EIOffice: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Nicholas Petreley takes a spin at the Java-based EIOffice office suite. I also tried this software 2-3 weeks ago but it has ugly dependencies in regards to its installation routine:It requires to have installed the Gnome 1.4 subsystem for no good reason (not just GTK+ 1.2.x, it’s just that the person who coded the gui front end has no clue on how to not-link against Gnome libs your app doesn’t really need) and even then it would bail out if you have the exact needed filenames/folder names of glibc & Java (if your java folder is named differently it won’t install and it won’t even tell you about it to let you know what went wrong) and also it requires that your distro is RPM-based. I tried to install it on 4 distros (FC1, Arch, Slackware, JDS), but apparently the software was ONLY tested against Fedora Core 1 and even there it got installed after lots of tricks (renaming its .dat file as .zip and the uncompressing it and placing the files manually on the system) and some manual RPM installation (it wanted FC1 to be *unpatched*, because if you update with latest glibc from RHN it won’t install on FC1 either). The people who do EIOffice should really re-think the way their software installs (the app itself works fine –if a bit slow–, it’s just that its installation procedure is a nightmare making the whole experience very sour).

14 Comments

  1. 2004-06-02 6:29 pm
  2. 2004-06-02 7:02 pm
  3. 2004-06-02 7:09 pm
  4. 2004-06-02 7:25 pm
  5. 2004-06-02 7:32 pm
  6. 2004-06-02 8:56 pm
  7. 2004-06-02 9:19 pm
  8. 2004-06-02 10:46 pm
  9. 2004-06-02 10:50 pm
  10. 2004-06-03 2:50 am
  11. 2004-06-03 3:36 am
  12. 2004-06-03 11:13 am
  13. 2004-06-03 11:29 am
  14. 2004-06-03 2:56 pm