Battle of the OS

With the very near release of Vista, BBC.co.uk technology news is running a Battle of the OSs and requesting user comments on their favourite OS in 100 words or less.

Open Document Format

As the founder of a Mac User Group (KESMUG), I know that there are users of many different
office suites (MS Office, Abiword, Nisus, OpenOffice.org/NeoOffice) and systems (Mac/Linux/PC), I would be very interested to know what you all think of the Open Document Format (ODF)?

I know that ODF is a standard developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) using XML to store and exchange data. Some 600 organizations worldwide, many big corporate names among them, assisted OASIS in developing ODF. It also
had a public test phase before final voting on the specification by OASIS members. ODF was voted as an International Standard by the ISO/IEC on May 2nd 2006.

Why do we need ODF?
Many governments around the world are switching to Linux OS and ODF. This is not about them saving money (though the benefits are huge) or putting Microsoft down. It is about the preservation of information. Each new version of MS Office changes the file format used. I read that Office XP cannot open Office 2000 files. Governments need to retain information for decades, even centuries. This is why MS has been asked for years to produce an Open file format that is accessible to anyone regardless of what system/software used. They were instructed to do so by the EU in 2004.

Instead MS chose to ignore its customers requests and produce its own xml format, MS Office Open XML. Now I have not read the license for this format but am given to understand that it is not Open, nor does it meet any of the specifications of the Standard. Nor is it interoperable with other non-MS office suites. Microsoft have produced the Office 2007 Format Compatibility Pack but it does not open ODF files, instead it converts them into Ms Office Open XML. It’s a stop gap until
whatever ends up in MS Office 2008.

What’s good about ODF?
If you change the file tag .odt (open document text) to .zip, you will see the following files at least;

* content.xml

* META-INF/manifest.xml

* meta.xml

* mimetype

* settings.xml

* styles.xml

Images and macros would be contained in additional folders. Thismakes it easy to recover data from files should it be necessary. ODF is used by many Office suites and the file size is a lot smaller than what MS Office produces. I have converted a few to ODF and some are only one third the size of their MS counterpart.

1. I am considering changing all files to ODF. What do you think?
2. Do you use ODF?
3. Have you had any problems with exchanging ODF documents?

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2007 New Year

Happy New Year to my readers. It’s off to a busy start what with putting all the decorations back in the loft, sorting out car insurance and card payments. Plus a new management team at work moving desks about and seeing who blags the best bits of furniture.

The holidays went fast this year which I suppose means that we enjoyed ourselves. We hosted Christmas dinner this year for a couple of relations. That went off without a hitch due to preparing most of it the day before.

The kids as usual got too much stuff so we now have the usual problem of where to keep it all? I strongly suspect there will be a post crimbo charity shop donation very soon. Once these chores are dealt with I can get back to finishing off painting our hallway.

On the PC side of things, I have been running Ubuntu 6.1 Edgy Eft for a few weeks on a laptop. I must say that I prefer the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu to YaST on Suse. It makes it really easy to install new apps that are clearly categorized. Also Automatix is an excellent tool used to add the proprietory drivers for apps like Realplayer, or the ability to play MP3 files. Though saying all this, I will likely replace Edgy with OpenSuse10.2 as I really miss being able to use Novell’s iFolder to share all my work files across different machines.