My sincere thanks to all of the 30 people who responded.
SUMMARY
For Question# 2 (Almost all responded to this question) :
- Staroffice (Free!) from Sun, suggested by everyone. Few people
cautioned that Startoffice may not handle MS documents with complex
(or a bit involved) macros. One response said "Staroffice is 98% MS
compatible."
-WordPerfect 8 (also handles MS word)
-Adobe Frame maker
-Applixware (applix.com)
-Corel's office suite (corel.com)
-purchase a SUN PCI card in order to run Microsoft in Native mode on your
SPARC.
-if you have a Terminal Server on an NT box you can have an ICA client for
Solaris and run Microsoft Suite.
For Question# 1:
-No, you will have to recompile (then use automounter/script
to mount/run the appropriate).
-You need to write your applications so they store their data in endian
independent format. Perhaps the best thing to do is use the
networking macros and store all data in network order.
- Java
For those who want to run NT on Ultra-10 SPARC, here is more information:
-Use Sun's SunPCi card in the Ultra-10; This has an AMD K6-2 400 MHz
CPU, video, and 64MB RAM; it runs either Windows 98 or NT natively,
using the Sun's disk for its diskdrives; it can display it's windows
either on a separate monitor, or mixed with the X windows on the user's
Sun screen.
We've found for our users that an Ultra5 with a SunPCi and
PGX32 costs about the same as an Ultra10, and is much more usable
for what they need to do (a mixture of Sun and MS stuff). And it
will run ANY program that will run under NT. (The 333 MHz/2M cache
CPU on the -5 is quite a bit faster than the 360 MHz/256K cache CPU,
by the way.)
-----Original Message ---
Cost of a latest PC is now comparable, to Sun's current Ultra-10 promotion
sale (at least for educational customers).
Our UNIX users use PCs for running a few MS Office products. Solaris (Intel)
will not run our applications already built under Sparc because of Little
Endian, Big Endian issues.
My option here is to use a PC with Solaris (Intel) and in dual boot mode, OR
to just get an Ultra-10. So here are my questions:
1) Is there a way to compile applications such that it will run both on
Intel and Sparc? Is it XDL(?) libraries, has anyone used this?
2) How to get applications that function close to Microsoft's Word, Excel,
and PowerPoint under Solaris 7 or 8, so that I avoid using Microsoft? Who is
the vendor?
----------------------------------------------
Sundar Paramasivan mparamas@iupui.edu
Systems Administrator
Indiana University Radiology/Imaging Science
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:14:05 CDT