which DOESN'T have MS Office), the Open Office "Quickstarter" is always sitting in RAM, allowing a fairly quick start of the program. I don't quite know how I feel about it in terms of resources. I don't really use OO that much -- I'm mostly running our paper's publishing system (Unisys Hermes) and for blog writing, when I'm not working directly in Movable Type, I use AbiWord or EditPad. And I open about one spreadsheet a month (I'm a total Excel-phobe) in OO.

I use OO so little on the Windows box, I'm still on version 1.1.4. I have version 2 downloaded; I just have to get around to installing it. We have MS Office on the iBook at home, but I'm not all that comfortable using it (I've gottten rusty in Word over the years). Of course, I have OO on most of my Linux systems, but I'm mostly using AbiWord and a variety of text editors at this point. My love affair with KWrite pretty much stalled when the only time I could get "typograpical quotes" to work was in MepisLite, a distro that Mepis pretty much abandoned. In both Slax and Kubuntu, the "smart" quotes don't work. So it's AbiWord for the moment (and I'm hoping for my two most-wanted AbiWord features -- "smart" quotes and the ability to change the case of letters from the keyboard -- to be added, though I am not holding my breath).

But in the larger world of open source and Linux, Open Office is VERY important. The fact that it's free is a powerful incentive to use it -- and since it covers most of MS Office's bases, it's essential for many who might consider switching to Linux for desktop use. To "sell" open source apps and operating systems to the unbelieving public, you've gotta be able to deal with MS file formats, and while AbiWord and Gnumeric suffice, OO is better, albeit way slower. But if you're spending your whole day in, say, OO Writer, you load it once and keep it running -- start times for the program aren't such an issue.

For instance, I use the GIMP a whole lot, and while it's slow to load, as long as I've got the memory to run it, I just start it when I first need it and leave it running. Not something I'd recommend with less than 512 MB (and something I'd definitely recommend with 1 GB). But for low-resource Linux systems, mtPaint does what I need -- and it loads in a few seconds. The same is true in Windows: Irfanview isn't as powerful as the GIMP, and the former program is kind of quirky at times, but it does a pretty good job of editing images.

Of course, the best thing to do is get a PC with tons of CPU power and memory and just be blissfully unaware of all this.