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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.
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.
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.
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Hehe. Well you see that may be true for you, sir. But if you let a windows box go for a couple years without reinstalling, it takes a good 5 minutes to boot up. In my experience a brand new fresh install of windows and any install of linux boots about the same speed, at least on a Pentium 2 or above. Well that is with the booting of X. If I don't boot to X it's even faster.
Also I see your point about the general feel of windows being more responsive. However If it's that big of a deal for you check out the preemptive/low latency patches for the linux kernel.
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.
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...
The binaries does not work for me (at least 641c). They quit silently, and I cannot find out why after several times of strace-ing.
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
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
Run it once as root, and then run it as a user after, for some reason that fixed it for me.
I have the same comment as most, how can they take software and make it so slow? By the time it loads, I either forgot what I was working on, or lost interest, both of which are very detrimental to schoolwork.
I have had quite a few crashes with it, as well. Saving seems to produce errors more often than not, esp when saving as a word document. Also, the tables are a little messed up. If you want to insert a new row, it will have the same alignment as the row above it, no matter what..say for example you want a table with 8 columns. If you merge two cells together in one of those rows and try to make a new row, there is *no* way to split the cells back up again. Very annoying.
As for the feature voting, I vote that they are all removed. I can run ms office XP on my computer without a problem at all, but when I go into linux and run openoffice, it would be quicker to just draw all the letters of my document in gimp.
Just my 2 cents
77' jeffs@wpi.edu
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
I guess I'm confused. I'm running OpenOffice on 5 different hardware systems here. The start up time for OpenOffice is very long, unreasonably long on all systems.
Sure it works great, and it's reliable. But I thought that the origionator of this thread has a good point.
I would like someone to explain to my just why the origional post was flamebait.
Then could someone please explain why, as a person selecting office machine (desktop) operating system packages and and office software suites I should not be concerned by things like program startup time or GUI responsiveness.
Thanks
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
...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
If it ain't broke then don't fix it. If it runs on 6.2 then it should run on newer versions.
I still fail to understand why people upgrade office machines as often as they do. My IT person at work tells me she has to upgrade the hardware in order to run the latest software and that often requires an OS upgrade.
Why? Because her users have to be "compatible" with other users in the world. She cited several examples of people receiving files from vendors that were in OfficeXP so we had to have OfficeXP to be compatable.
That was the reason that, when she discovered my 486 box with RedHat 6.2 on it while I was on vacation, she replaced it with a brand new 1.2 GHz machine running Microsoft products of the XP line. She claims this to be an upgrade and is shocked at my lack of thankfulness.
She is, and I'm sure you will be, shocked that I am not happy about this. But damnit my computer was doing just what I wanted it to do, and quite reliably. It now takes longer to write a simple memo, to create a simple spreadsheet, even to check my email or find information on the WWW. But I've got a "compatable" configuration.
Not everyone needs or wants the latest and greatest. Because of this I'm glad that they are testing on a version of Linux that has been out there a while, is fairly common, and has proven itself. The results of those tests should indicate that their product will work fine on newer OS. If not, well that's an OS issue.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
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?
Try 641d. 641c didn't work for me either, but
641d does.
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.
.. mozilla.. *cough*
-- jbl
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.
This sounds like a troll to me but really, the simple thing is to put redhat 6.2 or 7.2 on that AMD machine and keep on trucking. If you're really paranoid about her coming back to redo WinXP then go buy vmware or one of the other emulators and tab switch between the two.
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?
A troll? I guess then a troll is in the eye of the beholder.
Let me try again, this time in the context of cars.
Suppose you drive a mid '80s car that has under 100,000 miles on it. You keep up maintenance on it like you should, keep it clean, rotate the tires, and take it in for regular service. You only drive a few miles a week, maybe only using it for doing the shopping and the occasional trip to grandma's house.
That car does what you require of it.
Now the neighbor just got a 2003 model SUV. It's got power windows, power locks, air bags, CD player, a big V6 or V8....you know, all the trimmings. And he's got a 10 year 10,000 mile coverage plan on it.
Who knows what he uses it for, and who the hell really cares. But he's got one.
So now you need to be "compatable" with him? Now you're gonna trade in your old car.....a car which met your needs, meets your present needs, and will meet your needs for the immediate future?
THAT IS WHAT THE ATTITUDE SEEMS TO BE WITH COMPUTERS!!!!
I'm sorry if it seems like a troll to you, but I honestly don't see the point in getting a faster computer with a bigger hard drive to run bloated software when what I had was doing the work I tasked it to do.
It's a waste of money. It's a waste of resources, It's just plain stupid from the way I see it.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
But it wasn't your money and in the scheme of things eventually you'll need to upgrade. Sometimes just being thankful for what's given to you is better than going around saying "why, why, oh why god have you given me this $INSERT_WONDERFUL_OBJECT when my $INSERT_OLD_OBJECT was working so well?"
Sorry but you just sound silly. Maybe that isn't your intention but in all truthfulness that is how you come off to me. I could see your arguement but to me it's idiotic. Maybe that is because my car from the 1980's is dying and I'm getting ready to toss it.
Adios. And if you don't load linux up on that new computer you should go stew some prunes.
Since the money came out of the budget that I am responsible for, not to mention that the money comes from tax dollars, it is my money.
And maybe it is silly. The gods know I'm not the sharpest tack in the box. But it's awfully hard to be thankful for something that stopped productivity for 2 days, is now twice as slow, and took away money that I had hoped to use to keep a car on the road for another year.
Because this is a new computer, under contract and license agreements I am not allowed to remove, or install software. I could get IT to give me a waiver allowing them to remove Windows and Office but there is no refund. Even if I removed them and didn't use them there are several hundreds of dollars wasted.
Ya, pretty silly.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Well with those details included I can see why it does suck quite a bit! I'm really surprised that admin didn't ask you before going all bushy tailed and buying a brand new machine.
If I were you I'd get them to buy one more hard drive (20-30gb are damn cheap these days) and put Linux on that. If you aren't going to get anything back for the Windows license you might as well keep the ability to use it just in case (unless you don't want that ability which I could understand!).
Maybe my day sucked so much that it has changed my perspective a bit... So for what it's worth I can understand where you are coming from and why my previous attitude (which somehow seems to be a bit close to the bushy tailed admin's) is a bit one sided...
Good luck.