OpenOffice.org SDK Released

Jules V.D. writes "The OpenOffice.org group on Friday announced a kit that lets programmers build new modules for open-source alternatives to the Microsoft Office suite.This new SDK is an add-on for OpenOffice.org 1.0.2. It provides the necessary tools and documentation for programming the OpenOffice.org APIs and creating your own extensions (UNO components) for OpenOffice.org."The highlight of this SDK is the new Developer's Guide. This comprehensive guide provides, in 900 pages, a detailed description of the OpenOffice.org API concepts, the OpenOffice.org UNO component model and how to use the API in the context of the different application areas.""

Comments

Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Sausage in my pantalons.

Vasi - viens voir ma grande cucumber sandwich.

Thanks.

[supabeast!]

What else needs to be said?

good..

[caffeinex36]

'bout time.

One small step for Linux community...a little bit bigger one for a decent Office Suite.

-Rob

moron the chameleon LIEk behaviours..

[Anonymous Coward]

of va lairIE et AL, his SourceForgerIE(tm), & the unholy saycrud kode heist.

this is what you wanted, .......

A good step

[Anonymous Coward]

I think one of the strong reasons why we have Microsoft's dominance on Office programs is the add-on programs that take advantage of APIs provided in the office. So this is a good step, although I am very suspicious about how strong these APIs are compared to MS Office.

Re:A good step

[anonymous loser]

I agree, it is a good step, but there are still some *major* technical barriers that must be overcome before this will really be accepted as an alternative in business applications.

The main problem as I see it is that MS Office products support a COM automation API right out of the box. Now, I know a lot of folks may not think this is such a big deal, and the OpenOffice folks do provide a lot of similar functionality, but let me tell you why COM support is so important:

There are literally thousands upon thousands of business applications that already exist, written in VB and MS active scripting languages (VBScript, JScript, etc.) that depend on being able to access these other applications pretty much natively.

And, if the API isn't *exactly* the same, no company that depends on MS Office's API for business apps will be willing to spend that kind of development money just to make things the work same as they already do without OpenOffice.

The only chance I see (without OpenOffice implementing a perfect mirror of the MS Office API, and making it work natively with COM) is if somehow OpenOffice offered some amazing new functionality that a business couldn't possibly achieve using MS Office. Given MS's uncanny ability to steal good ideas and integrate them into their own products, that doesn't seem very likely to me.

Re:A good step

[Dr. Evil]

Managing Microsoft's upgrade & support cycle is like walking up the down escalator. Businesses are becoming resentful of lock-in.

Microsoft might act to correct this, but people may have grown too distrustful of them in how they have treated standards and provided support in the past.

Re:A good step

[Anonymous Coward]

I think just new users and projects are enough. As usual, the userbase growth will increase exp.

Re:A good step

[cookie_cutter]

How about being free?

Re:A good step

[10am-bedtime]

oop ack! a "perfect mirror" of an ugly thing means now you see two ugly
things!

Re:A good step

[swhiser]

OOo's "amazing new functionality:" an open file format.

Re:A good step

[anonymous loser]

It matters not to a big company. They could easily spend 100 times the cost of licensing MS Office on porting their existing applications to work with OpenOffice, and that's not taking into consideration additional IT expenses that would come up, down time for employees during the switchover, or additional training that would probably be required.

If there isn't a concrete plan that shows a dramatically high ROI (Return On Investment) you will not convince the necessary people to take that kind of plunge, because it's simply too risky.

Macros

[MSTCrow5429]

Are these basically Office macros for OpenOffice? Would think such a feature would be a priority.

Re:Macros

[joebp]

No, OpenOffice.org has had OpenOffice.org Basic as a macro language since the start.

Hmmm

[Gortbusters.org]

Can you do things like embedd Open Office into Evolution? That would be spiffy. I have Office XP at work and MS Word has hijacked the standard editting for e-mail messages in Outlook.

Re:Hmmm

[pokryfka]

there's abiword bonobo object on the way
and more to come (including gtk-vi ;) )

so in a near future you should be able to edit messages as in abiword (or vi!) wich IMHO is great
not as feature rich as oo but lightweight and very usable

Re:Hmmm

[Wiwi Jumbo]

Tools -> Options -> "Mail Format" tab -> Uncheck the first box:

"Use Microsoft Word to edit e-mail messages"

And have a nice day.

Re:Hmmm

[axxackall]

Can you do things like embedd Open Office into Evolution? - there's abiword bonobo object on the way

Binobo does not enabe functionality by itself for end-users. Instead, it give the way for programmers to implement it.

Although, I wish bonobo will enable some sort of end-user choice: in Evolution you would see an automatically generated list of bonobo-enabled (and registered!) external editors. So if you would add to the system new bobono-enabled editor, it will automatically apperaed in such lists in all bonobo-enabled "editor clients" like Evolution.

Or am I dreaming?

Re:Hmmm

[pokryfka]

AFAIK that's not right

sure app (like evolution) needs to be able to handle bonobo but it doesnt have to know them a priori

nautilus is quite good file browser but at the same time a very good bonobo-activating app able to handle bonobos that didnt even exist at the time it was written/compiled

as a user i just make it open some filetypes by some viewers which i installed after nautilus

This is really good.

[Anonymous Coward]

The SDK blows goats. It's only half as good as Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Office. Fuck you. Go suck a dick.

Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the majority of the public is aware of the existence of Linux. How does the Linux community expect the average user to be exposed to Linux without advertising? I've seen several Microsoft commericals but not a single RedHat advertisement.

Re:Microsoft

[Cromac]

Open Office is available on more than just Linux you know. The majority of the public isn't much aware of ANYTHING that isn't spoon fed to them. The first step is to get a reasonable alternative to MS products, which OO certainly is for most people. Once people get used to looking for something other than "Windows certified" then they'll be more open to looking at alternatives to Windows.

Re:Microsoft

[Dawn Falcon]

Right.

Mind you, I just set up a small (4 PC) office network using OOo. The OS is 98SE. Basically real, real small budget.

Free is good. And after a week, they've got the hang of OOo anyway.

Please make it actually useable

[Anonymous Coward]

Light Reading Anyone?

[AtomicX]

"...This comprehensive guide provides, in 900 pages, a detailed description of the OpenOffice.org API concepts..."

Assuming they meant A4 pages, that = 561330 square CM of paper.

[Looks at bare bedroom wall, picks up brush]

Now... if you thought that your Tux wallpaper was geeky ... think again.

Maybe I should translate it into Yodish Soviet Russian Haxor first for added effect?

Hmm...

1¦\¦ 50\/137 Ru551/-\, 0p3¦\¦0ff1C3.0R6 /-\P1 R3/-\D5 Y0U!

Re:Light Reading Anyone?

[capitalsucks]

LMAO.

You disgust me.

[Fecal Troll Matter]

All Hail Eris!

Great!

[capitalsucks]

That's mucho excellente. I can't wait till I get a good bit of free time..there are a few things I'd like to see in ole OOo ... also, I'm impressed and joyous that they're giving a 900 page book to go along with it!

Slightly Off-Topic

[caffeinex36]

I am sure evolution will jump on the bandwagon. With that said, I think it is safe to say that we need to start thinking about virus and worms.

Maybe cloning M$ isn't a good thing after all ;)


-Rob

flight sim..

[Suppafly]

So now that this is out, how long until someone makes a flight sim add-on for openoffice.

Re:flight sim..

[bankman]

Oh, there is, in OpenOffice calc. Check this article for easter eggs in OSS.

Re:flight sim..

[Dthoma]

Is that a reference to the flight sim easter egg in Microsoft Excel? That was pretty cool even if it got old fairly quickly.

Re:flight sim..

[Suppafly]

Too bad all the ones on that site aren't for real.

Open Source Blows

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what I'm talking about. "We're not interested in implement footnotes, but here's a fucking API."

Stupid fucking open sores programmers.

Re:Open Source Blows

[capitalsucks]

WTF? If you want such options then just suggest them or implement them yourself. If you're a programmer, adn you think you should hide your code from everyone, then do it. But guess what? It won't improve because the less people that have the oppurtunity to work on it the more human its limitations become.

When will my Karma get better?

Re:Open Source Blows

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want such options then just suggest them or implement them yourself.

Exactly! That's why open sores blows! I don't give two flying shits about writing programs all day; we have people to do that sort of thing. All I want is a word processor! This guy comes up to me and says, "Try Open Office! It's just as good as Microsoft Office, and it's free!" So I try it, and find that it doesn't even do footnotes, for chrissakes! So I tell my friend about this, and he says, "WTF? If you want such options then just suggest them or implement them yourself."

What would your reaction be if you went to a car dealership to testdrive a car and discovered that the car had no windshield? Sure, it's possible to drive the car without a windshield, but who'd want to? Wouldn't your reaction be, "Gee, that's a shitty car!" And if you found little (that is, big) problems like that with every car on the lot, wouldn't your reaction be, "Gee, that's a shitty car company!"

Open sores: Gee, that's a shitty software company!

At least Microsoft gives me a fucking word processor that fucking works. Open Office is a car without a windshield or any mirrors but with a god damned 24 karat gold-plated air freshener on the dash.

When will my Karma get better?

At this rate, never.

Re:Open Source Blows

[JJahn]

Yeah thanks Microsoft for giving us a "fucking word processor" that works...for only $500 for the suite! How nice they are to us. Or are you using a free (read: pirated) copy of MS Office?

Re:Open Source Blows

[Spiritd0g]

May I suggest OpenOffice 1.1 beta with footnote support? Never hurts to peruse their feature list from time to time. Works just fine.

Re:Open Source Blows

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Word: $142 from zones.com

Re:Open Source Blows

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you may not. Who the hell wants to use beta software?

Because you're evidently too fucking stupid to get it, here's my point: nobody should have spent one fucking minute working on a god damned API until they got the fucking software done. Footnotes, people! Footnotes are really fucking important! Jesus christ! The software is still in fucking beta, it's not even fucking READY yet, and yet here we are wasting our GOD DAMNED time on an AP-fucking-I!

This shit is for the birds. I'm sticking with Word, and so's everbody else who's not a fucking moron or a god damn hippy.

Re:Open Source Blows

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you forget your medication today?

Re:Open Source Blows

[Dr. Evil]

Insert, Footnote works well for me.

OpenOffice Draw is nice too. So far it hasn't let me down. I have the full MS Office suite at work, and I had to download OpenOffice to be able to do some good work with vector graphics.

In regard to footnotes, you must have been thinking of Abiword. That thing really shouldn't claim to compete with anything other than Wordpad.

Openoffice really is quite full featured. IMHO it still lacks the polish of Office XP, but it's quite capable.

Re:Open Source Blows

[Anonymous Coward]

I have one question, and a follow-up.

Why you lie? Why you lie so much?

Re:Open Source Blows

[sander]

You should have taken the advice to stay away from rabid dogs more seriously. Among things you are not noticing are that a) the sdk works with both the 1.0.x series and teh beta version of 1.1 and b) that OpenOffice.org has footnote support and has always had it. Maybe you should read both release notes before going wild with assumptions?

Re:Open Source Blows

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should suck less dick. Or possibly more. If we're talking about somebody else's dick, less. If we're talking about mine, more.

mod request

[Anonymous Coward]

mod:redundant

Who is doing all this work?

[molo]

This is a large body of work. It must consist of several hundred man-hours of effort. Who deserves the thanks for this? Was it volunteer driven or is there corporate backing? Anyone have any details?

Thanks.
-molo

Re:Who is doing all this work?

[gimpimp]

Sun have engineers working on it, as do Ximian.
You can check out some of Ximian's work, here.

cheers,

Re:Who is doing all this work?

[Jack William Bell]

Ximian is working on this? Hmm... I wonder how long it will be before we have a Mono (.NET) interface to the libraries?

Re:Who is doing all this work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ximian also do some hack with OO.o,
to made it more integrated with GNOME
(use GNOME icons, themes for UI, use CUPS for printing, etc), which is very pretty.
Anyway, it seems to be a kind of forking.

bact'

Great

[Fazed]

Now someone can code the paperclip assistant!

Re:Great

[BabyDave]

So many violent death animations, so little time ...

Re:Great

[bankman]

Yes, definitely!

But please, to exit it, add a crosshair to shoot the damn thing. You should be able to skin the paperclip with your bosses picture.

Re:Great

[bahwi]

Hell, we could just port vigor to it! (Screenshots)

And a FreeBSD Port Exists as well. So I'm sure you could apt-get it, rpm it, or emerge it also.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how a Tux assistant would be received?

sup scarface

[Anonymous Coward]

He's on the level if he's inclined.
The son of a devil, he wants mine and more.
Ooh, he's a high, high climber.
Not just a clinging vine.
He made the grade, he made his marks, senor,
and guess who's keeping score?
Rush rush, got the yeyo?
Buzz buzz, gimme yeyo.
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Uh oh.
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He's one of a kind.
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He's running out of time.
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Uh oh.
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Go go.
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Never, never take a chance before you know he's in a hurry.
Better better make your mind up boy, he's faster, he's faster, he's faster, he's faster.
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Yo yo, dame yeyo.
Uh oh.
He's a real speed demon.
He's one of a kind.
Watching, waiting, winking over his shoulder.
He's running out of time, time, time, time.

C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\GTAIII\audio\FLASH.wav

BZZT

[Anonymous Coward]

You still forgot to copy MS Access, guys.

Seriously, how hard would it to be to put an easy to use interface and reporting engine on top of mysql (or postgre or whatever)?

There are a ton of workstations all across the corporate world that are running MS Office just for Access.

Re:BZZT

[fucksl4shd0t]

Seriously, how hard would it to be to put an easy to use interface and reporting engine on top of mysql (or postgre or whatever)?

If you want the desktop database that's part of the suite, you have to pay Sun. That's the only component of the suite they didn't open source.

That said, GNU Enterprise does well, even at its low version, for functionality typical of Access. It'll plug into MySQL and Postgres both, as well as a few commercial databases. Also, if you do a little googling, you'll find a php frontend, and some other stuff. There's plenty of free software out there to fit this need, it's just not bundled in with OpenOffice.org, that's all.

Re:BZZT

[Rick the Red]

Seriously, how hard would it to be to put an easy to use interface and reporting engine on top of mysql (or postgre or whatever)?

I'm guessing "seriously hard", otherwise you would have done it by now, right? Quit bitching and contribute, if you think it's so easy.

Re:BZZT

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I spend 12 hours a day coding.

Thing is, I get PAYED for it.

Write me a check every week and I'll consider it.

Re:BZZT

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, if you do a little googling, you'll find a php frontend, and some other stuff.

Bzzt. You lose, bitch. Why the fuck would anybody "do a little googling" to find some shit whatever written in some obscure computer language that nobody understands when we can just double-click the little icon that says "Microsoft Access?"

Get this through your thick skulls, open sores freaks: your software is not as good as Microsoft's. Until your software is as good as Microsoft's, don't even fucking call me. Shitheads.

Re:BZZT

[Karpe]

No they didn't.

It is (was) a little known fact that OO can connect to mysql using ODBC. It is just a little hard getting it to work, but you can find info here and here. You can have an access lookalike with OO, ODBC and mysql.

Re:BZZT

[Blaine Hilton]

Good point, now though it needs to be packaged "nicly" so more people find out about it and can easily use it.

Re:BZZT

[jd142]

Umm. It isn't hard at all. I've set up OOo and Star Office to use ODBC connections to mysql plenty of times. All you need to know is your server name, login and password.

Re:BZZT

[JohnFluxx]

12 hours.. you should calm down - don't burn yourself out.

Re:BZZT

[aoteoroa]

OpenOffice also connects to firbird (Interbase) easily via JDBC. All you need is the jdbc driver, and the permission to access the database (ie filename, username, password) I assume the same is true for any JDBC or ODBC compliant database.

Re:BZZT

[Narchie Troll]

I'm finding it hard to believe that anyone calls you.

Re:BZZT

[Micah]

I do it with PostgreSQL under Red Hat 8, and it isn't hard at all.

The problem is, it really isn't the same thing as Access. Access is nice for small personal databases because you have the entire DB crammed into one nice little portable package. You can take the file and open it in anyone's Access, and it will work.

Postgres certainly has a far more powerful DB engine than Access, but you don't have the file portability. It would be truly great if someone worked up a real Open Source equivalant to Access.

Re:BZZT

[tzanger]

If you're thinking of buying StarOffice for the database, don't bother. Adabas sucks ass. OpenOffice can contact practically any database, including MySQL or Postgres. Personally I suggest the latter.

Re:BZZT

[sander]

StarOffice has no database component that could be open sourced - it ships with Adabas D, which can be open sourced by adabas and not Sun

Re:BZZT

[EarthTone]

It's already being developed...http://www.koffice.org/kexi/

Cheers,

Eron

Re:BZZT

[Micah]

> It's already being developed...http://www.koffice.org/kexi/

Huh, cool, I wasn't aware of that. If this CQL++ does roughly what the Access engine does and can be seamlessly integrated into Kexi, that could indeed fit the bill!

Re:BZZT

[BrokenHalo]

There are a ton of workstations all across the corporate world that are running MS Office just for Access.

Is that an imperial long ton, i.e. 20 hundredweight (2,240 pounds) or a short ton (identical to the US ton at 2,000 pounds)? Or do you mean a metric tonne?

StarOffice?

[kannibal_klown]

What does this mean for StarOffice? While I think OpenOffice is great, I use StarOffice mainly for the nicer looking fonts and stuff.

Can or will this SDK be usable for StarOffice, since they are very similar?

Re:StarOffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the only difference between SO and OOo the fonts? In that case why not just copy them over? (not to flame SO, I picked up a boxed copy and I think it's pretty keen.)

Boot time

[Anonymous Coward]

Openoffice takes 15 seconds to boot on my 1.7ghz linux machine and even longer on the windows duel boot.

Re:Boot time

[capitalsucks]

And? What's your point? They'll make the footprint as small as possible with time, duh.

Re:Boot time

[d-Orb]

In my (limited) experience, it really boils down to disk access. If you have nice fast, mean SCSI disks, the the boot-up time improves dramatically (both on Windows and Linux). I can't give any figures, because we did the test at work. But it was a significant increase.

This is not to say that OOo boots quickly or is perfect, but maybe to suggest what the cause of the problem is (are there any "armchair programmers", similar to "armchair generals"?) :D)

Re:Boot time

[cscx]

Well maybe Sun needs to get their priorities straight. I just timed this on my 1 GHz P-III:

Time to load (from clicking the icon till the template doc is fully loaded and you can start typing):
Open Office.org Writer: 14.64 sec
MS Word: 4.83 sec

And no, the incorrect answer here is "MS builds office into Windows to make it start faster MWHAHA!!" Sun may want to step aside here and optimize what the have going... which is a pretty good piece of software, albeit a bit slow.

Re:Boot time

[aoteoroa]

Time to load (from clicking the icon till the template doc is fully loaded and you can start typing):
Open Office.org Writer: 14.64 sec
MS Word: 4.83 sec

I have to wonder if something is wrong with your system that is slowing it down because I ran the same test on a similar system with the following results.

• Open Office.org Writer: 2.78 sec
• MS Word: 2.14 sec

The test system is a Celeron 1.1 with 256 ram, 7200 rpm hard drive, and Win2000 pro. Are you using Win XP by chance?

Re:Boot time

[Tyreth]

Loading MS Word in Linux using codeweaver's office it loads very fast, just like in windows, so I'm assuming that something else is going on here.

Re:Boot time

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, thats much faster than on my machine. It takes about a good 10sec just for a window for the splash to come up, then about another 1-2sec for the spash "picture" to display. Then after that, its another 10-12sec for Writer's window to appear then about another 2sec for Writer to draw everything. After another sec or so, I can type but its still doing something because the disk is accessing like a monkey on speed drinking a gallon of coffee. Another 3-5sec before it to stop and stablize.
So in total, it takes at least 25sec for Writer to be basically usable, but really it takes a bit over 30sec for it to be responsively usable.

I don't have a really crappy machine either, well maybe for playing new games yea. I have a Athlon (slot-a) 750Mhz, 256MB PC-133, 30GB 7200rpm IDE (use XFS and get about 5MB/sec). Remember, you can't use 'hdparm -Tt' because that is basic transfers w/o a file-system. Its better to find some HD benchmark utility or write a simple one that writes like 0's to a file in like 4KB increments for 100MB in C or something. That will give you a much better idea of performance.

Re:Boot time

[Anonymous Coward]

Then try TextMaker for Linux. That's one fast-loading word processor...and it's nice to have the same WP on Linux, *BSD, Windows, and my PocketPC.

Re:Boot time

[juhaz]

To counter the "MS builds office into Windows" argument shouldn't OO.o be allowed to use the quickstarter? That enabled, takes maybe 1-2 seconds to load a template.

That's on 700MHz Duron, so no mucle machine trickery here. I've got rather fast 7200RPM disk, though.

Re:Boot time

[cscx]

No, because the other poster said that Word starts just as quickly under Linux using Codeweavers Office. So something else is wrong here.

Re:Boot time

[sander]

Well, where are all your perfomance enhancement patches?

Re:Boot time

[cscx]

Well, I couldn't give two shits cause I use MS Word about 95% of the time.

This is the problem with open-source software. You guys complain that no one uses your software, and spend all your time programming in totally useless, bloat-inducing features. When someone tries to suggest some constructive criticism, the answer always is "why don't you fix it yourself" or "where are all your performance enhancement patches?"

The bottom line here, of course, is that if you want your software to succeed and cease being a pile of horseshit for 95% of the business software-oriented population, you'd better start listening quickly. Otherwise you can kiss your "Linux on the desktop," et al, goodbye.

But hey, why improve performance and usability when KDE can use another Anime skin and someone can waste time programming the 5,202nd replacement for biff ?

Re:Boot time

[sander]

Fine by me - you are entirely welcome to continue to use MS Word for as long as you want. After all, it is your choice by which you continue to pay for Word and its functionality (including fast startup). But if you suggest that you cannot use it because start-up, a one time event takes 15 seconds, then well... what can I say - you appear to live on a different planet. There are not that many use cases that require a startup to be in 5 seconds or less, or at least ones that I can think of.

I personaly spend my time on way more productive things than you list - but the startup time of OpenOffice.org is not on my list of things that need to badly happen soon, meaning either you or somebody else who cares needs to do it.

Automation?

[tomer]

I hope this will help programming automated tasks of creating documents. MS-OFFICE has this for years, and this made it possible to the lowest scripting envrioment (read - VbScript/JScript) to get full control over the office suite.

MS sucks

[stratjakt]

it is for poopy heads.

Only dumheads use windows and not linux!

(just rebuilding my karma, thanks in advance mods)

Thank You.

[Sir_Bill_William_Jen]

Just what we needed. Now lets see if those 900 pages are worth the read. If they aren't they will probably make great filter paper for joints. ;)

Smart idea

[gatesh8r]

It will make Open Office more attractive, especially for proprietary ("We hates proprietary! Hates it, hates it!") extensions. Seriously, both OSS licenced and proprietary/commerical modules will make for better file formats and more functionality. I have seen in my Sys Admin experience having to deal with M$ Office licenses solely for the reason of M$ Office API's integrated with the properietary software.

Go Open Office!

More must be said

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello,

Recently I've been introduced to an operating system known as Linux.

Lured by its low cost, I replaced Windows 98 on my computer with Linux. Unfortunately the more I use it the more I fear that this "Linux" may be an insidious way for the Dark One to gain a stronger foothold here on Earth. I know this may be a shocking claim, but I have evidence to back it up!

To begin with, Linux is based off of an older, obsolete OS called "BSD Unix". The child-indoctrinatingly-cute cartoon mascot of this OS is a devil holding a pitchfork. This OS -- and its Linux offspring -- extensively use what are unsettingly called "daemons" (which is how Pagans write "demon" -- they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user's notice. If you are using a computer running Linux then you probably have these "demons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! Furthermore in order to start or stop these "demons" a user must execute a command called "finger". By "fingering" a "demon" one excercises an unholy power, much the same way that the Lord of Flies controls his black minions.

Linux contains another Satanic holdover from the "BSD Unix" OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: "chmod 666". What other horrors lurk in this thing?

Consider some of these other Linux commands: "sleep", "mount", "unzip", "strip" and "touch". All highly suggestive in a sexual nature. I know that our Lord cannot approve of these, and I urge them to be renamed to something appropriate to the Christian community. Interestingly "CONTROL-G" (the sixth key from the left of the keyboard) does an abort. To write files a "VI" editor is included. All these are to ensnare the unsuspecting christian who could get tempted by typing "VIVIVI" all day long.

Fourth, Linux uses a flavor of DOS known as Bash. Bash is an acronym for "Bourne Again Shell". On the surface this would appear to be supportive of the Lord. However, remember that even Satan can quote the bible for his own purposes! While I believe Linux may be born-again, its obvious by the misspelling of "born" that its not born-again in an Christian church. Will the lies ever cease?

Additionally, one of the main long-haired hippies involved with the GNU Free Software Foundation supports communism, contraception and abortion. He has consistently supported 60's counter-cultural "values", and his web site even advocates government support of contraception. He also wears fake halos, and has quips about his made-up church that relates to his free software. I find such blasphemy to be extremely unsettling.

One must also remember that the creator of Linux, a college student named Linux Torvaldis, comes from Finland. I'm sure all the followers of Christ are aware of the heritical nature of the Finnish: from necrophilia to human sacrifice, Finnish culture is awash in sin. I find little reason to believe anything good and holy could arise from this evil land.

Finally, let us remember that there is an alternative to using the Satan-powered Linux. I think history has shown us that Microsoft is quite holy. I'm told that its founder, William Gates is a strong supporter of our Lord and I encourage my fellow Christians to buy only his products to help keep the Devil at bay.

I wish I had more time to expound upon my findings. Unfortunately a family of Jews has moved in across the street and I must go speak to them of Jesus Christ before they are condemned to eternal hellfire.

Please investigate this as you see fit and I'm sure you'll reach the same conclusions that I have.

Re:More must be said

[MrTangent]

Hail Satan!

Those kooky Christians. I would be tempted to think this is an elaborate joke, but the person went to great pains to write this which would lead me to believe he's genuinely retarded, I mean, screwed up. Believe what you will, but read this if you want an explanation where the Daemon thing came from. It's funny to see to what lengths Christians (and other Religious fanatics) will go to in order to justify their paranoid delusions. Hell, billions of people have died in various Holy Wars over Religion (most of them over Christianity). I think that speaks volumes for Christianity/Religion right there.

Remember, it's okay to break the ten commandments/"Thou Shall Not Kill" if it's for your God.

Re:More must be said

[gi-tux]

It's funny to see to what lengths Christians (and other Religious fanatics) will go to in order to justify their paranoid delusions.

I take offense to at least some of the above statement. I don't believe that you should group Christians and "other Religious fanatics" together like that. I realize that I am taking an unpopular stand here, but just because a person is a Christian doesn't mean that he is a paranoid delusional or a religious fanatic.

The message to which you responded was obviously a flamebait. If Bill Gates were truly a Christian, then Microsoft wouldn't be the company that it is. He would deal ethically with his fellow man and even his competitors. The person that wrote the post to which you refer went about as far in finding every "mark of satan" in Linux (and some based on untruths i.e. Linux came from BSD?) as some do in finding the same things about Bill Gates and Microsoft.

If you look hard enough, you will find fault with everything on earth. After all the world as we know it is not a perfect place. BTW, "Thou Shall Not Kill" is better translated as "Thou Shall Not Murder" and there is a difference in Murder (cold blooded) and killing in war. While I do not support religious wars, I do not feel that war in and of itself is wrong.

Re:More must be said

[MrTangent]

Sorry I offended. I must admit that as an atheist I harbor a lot of resentment for organized religion (specifically Christianity and Islam, most of the other organized religions are peaceful, where Christianity and Islam as a whole have a very long lineage of war and destruction). I shouldn't have mentioned some of the things I did perhaps, and I do apologize if it offended you, but I was reacting more towards the original poster's ignorance than anything (with a healthy does of my own anti-Religion bias). For the record, I'm not against faith or belief in something as long as you don't impose your belief on others. :)

movies

[mz001b]

Hopefully this will allow someone with more time than me to make an extension that allows movies to be embedded in OOo Impress presentations. This is the one major thing missing from the suite that I really need (although, it is not a big enough issue for me to want to use Windows).

For now, pausing during a talk to fire up mplayer or the like works, but it is a bit inelegant.

It's a slick system but printing isn't

[mrmeval]

I cannot get it to print, gs is my friend (sort of).

pls

[Anonymous Coward]

i like dmca and copywright adn palladium pls thx pls but tuwiprlip needs nik change h8 nikpls fix thx

Oh, the glorious and perverse possibilities

[ColGraff]

Consider: Duke3d source code released.

Consider: Openoffice.Org SDK released within a week thereafter.

Question: How soon until Duke3d is ported to Openoffice.Org as a module?

How about porting it kde now.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about using the sdk to port OpenOffice to kde. It's a lot better than koffice.

Re:How about porting it kde now.

[Robowally]

I think that is a good idea, but is it possible? I have used OOo for the past three years with great success. Having it run as a 'proper' KDE app would be a good reason to move to Linux/FreeBSD.

Re:How about porting it kde now.

[IamTheRealMike]

How about .... no.

OpenOffice is enormous. The code is mindboggling. It has its own portable runtime, its own object model, its own widget toolkit. It's like Mozilla.

You can't "port" it to KDE, any more than you could port it to GTK/GNOME. What Ximian have been doing lately is simply touching up the edges, making it use the same font/colors as GTK, use GNOME artwork etc, but it's not a "port".

[soapbox]The original KDE vision of producing an integrated desktop through making kickass APIs that everybody would use was a cute one, but ultimately short sighted - your average Linux desktop is a mishmash of different platforms and toolkits, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Wine - there's no way all this sofware can be ported to KDE, so the only solution is to eliminate the idea of KDE/GNOME as a platform and become based entirely on standards, with KDE merely providing an implementation via C++ APIs.[/soapbox].

Re:How about porting it kde now.

[sander]

Well, considering there is an aqua port, why not ?

easy

[hey]

What could be easier ?!

MSFT announced the first extension

[Anonymous Coward]

In an onslaught against OpenOffice MSFT announced its first extension, a collection of paperclip buddies...

hey jackass

[Anonymous Coward]

it didn't hijack nothing --- therez a setting for how U wants to compose mail: use word/rich text/plain text editor in ur options, l00ser.

HAR HAR HAR!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is so fucking funny!! you are truly a comedic genious!!! ladies and gentleme, the next richard pryor!!!

It's great.. but.. where's 'open' Exchange?

[derekb]

Open Office is a great suite to replace a word process, spreadsheet and a presentation tool. But replacing an Office suite means replacing all the tools. I need my Outlook. I wish this wicked office app had a similar-in-quality outlook clone that could interface with open source back-ends for ldap, mcal, imap, etc.

Or maybe one exists? Anyone got a good pointer on a windows app (not a web-based system) that lets me calendar, email and share address books?

The APIs are pretty cool

[Krischi]

I've played around with an Alpha version of the SDK in October, and it was pretty nice. It is hard to get your head around some concepts, because the whole SDK is kind of baroque, just like OOo itself, but from my limited experience, it is very powerful.

I built a bridge for the Lua scripting language on top of the Java UNO bridge and used it to script 2D animations for a movie that I had to create for my research. I used OOo Draw to specify the animated elements, and traced out their paths via other elements and object prperties.

The scripts inspected the objects and their properties, animated them accordingly in an OOo Draw canvas, and saved the frames to the disk. All in all, it took me about a week to get this to work; time that I consider well-invested.

Re:The APIs are pretty cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I used OOo Draw to specify the animated elements, and traced out their paths via other elements and object prperties.

Are you crazy? Of all the possible drawing libraries you used OOo draw? Its 'circles' are octagons ffs!

Sure it does

[neurostar]

... So I try it, and find that it doesn't even do footnotes,...

Insert -> Footnote

There ya go!

neurostar

This is great, but...

[PimpNinjaWannaBee]

I use Linux 99% of the time so even though I dont do alot of text editing/spreadsheets I need something like StarOffice. BUT, for christ sake!, must it be so slooooow on my otherwise spiffy 1.7GHz Gentoo box??

New excuse for not doing your homework

[Anonymous Coward]

Tired of having to use the excuse "a dog ate my homework"?

With the new Duke3d plugin for OpenOffice, you now have a choice of letting your homework eated by:
* wild pigs dressed like a LAPD cops
* your choice of aliens
* your choice of dinosaur-like creatures
* giant squids
* or your choice of strippers

Order today and recieve a discount coupon for "DukeNukem Forever", "DukeNukem Returns", and "DukeNukem and Robin" when they come out RSN.

Don't miss this spectacular opportunity!

Fix the numeric pad first!

[deragon]

You know, marketing wise, they do not have their priorities right. They are pushing a spreadsheet for which the numeric pad is useless for a big chunk of the world, yet put out an SDK. I would put the efforts on the numeric pad issue first.

You do not believe me? Check out this bug report #1820

All people using the following locales are affected: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, French (all except Switzerland), Galician, Italian, Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian (Latin) and Spanish (all variants). This list might not be complete.

Now try to convert someone using Excel to use Calc by telling them that they can not use the numeric pad anymore...

Re:Fix the numeric pad first!

[MrMr]

Convert them to use Linux and Calc then

xmodmap -e "keysym KP_Decimal = comma"

fixes OpenOffice, and all other programs

Re:Fix the numeric pad first!

[deragon]

Ah yes... and then any application written by an americain that ignores the locale while barf at the comma returned by the numeric pad. So now Calc will work, but some other apps will not.

Unfortunatly, since many apps under linux ignore locales, this is not a good solution. The better one would be an item in the preference to setup the function of the KP_Decimal within Calc.

In a perfect world, the OS should take care of this. But the world is not perfect, and we need a solution now.

Re:It's great.. but.. where's 'open' Exchange?

[fireboy1919]

Here you go.I actually like evolution better than I ever liked Outlook.

On that note, let me say specifically, that I want my Office suite to

• NOT

include anything for e-mail. First of all, an e-mail client is not a publishing tool. Its used to converse.

Secondly, I don't want something made for publishing with a built in api to require access to the internet for any purpose. That leads to the insecurity, which leads to the dark side - viruses.

Better to keep the two separate.

Re:It's great.. but.. where's 'open' Exchange?

[uchian]

Please god, not a "similar in quality" outlook clone. I have had the misfortune to use that pile of crap for the past week, and quality is not a word that springs to my mind.

As a quick example, notice how the list view in which your email messages are displayed has a scrollbar that doesn't conform with any other scrollbar used in any other microsoft package.

Or the fact that it is incapable of reading your open standards news groups like every other email/news client under the sun - including it's "lite" version, outlook express.

And it feels "clunky", as if it's been thrown together without much thought - which is not a good feel for what is supposed to be a mature app. Maybe I'm spoilt as a KDE user, but I like my user interface to be a pleasant and consistant experience.

Startup time

[Anonymous Coward]

Slightly OT, but some others have mentioned it, and the abysmal startup time of OOo is a sore point for many.

Otherwise, I love the bloody thing -- it's free, it's open, and as "90% of the people only use 10% of the features" (as research has proven), OOo will be a REAL challenge to Microsoft in the next few years.

So, anyone know if there's work being done on the startup time? I see that there's a "performance" sub-project thing on the site, and apparently for 1.1 they're further breaking the components up.

I really hope they can speed it up -- it's a great app, and I'm waiting to show it to friends and colleagues.

Ximian Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

www.ximian.com

Re:Ximian Evolution

[ColdGrits]

Nice try, but the Exchange connector is NOT open and NOT free (either as in speech or beer).

So, the original question still stands.

Cut the Fat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someone will cut out all the source code for open office except for the word processor,
and complie THAT puppy. Then do the same for the spreadsheet... bam, smaller programs that load in a reasonable amount of time.

Re:Cut the Fat?

[Micah]

Maybe someone will cut out all the source code for open office except for the word processor, and complie THAT puppy. Then do the same for the spreadsheet... bam, smaller programs that load in a reasonable amount of time.

That might help some, but then you'd lose the integration.

Also, I don't believe OOo loads all the modules when you start it. Most of the functionality is in dynamically loaded shared libraries.

Overall, if small and light is what you want/need, I'd say use AbiWord and Gnumeric. Maybe KOffice.

Re:Cut the Fat?

[Bulln-Bulln]

Many people said (say) the same about Mozilla. Now Mozilla is getting divided into seperate applications.

IMHO this gives more benifits than disadvantages.

Re:Cut the Fat?

[Micah]

ok, true.

But due to the architecture of OOo, I think it would be a LOT more difficult than it was for Mozilla. Could be wrong though.

Re:Cut the Fat?

[stor]

Eh?

Are you suggesting they "componentize" it? That was one of the first things they did. It's even in their FAQ.

From: http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-other.html#12

"A. Differences between StarOffice 5.2 and the future of StarOffice

* The source code has undergone some significant changes since 5.2 was released. Some of these changes are:
o Removal of integrated desktop
o Componentization of word processing, spreadsheet and graphic applications modules
o Removal of email and calendar and the schedule server
o Removal of the browser
o Move to XML-file formats
o Improved Microsoft filters
o CJK support (CJK refers to Asian languages: C=Chinese, simple and traditional, J= Japanese, K= Korean)

These are all changes that were decided upon by Sun Microsystems before the source code was released to the community."

Or did you mean something else?

Cheers
Stor

Re:Cut the Fat?

[BrokenHalo]

First off, don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of OpenOffice, and I use it every day, so this is not intended as flamebait.

Yes, they did get rid of that vile desktop that everybody hated (well, I did, anyway), but that didn't make the thing very much quicker to load.

Mileage varies, but on this 1GHz Athlon it takes 14 seconds to load swriter (I just checked). OK, this box is hardly stat of the art, but there are still plenty of people out there using 200 or 400 MHz boxen.

Here in the noughties, we should be able to fire up a WP app without needing to go and make a coffee while it loads.

Yeah, thats the way to go

[Yag]

Why mozilla is better ? Because is a PLATFORM not just a browser. How can OpenOffice be better than MSOffice, being a platform and having a lot of projects surrounding it and making it a good choice, cause, like linux and mozilla, you can customize it following your needs without loosing speed and standards.

SDK?

[nmg196]

Does anyone else not quite get the point of an SDK for an opensource product?

The product *is* the SDK! :)

Nick...

Re:SDK?

[Billly Gates]

Take a look at the developers guide. Good lord is it bloated with thousands of pages worth of calls, functions, and classes as well as tutorials. WIthout the sdk there is no way anyone could make sense of the code.

You have won... the game of losing.

[Narchie Troll]

What exactly does getting "PAYED" mean? Is that anything like getting paid?

The state of education today...

Re:It's great.. but.. where's 'open' Exchange?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read news in an email client then you are a moron. Use a news client, Skippy. I fucking HATE any email client that has news built in. Get it the fuck out.

I have no idea what the rest of your post is babbling about. My guess is that you're just a dumbass. As a KDE user, you are not "spoiled". Actually, I take that back. You are spoiled from having an opinion worth listening to if you actually think any linux desktop is enjoyable to use.

Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of stuff I don't like about Outlook, but I haven't used any program in linux that satisfied me at all.

help is on the way.

[twitter]

Are you trying to Blame Sun for how people's Keyboards are wired? Hmmm, very strange. I'll quote the bug you pointed to so people don't have to go visit:

It is appliable to all versions of OO and StarOffice (at least 5.2 and 6.0 Beta).Introducing numbers with decimal point is too slow, because all Spanish keyboards sold in Spain (and the O.S. driver) has a dot in the numeric keypad, but the decimal point character in Spain is the comma. It means we have to use the numeric keypad and type the comma with the alphanumeric portion of the keyboard. Some spreadsheets like excel overrides the system default character for the dot of our numeric keypad outputting a comma, solving this problem for Spanish users. OO must do the same, because is very important for the productivity.
Thanks.

I've never had this problem but I've seen where it should be solved. This problem should be taken care of by proper configuration of X. There should be a version of the xkeyborad map for you. At a lower level you might even have your kernel configured for your particular keyboard. If you use an unreasonable comercial GUI that does not take care of such basic funcionality for you the SDK might come to your rescue and implement keymaping as a module or a whole European decimal system format if that's not already available. This bug seems inconcevable in a world where people use free software to type Arabic, Cryic, Hebrew and Vietnamese characters on a regular basis.

Good luck with your problem. I'd simply ten key with six digits. Ten key in Excell requires seven digits if you count frequent CNTRL-S hits.

Boot time - more tests

[aoteoroa]

I guess the reason Open Office loads so quickly on this machine is that I had "Load OpenOffice.org during system start up" selected in my preferences. I disabled the auto load option. Restarted windows, and then loaded open office. This time the writer program needed almost 12 seconds to start which is closer to cscx's results.

Mmmmmmm

[fizban]

.... Pizza....

Oh, not that UNO's. Sorry.

Mmmmmm.... OpenOffice....

On the same (Numeric KP) note...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm used to using the KP movement keys - NUMLOCK off, (BTW also i sometime use ALT+BACKSPACE for undo and double click on the control menu to exit).

How can get the keyboard in XFree86 and linux to behave like windows, ie movement and being able to press shift+a movement key??

Does anyone know if this API are the same in 1.1

[Robert The Coward]

I see from the site that 1.1 Beta is comming along and wondering if 1.1 was going to be basicly the same API or total different API.

My wish....

[Bulln-Bulln]

My wish is, that OpenOffice gets a re-design simmilar to Mozilla... split into single applications each using a different process.
Yes, I know that there are ooowriter, ooocalc and so on, but those application only launch soffice.

The GUI toolkit does also not integrate very well into Windows. Some people use Skins (either WinXP's VisualStyles or WindowsBlinds), but it still looks like an Win95 application.
AFAIK under Unix/Linux OpenOffice uses GTK+ themes (I only use OOo under Windows, under FreeBSD I use KOffice).

Well, it took Mozilla 5 years to plan a re-design. IIRC OpenOffice.org started in 2000. OK, I'll wait until 2005 then. ;)

Re:My wish....

[ptr2void]

Unfortunately, it doesn't use GTK+ under X11 either.

OpenBSD, anyone?

[evilviper]

RANT:
Amazing, isn't it? All this great stuff happening for OpenOffice, and yet they still haven't spent 10 minutes to solve the problems it's having on OpenBSD.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm damn tired of cludgy, platform-specific, Open Source software. First Mozilla, now OpenOffice. Where does it stop? Linux isn't the only Unix platform in the world, yet it's the only platform most software will compile on, without a truckload of developers spending hours on each release to port it over to a different platform.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[JoeBuck]

Welcome to free software. If it doesn't work on a minority platform, it's up to people who care about that platform (e.g. folks like you) to contribute fixes, or at least to contribute help in isolating the bugs. Just because you're seeing problems on OpenBSD, by the way, doesn't mean it is "platform-specific" -- after all, it runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X, plus many others.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[evilviper]

seeing problems on OpenBSD, by the way, doesn't mean it is "platform-specific" -- after all, it runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X, plus many others.

It certainly does. OpenBSD doesn't do anything strange. It's just that the programmers basically did the job of porting it to the platforms that they wanted it to work on, and maintained those ports. It can't be compiled on any other form of Unix that they didn't expressly port it to. It has to be ported to compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SCO, Tru64, ANYTHING other than what they ported it to. That is the VERY DEFINITION of NON-PORTABLE!

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[rsax]

Amazing, isn't it? All this great stuff happening for OpenOffice, and yet they still haven't spent 10 minutes to solve the problems it's having on OpenBSD.

It makes sense to me that the OpenBSD developers continue to spend time on it if they want it to work on their OS.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm damn tired of cludgy, platform-specific, Open Source software. First Mozilla, now OpenOffice.

Platform specific hardly. Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have functioning ports of Mozilla and OpenOffice. Thank you, come again.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[TKinias]

scripsit evilviper:

It has to be ported to compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SCO, Tru64, ANYTHING other than what they ported it to.

More than that, it apparently requires very significant work to compile on non-i386 arches. AFAIK it won't build on sparc, alpha, m68k, s390, mips, ia64, or any other Linux arches except powerpc. IANA OO.o developer, but it seems that portability was not a concern from the beginning -- and now it's making porting more difficult.

I wonder if this is a legacy of its Windows origins? It wouldn't surprise me if no one working on the original code ever imagined it would ever be running on linux-s390 or netbsd-m68k or whatever.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[evilviper]

Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have functioning ports of Mozilla and OpenOffice.

That's right: PORT. It took good deals of effort, and numerous hacks, to get it to simply WORK on any other platform. In fact, the FreeBSD port is quite unstable (can't speak for the netbsd port).

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[evilviper]

That's a bit strange, however. I would have expected it to work with, at least SPARC, since Solaris is the primary platform.

but it seems that portability was not a concern from the beginning

Well, I've got nearly a half-dozen /.ers (replying to my post) that strongly disagree. :-)

I wonder if this is a legacy of its Windows origins?

That's a good point, but Sun has had plenty of time to change it already. Maybe it's time to rip out the guts of OO, and build a new office suite around it. That would probably require less effort than porting each release.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[Malcontent]

"That is the VERY DEFINITION of NON-PORTABLE!"

No. The definition of non portable is that it can not be ported without a complete rewrite of the code. It may be hard to port but it's portable.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can have portability or you can have optimised performance. (Java vs C anyone?) (Free vs. Net BSD anyone?) This is by now a truism. Few good things in life are so simple that porting them is easy.

If the OpenBSD community was less focused on security and performance of server apps, then it might have found the time to focus on hardware and software support for the things people want to do on the desktop. Then it might have a community of people who would put the work in to port desktop type things, like happens with other OS's. No project ports beyond the big OS's without significant community support for the port.

Of course, if OpenBSD was less focused on being what it is, then it wouldn't be what it is. No free lunches.

BTW, I'm damn tired of people who run Server OS's on their desktop (complete with smug preaching about security) whining when their server OS turns out to need more work before it makes a decent desktop computer.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

because linux provides better api calls, and more people use it, and is therefore a prority.

If you want code to run on your second fiddle platform, port it yourself.

This is what is possible with OSS, rejoice.

1. port.

2. rejoice.

3. ?????.

4. profit!

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[gi-tux]

And how long would it take to get Microsoft Office running on OpenBSD? At least you have the possibility of getting OO.o to work. If it were closed source, there would be no hope. Since OO.o is an open source project, you could conceivably help find the root problems and submit fixes for them.

Also, you can't expect all open source software to run on all platforms coming out of the chute. Most open source developers, don't have the resources to have one of each operating system and each platform for testing. You will likely find more that will work on Linux as it is the most popular open source operating system, and less on the x86 BSD systems and then even less on the PowerPC and Sparc based systems.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[alext]

I wonder if this is a legacy of its Windows origins?

I think it's a legacy of its C++ origins - applications like this should be moving to Java.

Anyone know when Microsoft will have moved Office to Dotnet (CLR)? Certainly when this happens they'll gain a lot of agility insofar as supporting different hardware platforms is concerned.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[evilviper]

If it were closed source, there would be no hope.

Ironically, StarOffice 5.1/5.2 worked under Linux emulation without a problem. No such luck with OpenOffice.

Also, you can't expect all open source software to run on all platforms coming out of the chute.

Any system that is reasonably standard, yes I can expect that. You don't have to test the program on multiple systems, as long as your code is reasonably standard.

You will likely find more that will work on Linux as it is the most popular open source operating system

Exactly the problem. More and more software is being written non-portably. There's no reason an app written for Linux can't compile and run on just about every other Unix system. Just look at any BSD app, you'll rarely find one that doesn't compile on Linux, Solaris, etc.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[evilviper]

I think it's a legacy of its C++ origins - applications like this should be moving to Java.

A) There's no reason a C++ application can't be portable.
B) There's plenty of examples of java programs being platform-specific.
C) Most people are not fans of Java. If OpenOffcie was java, you'd not see a fraction of the people using it.

(Sun has it right, very few Solaris apps are java-based... java is almost exclusively used for server services.)

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[alext]

a) I'm not quite sure what your perspective is, but it is not that of a typical technology consumer. Such people are not going to compile C++ applications.

b) There are plenty of examples of non-platform specific Java apps - across phones, PDAs and mainframes. Nothing else comes close in achieving portability.

c) I'm not sure how you gauge this, anyway, appeals to vague sentiment are of little value in such a debate. I trust you will be making Microsoft aware of your findings so that they can halt their efforts porting Office to C#?

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[evilviper]

a) Who said end-users need to compile the application? Just because the code should be written portably, does not exclude distributing binaries.

b) Actually, C is the single most portable lanuage available. Java's claim to fame is sandboxing. Java is basically Sun's own version of perl.

c) Performance, stability, responsiveness, and a relatively small memory footprint are things people want in the applications they use regularly. And I don't see what C# has to do with any of this at all.

Someone please make a "text to columns" function.

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough said.

rockin, good work guys.

[gnurb]

open office group
how i love you. keep fighting
the good software fight.

Mozilla?

[SEE]

Look, when a package compiles and runs on nineteen different operating systems as varied as AIX, BeOS, BSD/OS, DG/UX, FreeBSD, HPUX, Irix, Linux, MacOS, MacOS X, NetBSD, OpenUNIX/Unixware, OpenVMS, OS/2, QNX, Solaris, Tru64, and Win9x, and WinNT, the problem on the 20th probably isn't Mozilla being non-portable; it's that the 20th operating system is doing something unusual.

Re:Mozilla?

[evilviper]

Normally that would make sense, but knowing Mozilla and OpenBSD, I can tell you that it's not the case. What that actually means is that someone went through a good deal of effort to port the application over to the individual systems. Go back into the history of Mozilla and you will see less and less platforms working with Mozilla as you go further back.

In defense of Mozilla (versuses OpenOffice) the developers were good enough to import the necessary patches, and attempt to maintain compatibility after the fact. That still doesn't change the fact that Mozilla is strikingly non-portable.

are you kidding?

[pyrrho]

having an SDK is much different, and more facilitating, than just access to source code.

HIBT? May I HAND?

OOo

[Anonymous Coward]

hi, Having had the priviledge of attending the OOo con in Hamburg (no, not Berlin as it read somewhere - maybe in Gnome news?), I would just make a little account of it. First, OOo is really a SUN effort in the "background". They do not like exterior commit in their CVS, because they branch off SO right from it - and they are _very_ cautious. Therefore many patches didn't make it in to the main branch. Neither did Ximian's version: they set up their own forked CVS "tinderbox". Ximian made a custom version - as seen on Michael's slides. Nice Gnome integration, little enhancements. Though not a Gtk port. It isn't free, unless SUN will pay them - or you buy XD2. Talks are in way (those who can - it might be nice to put a little pressure on them ;-). To relax the community contrib problem, they plan using MWS and CWS-es as seen in one of the slides. Anyone can play in a child workspace, and if it prooves good, then it is merged back to the main workspace. The SO will be directly compiled from MWS, so there will be binary compatibility, and SO will be differenciated by adding a few extra files. They have a real hard time accepting community effort. Plans are there for a change - without a timeline though. So go and figure. Ximian added much that was needed to "modernize" OOo. SUN plans the same stuff for 2.0. OOo 2.0 will have alpha-channel-ed icons, and that kind of stuff, much like Aqua. They don't plan to change toolkit though, SWING was slow and they decided on keeping their custom kit (they didn't like issues with windowmanagers to be solved with other tk-s...). Ximian would like to see a Gtk "port" in the future. They will change the l10n backend, and the help engine. Release will be in the end of 2004. SDK: yes, real nice for the future. Look at two slides: one on Java, and one on Javascript. Both are nice. Note, that everything is java based: it is both good and bad. Good, because it is a real good tool (they demoed nice things using OOo Java and NetBeans), bad because the JAVA name means SUN (license, copyright etc. Look at the debian integration slide from Chris Halls for legal issues). A little quirk: anything done with SDK/Java will have a SWING GUI, which doesn't blend with OOo's. OOo can have multiple language bindings through bridges, but JAVA is preferred. StarBasic is depreciated. UNO is a capable tool: Ximian is planning to adopt it and migrate from Bonobo - keeping the latter only for compatibility. KDE/Qt is not anywhere on the screen. So the formula of a distant future looks like (in my opinion): Gnome/Gtk/OOo/Java/UNO/NetBeans. MySQL guys were there, so they may have more serious plans. So they could be added too, but they didn't "show" anything. http://marketing.openoffice.org/conference/schedul e.html a member of the OOo Hungarian team ;-)

Re:OOo

[sander]

you are completely wrong on almost anything that you say - starting with not knowing what tinderbox is (come, on, go to mozilla.org and find out, it won't hurt you). And everything in SDK is definately not java based - where did you get that idea from?

Re:OOo

[Anonymous Coward]

http://ooo.ximian.com/
It is true - no, not everything is java based. No one ever said so. But all the "mainstream" tools in the SDK are as closely tied to java as possible.

Why the name?

[Ed Avis]

Can someone explain why it's called OpenOffice.org rather than just plain OpenOffice? It seems a bit peculiar to me, I mean, you'd then expect the domain name to be openoffice.org.org.

Is it going to be another project like GTK+ where there's an 'official' name with some random suffix, used by almost nobody except the project web page?

Re:Why the name?

[WWWWolf]

Can someone explain why it's called OpenOffice.org rather than just plain OpenOffice?

Because "OpenOffice" was someone else's trademark...

(My guess it was some product that was "open" as in "Open Group", therefore it didn't gain that much reputation =)

Re:Why the name?

[thesman]

From the official FAQ [openoffice.org]:

10. How should I refer to OpenOffice.org in my documents?
[...]
Now for the obvious question: Why? The reason is: Someone else owns the phrase "OpenOffice", and we want to make sure we do not get into trouble.

Cheers.

Re: COM is supported

[Billly Gates]

Check 3.4 in Automation Brdige in the developers guide with the kit and then look at Service Manager Component. Com/Dcom is supported by UNO. aka Unified Network Object model in which c++, java, jscript, and basic all use.

The section on com/dcom is quite large and I am very impressed. I am simply amazed at how complex this product is. No wonder people complain its bloated good lord. Each section according to printer preview in IE is about 200 pages each! Its close to 2k pages in total.

Re:It's great.. but.. where's 'open' Exchange?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

there will be something in the near future...look at

http://groupware.openoffice.org/glow/index.html ... and contribute...!

Re:Does anyone know if this API are the same in 1.

[sander]

Yes, components developed with the sdk will also work with 1.1

The important thing is the common file format

[EarthTone]

KOffice is already actively working to support the OpenOffice XML file formats. David Faure is even on the OASIS team working to standardize on the OO.o specification. This is the important area of focus, to allow for true integration into the KDE desktop. Besides, down the road, KOffice will be much more advanced than the OpenOffice.org suite. Check it out for yourself: www.koffice.org.

JDBC

[wrfink]

I connect to Oracle using JDBC in OO 1.2b. While it is not too easy to set up, it is great once things are all configured. It even has the cheesy ERD mode to generate reports.

Now, if I could only find a Linux version of ErWin (or something like that), I would have no reason to keep Windows around.

...anyone know of a good ER tool...other than DIA.

Fonts...

[BrokenHalo]

You do know that you can change the toolbar fonts, don't you?

The first time I tried OO, I thought "Yuck" when I saw the default (just about the time when StarOffice was becoming non-free again, so I had the incentive to look) but you can select the TTF or T1 font of your choice through Tools-> Options -> Fonts -> Replacement Table.

If you want to make any other fonts available to OO, there's the spadmin utility to link them. Unless you need the database stuff, I can't think of anything to make it worthwhile coughing up shekels for SO any more.

Here you go...

[BrokenHalo]

any more than you could port it to GTK/GNOME

This isn't strictly a Gnome or GTK port, but there is a Gnome2 icon theme available here . The next best thing :-)