Sun to offer Star Office on Singapore Airlines

Sun Microsystems will be offering its StarOffice suite to Singapore Airlines passengers on certain international flights.

The company has agreed to a deal with the airline that will integrate Staroffice into Krisworld, the free entertainment service that Singapore Airlines puts in its Boeing 777-300ER planes.

StarOffice is Sun Microsystem's implementation of the open source OpenOffice productivity suite.

"With heightened security, access to laptops during flights can sometimes be restricted," explained Wong Heng Chew, managing director of Sun's Singapore branch.

"The availability of Staroffice software as part of Krisworld offers Singapore Airlines' customers the opportunity to work on and access their information in an open, secure and freely available fashion."

The Staroffice service will be built in to the systems, but users will need to supply their own USB mice and keyboards. The system allows users to load and store documents through a USB storage device.

The documents can be saved as either Staroffice OpenXML documents or as PDF files. Both formats are compatible with Microsoft Office.

Currently, the Krisworld-equipped planes only fly from Singapore to Barcelona, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Milan, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul and Zurich. The company said that it plans to expand the service to other routes.

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