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OpenOffice 641d Released, Next Stop: 1.0
Damek writes "In the spirit of the proliferating news about Office alternatives and 1.0 versions this week, OpenOffice.org has released a new version of OpenOffice, 641d, the last planned release before 1.0. They're calling for help in pinning down and eradicating final bugs before they hit the big milestone: "...we would like you to download it, test it, and finally vote on the feature set.""
Its takes almost as long to start up OpenOffice as it does to start Linux.
Hail to the king, baby!
I love OS_X i have recently switched to OS_X from many years with windows. If i were a more advanced developer i would help but i wouldnt want to use my code.
Anyone know what the status of the OS_X port is ? I know star division was supporting Mac OS.
Why does this get modded down as flamebait?
This is a serious issue
In my experience advanced operating systems like windows load significantly faster in the GUI department than operating systems primarily based around the command line.
If linux is ever going to storm the desktop market they are going to have to address issues of GUI responsiveness.
Whatever happened to porting OpenOffice to GTK? Was this ever seriously considered or did I just imagine it?
I recently had to convert 100 pages of M$-Word to Latex. There was loads of mathematics in it, and Open Office helped me a great deal in seeing what the original looked like, since i don't have any M$ on my machine.
nearly 1.0 but no rpms out there ?
I liked it alot, but I had some trouble running it at first. I fiddled with everything to get it to work, finaly I just gave up and started to read slashdot, after a few mins I went down to the taskbar to check the status on a POV render and low and behold there was a button on the taskbar for open office so I checked it out and the damn thing started up. I havn't had a problem sense.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
with the recent stories about the implications of star office being charged for, it's good to see that openoffice is setpping up to the plate.
if I were the developers working on openoffice, I'd be thankin my lucky stars(no pun inteded) that sun decided to charge for it. with the growing wave of 'open and free is better' I think they can capitalize on it.
As a former BeOS user, I also noticed gobe productive made the news. sweet.
Now comes the important part. in a month, I'm switching over to a completely linux system, and I'm gonna need a replacement for Office. so who's it gonna be?:)
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
If microsoft office didn't come pre-packaged with new computers, who would use office? Why spend a couple hundred bucks?
the only possible reason would be that extremely *cough* cute and helpfull paperclip person/thing
While i like the features of Openoffice, i hate the way the whole thing works. The desktop of Staroffice 5.2 has been removed, but OO is still one big process and the different applications are just modules. If only one of these modules hangs and you have to kill it, all your OO aplications get killed. Another result is, for me starting up the Writer takes as long as starting up the whole 5.2 Desktop.
I hope that this changes in one of the future versions, but i have the feeling that it won't.
Unless they are planning a linux only type release then openoffice is nowhere near version 1, I'm all for software for linux but really it isn't hard to make the code portable enough that it will compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OsX etc. Right now it compiles nicely in NetBSD ports n thats it, the others are all broken. If I was enough of a C hacker I would try and do my bit but my gripe is the portability issue should have been thought of from the start, if it had been then we could be close to a true open source office solution that everyone (nearly) can use.
-mutter- something something something...
We were using the StarOffice 6-beta release, but when I heard of the 31-3-02 timebomb in it, we moved to OpenOffice 641C. Of course now there is a patch to extend StarOffice, but we won't be needing it.
The 641 build is quite stable and complete. Oh - except for that Australian dictionary. Maybe I should go make one...
I'm looking forward to the proposed changes to the toolbars (look under the 'Todo' section on their site). Looks very nice. Maybe it will come with a performance improvement too. Hint, hint!!!
For a package thats 60+ megs to install, shouldnt it at least install without me having to configure it?
./setup
"
glibc version: 2.2.4
/tmp/sv001.tmp/setup.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.1-2.so.3: cannot open shared ojbect file: No such file or directory
"
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
the release (Linux binaries, Solver tree and sources)?
I'm trying to download it and provide a mirror, but it's impossible yet.
As one might infer from the original post, Open Office is a beta product.
Beta products have been known to have bugs now and again.
The best thing to do when you note a bug is to check and see if it's already been reported. If it hasn't, then you should go ahead and report it.
Complaining does little to make the product better. Reporting (and helping to fix) bugs does much.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
They've been saying that about Unix for years. Trouble is, we have a damn good necromancer keeping it going.
6 38c
6 41b
6 41c
6 41d
Why the version number contained with bra size?
after this is 1.0,
what's next?
1.0PU
1.1
1.1PU
1.2
1.2PU
(PU = Push up)
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
Well, there's still that other platform that most open source projects tend to neglect.
One thing I have wondered using OpenOffice (and als o Mozilla) is: How do they manage to make them so slow?! I am a software developer myself and even though I might never have made something as complex as OpenOffice or Mozilla, I can't see how they even manage to make the menues take ages to drop down.
.(StarOffice/Netscape is faster.. at least a little, or am I wrong there?).
My theory (call me paranoid) is that there are time loops in there to make the free version worse than the proprietary version
Find nice cocktail recipes @ www.spitzy.net
I'm interested in Open Office, but the first thing I always look for in a web site about a GUI-based software products is a set of screen shots, and they don't have any. I want to see what the product looks like. It would be really cool if OpenOffice would make some screen shots of their prodict available.
Miko O'Sullivan
Why do they even test with RedHat 6.2!?!
Hello! RedHat will be on 8.x soon enough. I know there are a few 6.x workstations still around but come on.
All I know is OpenOffice 641c & d don't work with RedHat 7.2. It starts then quits after a couple of seconds.
It doesn't matter how well it works. The main thing that matters to most people in an MS Office replacement is how well it reads and writes MS Office files. And that's, unfortunately, a moving target.
The article says 641D is the production (or near production) version. But if you go to the mirror sites, there's already a 642 version out there.
(Incidentally, neither of the US mirrors are working, but the one from Denmark seemed to work just fine. The links are further down on the page.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I grabbed 641D a couple of days ago, and I have to say that I'm impressed! Other than a few fonts that I haven't migrated to Linux, it's done a great job with complex tables and formatting.
The only thing that would stop me from using it as my regular word processor is that I can't figure out how to make it use imperial units (inches) instead of metric.
i havent had the chance to use open office, but i found star office to be very slow. mozilla on the other hand is fairly fast. it was slow at first but i believe it has improved alot in the last 6months or so. if you want something a little more light weight, try galeon. it's based on mozilla without all the frills.
-- john
Sorry, gnumeric isn't there yet for replacing Excel
neither is kspread, but they are getting pretty good for simple usage.
I expect that it is only a matter of a few months before it is usable for me
...restrained from exploiting their monopoly...the PC vendors can install openoffice, java, Perl, Mozilla on EVERY PC that they ship....that might give us a base to start with. Perhaps the XML file formats will become the basic document exchange standard...
I want to be alone with the sandwich
After trying the software all I can say is: Wow.
All the menus are pretty much instant, with the exception of the presentation wizard that had to read some files.
Ofcourse I can't say much on realworld use, but the first impression was excellent.
But after using for about 1/2 an hour, I'd say this thing is pretty impressive.
Just a couple of notes:
1) I find the interface a little (stress "little")clunky, but I'm a long time Office user. But I'd get used to it in about a week.
2) The Document default views are awful. I'm going to see if I can mess with this to make it more livable for me.
3) It opens Office XP Spreadsheets, Documents, and Powerpoints pretty well. I haven't thrown the kitchen sink at it though.
4) 1/2 hour isn't long enough to judge stability. But I haven't had any crashes or oddities yet.
This is a good package so far as I've looked. I'm going to try to work in it for the next few days and see if its good enough to recommend to relatives who need MS Office compatibility.
Hats off to these guys. This is excellent work.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Any reason why there isn't a debian package yet? I heard there was some kind of licensing problem (Maybe java?) Any one knows?
Why doesn't OO be a nice UNIX app and install in /usr/local with a .*rc in the home dir of each user? The way they have it now is like old DOS games where all goes into one directory, which is just silly in a UNIX environment (unless we want everyone installing >60MB apps in their home dir's....)
:-)
:-) Overall, though, hats off and THANK YOU's to the OpenOffice developers who lead the way for a real solution to the open-source office app void.
Also, why can't they include a simple database module with OO? Just something simple, to do simple Access-like db's?
I'll agree that it's too slow, but I think this latest release *is* a nudge faster. A GTK+ port would be wonderful. My general sense, though, is that they're just trying to weed through some questionably written code from waaaay back was it was commented in German.
I also think it makes no sense for developers to work on open-source projects that do the same thing (i.e. KOffice & OpenOffice, Mozilla & Konqueror, GNOME & KDE). Okay yeah, if someone wants a lighter, quicker version of something, that's great, but why start entirely new projects? One of the coolest examples of the *right* way to do stuff like this is the SkipStone browser, on which I'm typing this message. Not that Mozilla isn't getty fairly snappy with the latest milestones, but SkipStone implements the rendering engine without some of the "extras". (Galeon's dependence on GNOME is too weird for me- why have all those dependencies if you're trying to write something light? SS is much lighter anyway; the source tarball is like 400k.)
Okay, I got carried away.
I tried Star Office a year back and gave up because I found it to be too slow. I downloaded 641d for Windows yesterday and find that it is fast, stable and a pleasure to work with. I will try this for another month or so before I finally throw MS-Office out of the window -- no pun intended :) -- but I have to say it is looking very good indeed. Congratulations to the Open Office team.
You can try the ooqstart applet which preloads the Open Office binary for rapid startup.
It can be found on SourceForge: ooqstart.sourceforge.net
Excerpt from the project page:
This applet provides a quick launcher for Open Office 641C+ or Star Office 6.0+. It attempts to mimic the functionality provided by the quickstarter tray icon on the other operating system supported by Open Office.
The program attempts to keep a background process alive at all times, even if that process is terminated by the user. The four main applications: Writer, Calc, Draw, and Impress can be launched directly from the context menu of the applet.
WordPerfect import ability would really help.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
OpenOffice 641C only works for me when I set my windowmanager to use click-to-focus (somthing I dislike).
If I use enter-exit focus then all the menus and dropdown selectors disappear as I move the mouse from the menu/selector title to the menu itself.
this seems to happen irrespective of the window manager I use (even happens without a windowmanager).
Has this changed in 641D?
Regards,
Tim
This is all just my personal opinion.
Where do you redhat losers get off thinking you count for anything anyway?
Viva las Bolas del Alquitrán!
That's not actually a bad idea. A little, annoying, sarcastic penguin, that makes you agree to vote for him before he points out the glaringly obvious UI hints that you have been ignoring, and then staggers back to his igloo to continue drinking smoking and boinking the Dabo twins.
I hope OOFffice 1.0 has native FreeBSD support along with it, because right now I am stuck using StarOffice 5.2, as OOffice 641 won't run.
What's the difference between a necromancer and a
necrophile?
The necromancer pays for dinner.
.. mozilla.. *cough*
-- jbl
No matter how many bugs they expunge, the economics of the office favor MS. If I'm working in a business, and I have one document that doesn't paginate correctly, won't open, renders badly, or must be resent in another format, then the time and expense of dealing with just one problem and trying to prevent it from happening again has cost me as much as I've saved by using a zero cost package instead of MS-Office. And I'm not going to be the one who tells Mr. Big that I can't read his document because he uses Word.
I believe that's because it uses the old MS trick of pre-loading a lot of its stuff. unless you've turned that off...in which case i couldn't tell you why its faster.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
A few days ago, I posted a quick personal review of OO 641C. I've been impressed by the software, and my main complaint was the speed of the program as a whole.
I can gladly say that 641D has introduced significant speed increases under Linux. Startup time fell by half; whereas I used to wait 20 seconds to get a workspace, I now wait 10 seconds or less. The interface in general has sped up. Things feel much snappier, far less laggy. Dialogs open faster, new windows open faster, the whole thing feels like the developers spent much of their time between releases on optimizations and speed increases. I'm already very impressed.
The one thing I used to dread about starting up OO was the speed. I don't think I'll have any such worries anymore, as it doesn't seem to bog down the system either anymore - or at least, not as much.
I'm a happy user.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
OpenOffice is as bloated as StarOffice. It really needs optimization badly. Is there any way to compile each module separately? For example OpenWriter (15MB). Other module as OpenCalc (10MB).
6 .rpm
I think that would be very nice.
OpenWriter-1.0.i386.rpm
OpenCalc-1.0.i386.rpm
OpenPresentation-1.0.i38
For a while I couldn't figure out how to make the paper size for the printer (File, Printer settings) stay at Letter: it would always switch back to A4 after restarting the application.
/.../OpenOffice.org641/share/psprint/psprint. conf and change line 45 (PPD_PageSize) to "PPD_PageSize=Letter". As far as I know, there is no way to do this from within the application itself.
After some searching, I found the answer: edit file
Also note that this is regarding the Linux version of the 641D release (though it probably works elsewhere).
I still haven't figured out how to change the default style rules without creating (and always having to instantiate) a custom template. If anyone knows how, would you please share? Searching google, google groups, OO.o's issuezilla, and OO.o's mailing lists didn't turn up any good results for me.
Metric vs Imperial is a hard problem, or so it appears to be. Switching between them is always bolted on to a software product as the very last thing, and hard coded defaults have a tendency to rear their ugly heads at the worst moment (especially if you prefer to use the en_US locale for menus and dialogs, but require metric sizes).
I have long believed that every developer should spend time fielding support calls, just to make 'm feel the pain they inflict on their customers.
It just occurred to me that developers should also be encouraged to switch between localization preferences from time to time. Heck, alternating their printers between A4 and Letter sized paper every week would either take a significant bite out of user frustration, or save acres of trees.
Just a thought.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
I find the approach of gobeProductve 3 much more refreshing, that rather than having several apps bundled together (like office/imitations) you rather have all the apps working seemlessly together using worksheets.
When you work on having them distinct, a lot of common functionality has to be repeated. It's just a waste, and promotes the bloat that you so scorn. Making apps completely separate as you advocate makes this even worse.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
Some one sez:
"Miguel de Icaza too has said that time is
better spent on improving OpenOffice rather
than working on say Gnumeric "
And you replied:
"Which is yet another indication that Miguel
has lost the plot. Gnumeric is a stunning
app that could seriously rival Excel."
Very true !
All Gnumeric lacks is the Pivot Table thingy. If Gnumeric acquire that thing, then Gnumeric can really be THE STAR of the Open Source Movement !
But no
"OpenOffice isn't close to rivalling either
Word or Excel any time soon. But Miguel has
long ago forgotten the Unix concept of small
specialized tools, and is heading towards MS
bloat at an alarming pace."
Very true again !
Although Gnumeric is NOT small, it runs like a charm !
Over 99% of my Excel spreadsheet runs on Gnumeric without any hitch. All it needs is the extra 1%, and if that Hanscom suite thing can do Pivot Table, why can't Gnumeric ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Considering their current ambivalence towards Bugzilla's voting feature, how exactly is this voting supposed to be done?
I can't say I've read very much about 641D though, so it may be obvious...
Cheers //Johan
Installed the Bubblemon yet?