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OpenOffice.org Hits 1.1

sander writes "OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet). The announcement is here, there is a really nice features page and a long list of mirrors carrying the goodies." OO.org releases for languages other than English should be here soon, too.

48 of 490 comments (clear)

  1. Start up time? by n1k0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has the start-up time been reduced for this release? When last I tried (a few weeks ago), it was rediculously slow.

    Here's hoping,

    -Nick

    1. Re:Start up time? by madfgurtbn · · Score: 5, Informative

      Has the start-up time been reduced for this release?

      It looks like their website is groaning under the load right now, so I can't give you a link, but there is a roadmap up somewhere which says startup time is one of the highest priority goals for version 2.0.

      Startup is still quite slow even on speedy hardware, but I don't think it has been one of their highest priorities yet.

      --
      Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
    2. Re:Start up time? by MarcQuadra · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm running on a hotrod 1466Mhz athlon / 768MB/ 10GB running gentoo. First load takes about 11 seconds (that's a long time) but subsequent loads are pretty zippy. I suggest you either prelink the app (which I don't do) or put a script in your init.d directory to recursively cat the /opt/OpenOffice directory to /dev/null, that would effectively 'precache' the application.

      Also, try building from source if you can, you'll be able to set the optimization and several options that you don't see with a binary-only install.

      --
      "Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
    3. Re:Start up time? by BlackBolt · · Score: 4, Informative

      The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness. *In comparison* to either MSOffice or Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 or 8 on Windows it is abysmal.

      Please note: I put "in comparison" in asterisks because the trolls think people should "get faster computers, fool". My friend was given OO.O recently and was immediately disgusted by the startup speed compared to MSOffice. "You get what you pay for", she said. NOT a good showing for open-source software. The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.

    4. Re:Start up time? by MeNeXT · · Score: 3, Informative
      Do like msoffice. Set it to start on login and minimize it. Then it's very fast...It's how MS does it.

      --
      DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
    5. Re:Start up time? by ekuns · · Score: 3, Informative

      The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness [snip] "You get what you pay for", she said. [snip] The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.

      Wow, do you see the irony there? Someone complains that "You get what you pay for" and then pirates commercial software? I have no sympathy, nor respect, for people who pirate software. You mention that person's complaint like it's someone whose opinion should be taken seriously. Someone who is going to pirate software isn't mature enough to get the difference between free as in "Free Beer" and free is in "Free speech."

      If you want start up speeds comparable to Office and to Corel's office suite, then you have to do the exact same thing both of those suites do to speed up their loading -- preload the application. Just because Microsoft has made it non-obvious that they preload the app doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Internet Explorer starts up quickly for the same reason. Once I configured Mozilla to preload under Win2k, it started up exactly as rapidly as IE6.

      By way of comparison, someone who will pirate commercial software because what is freely available doesn't immediately meet their approval, well, is sort of like someone who doesn't like the food they are being given freely, so instead they go rob a store to get different food. Is that someone whose opinion you worry about? IMO, no.

  2. Just tried it by KrackHouse · · Score: 3, Interesting

    IBM should help out with the marketing of this, it's really great. Get better icons, etc. here -> http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7 131 It seems faster than 1.0, more polished.

    --
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  3. My favorite feature by carl67lp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF. It's one of the reasons why I still use OO even though I almost always have access to Microsoft Office.

    That, and there's something to be said for the ability to literally unpack a saved file, look at the raw data, and get exactly what you need. (I had to do this on a spreadsheet before I installed OO again, and was able to retrieve an important CD key. ;-) )

    1. Re:My favorite feature by jlechem · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes but can it save word files to crappy html files with propriatary tags?

      I didn't think so.
      --
      Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
    2. Re:My favorite feature by mblase · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF.

      You know, in Mac OS X (or Windows, if you buy Adobe Acrobat), you can export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing.

      Come to think of it, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a Linux printer driver to do the same thing....

    3. Re:My favorite feature by mblase · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ahh, good: there's a Linux print-to-PDF solution after all.

      Of course, OO's button is certainly easier to use, but I think adding it either to the "save as..." dialog or the "print to..." list (or both) is more intuitive.

    4. Re:My favorite feature by aled · · Score: 5, Funny

      Why would you want a one-click-save-to-pdf when you can install ghostscript and ghostview and configure... ah, never mind.

      --

      "I think this line is mostly filler"
    5. Re:My favorite feature by Bistronaut · · Score: 3, Informative

      PDF995 is a shareware (free version pops up a web page every time you use it) app that does exactly that. Plus, if you want to register it it's only $9.95 (hence the name). It's great. You can set up the same thing with all free software, but it's a pain. PDF995 takes the pain out of making PDFs for free on Windows. That said, I use OOo. It rocks.

    6. Re:My favorite feature by generic-man · · Score: 4, Informative

      In Windows, you can use PDFCreator to export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing. Unlike Adobe Acrobat, PDFCreator is free (GPL).

      --
      For more information, click here.
    7. Re:My favorite feature by johnnyb · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, Linux supports this to. Just print to postscript, and run ps2pdf on it, or better yet, set up a printer to do that for you.

      In fact, I have my Linux PDF Printer set up using SAMBA so the whole office can use it. This way noone has to buy Acrobat, and we can all print to PDF without even installing software (it's just a printer install - the drivers are already installed on Windows).

    8. Re:My favorite feature by Qube · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or better still, PDFCreator does all that for nothing with with no ads or nagging - completely GPL. Comes with a proper no-hassle installer, and is as easy to set up and use as PDF995 or similar.

    9. Re:My favorite feature by The+Madpostal+Worker · · Score: 3, Informative

      There is a redirector which will redirect a printer port to a ghost script process, which is essentially a free version of distiller.

      --

      /*
      *Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
      */
  4. RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same by Lord+Satri · · Score: 5, Informative

    FYI, received this interesting info from OOO's staff :
    In my enthusiasm for OpenOffice.org 1.1, I neglected to clarify a point (see http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ ReadMsg?msgId=848545&listName=announce ).

    OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 is *identical* to the recently released OpenOffice.org RC5.

    Therefore, if you have downloaded RC5, there is no need to download 1.1.

    1. Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same by Delirium+Tremens · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Therefore, if you have downloaded RC5, there is no need to download 1.1.
      That is not exactly true because there was actually 3 rc5 release attempts, the latest one even being called rc5b.
      So your RC5 being the same as the final version really depends on which RC5 you actually downloaded.
  5. Here's a nice page by zr-rifle · · Score: 5, Informative

    with the complete illustrated feature list.
    http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features /1.1/

    Loading times seem to have been improved, that's great news since that's what's keeping me using Abiword for common word processing jobs at uni. Let's see if there's already an ebuild for it...

    --
    Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
  6. Re:For those that have tried both.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    StarOffice 7 has a database component (AdabasD) that is not OSS, since its not created by Sun. SO7 also has more clip-art style stuff, a WordPerfect filter (also not OSS due to 3rd party code), and a different spelling checker (same thing again).

    And it costs $79 (OpenOffice.org 1.1 is free), but you get Sun support with it.

    Dan
    fa@ooo

  7. 1.1 final is the same as RC5 by kg4eyf · · Score: 3, Informative

    The zip file is identical to the RC5 release. If you got it already, then there's no need to download it again.

  8. Re:OS X version? Not there yet... by Lord+Satri · · Score: 3, Informative

    Nope, no native OSX port soon. See

    http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/timeline.html

  9. Re:Blah by Kadagan+AU · · Score: 3, Informative

    I know this was a joke (and a good one at that), but OpenOffice.org is also available for Windows and OS X, and others.

    --
    This space for rent, inquire within.
  10. "release candidate" != "feature freeze", sadly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet)

    Don't read too much into the word "release candidate", which is a Sun marketing tool rather than anything like a feature freeze. As someone working on OpenOffice translation, it has been somewhat difficult when "release candidates" come out containing whole new modules like crashrep and officecfg. Also, there is nothing like a timeline or a release plan like the mozilla project uses - as a contributor, the first you hear about an OpenOffice release is when it appears on the website. This makes it very difficult when you're trying to convince organisations in your country to switch - you're working in the dark and have no timescale to plan against.


    Don't get me wrong - I think OpenOffice is a brilliant product and will be pushing it very hard in my country. But if they'd open up the development process half as much as they've opened up the licence, it'd make advocacy a lot easier.

  11. Cool! by the+bluebrain · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... only 1998.9 versions to go (plus a couple of arbitrary letters), and we'll have caught up with Microsoft!

    (hey - there are "industry analysts" out there that count this way)

    --
    yes, we have no bananas
  12. For those who run into trouble looking for mirrors by ErrorBase · · Score: 5, Informative
  13. Re:Damn... by prandal · · Score: 3, Informative

    Google has a list here.

    Amazing what searching for "Openoffice mirrors" turns up.

    Phil

  14. Re:Torrent anyone? by carlmenezes · · Score: 3, Informative

    Windows install torrent link :

    http://www.emptylogic.com/suprnova/torrents/378/ OO o_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install-zip.torrent

    Linux torrent anyone?

    --
    Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
  15. Re:Excellent! by allan_q · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just click on Actions > Expunge to delete these marked messages. You can also hit Ctrl-E. After a while it becomes second nature.

  16. Personal Star/OpenOffice timeline by swordgeek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ah, how far we've come.

    I got one of the very first copies of StarOffice 5.0b when Sun bought and released it for free. It very quickly got renamed 5.1, and I tentatively recommended it to a client as a means to solving their office-suite-on-xterm problem. Ended up having to support the evil bastard package as a result. Horrible, horrible thing it was. 5.2 was identical, except with slightly fewer bugs.

    OpenOffice.org was born, and I ran screaming. Occasionally I'd drop in and check out the current release (around the 0.300 to 0.500 mark), and find that they had gone light years beyond SO5.2, but still had at least that far to go.

    When Sun announced that SO6.0 was coming out, I started to check out the OO releases again, and found a passable package. Slow slow slow (still), but actually usable and convenient.

    SO-6.0/OO-1.0.1 was a decent product. I used it regularly, learned to deal with its quirks (no anti-aliased fonts on Solaris--ugh!), and was relatively happy.

    Then came the StarOffice 6.1 beta program, which I was a part of. That's when I fell in love, or at least like. StarOffice 7.0 (formerly 6.1) or OpenOffice 1.1.0 are GREAT packages, at long last! Slow to start up, but fast to use once they're running, and really well designed. It's professional quality software, available for multiple platforms, for free. My sole Windows machine is now no more than a games console.

    This is a happy day folks! We finally have a complete non-MS desktop!

    --

    "People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
  17. Re:Hello by Mod+Me+God · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Although for the home your reasons are good, for the business:

    1. My company pays, I do not. They get a huge discount and even if for 1000 users it only costs $100K eacg, that's only $100,000K (the price of a single senior analyst a year). Role that over the three year product lifestyle and $100K is the cost of a junior admin staff over those three years. In anorganisation of 1000 this is hardly a good thing, when all OO can do is all MSOffice can do. If OO did something extra that MSOffice did not that would be different, but it is not. Although OO has suppost for office documents, macros cannot be converted unless weeding the code (this takes time, hence money).

    2. My secretary does the PDF writing if I need it, this takes less than 5 seconds for me to do and little longer for her (though she also checks various points of detail in it). If something big needs doing I'll forward to our printing department, who will ensure the layout stc is perfect - they are the best people to do the nitty picky presentational polishing, not me.

    3. Business licences have already brought down cost of business software for businesses.

    4. It's proprietary, and guess what... I can still change it to my needs! Yes I can write macros etc, and can integrate some VB into it and can seamlessly integrate a MS Access DB with Excel etc... but have you ever used Reuters etc??? Reuters worked with MS to reverse engineer Excel to work with live feeds from Reuters, Bloomberg did a similar thing. OO does not have this feature, and until it does will never be the spreadsheet of choice for front office finance work. In the back of a finance office a spreadsheet which cannot do pivot tables easily or work with the existing implenentation (i.e., existing macros or bespoke software) is not worth having on your hard disk.

    5. The licence is cheap for a corporate, see 1.

    In the end, unless the OO (or even a change over in proprietary software) offers cost savings over the costs involved in changing bespoke applications and macros AND can do all that the previous software will it be implemented by corporates. However to me, the ONLY SURE WAY FOR NEW SOFTWARE TO SUCCEED (proprietary or open source) is to offer new functionality. This is the only thing that can get over the inertia for companies to move. So come on OO, give me something new... I don't know what I want, you've got to do the development of something new and that is truely hard.

    SOrry for rambling.

    --
    --

    FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
  18. Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO by Tor · · Score: 5, Interesting
    You know, in Mac OS X [...] you can export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing.


    True, however those PDFs are HUGE compared to those that OpenOffice creates -- with no seeming improvement in quality. Indeed, the OO seems a bit better at detailed pictures etc.

    I printed a 3.2MB MS PowerPoint presentation to PDF from a Mac, and the resulting file was 22MB. I exported the same file from OO v1.1 (which, by the way, has been in Debian 'sid' since Sep 25), and the resulting size was 2.3MB.

    Indeed, the PDF created from OO seemed smoother (despite having to import a foreign document format) than the one created via the "Print to PDF..." option in the Mac OS X print dialogue.

    -tor
    1. Re:Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO by Graymalkin · · Score: 3, Informative

      In Jaguar (10.2) the Print to PDF feature doesn't use any compression. OO's print to PDF feature supports image compression. In Panther (10.3) Apple is finally adding compression support to their Print to PDF feature so the files ought to be a whole lot smaller than the ones produced in jaguar. Granted they might not be as small as a dedicated PDF generation utility might output but they are much better than Jaguar's PDFs.

      Regardless, the ability to print anything to a PDF is a very cool feature. Want to send an AppleWorks document to a Windows user? Print to PDF and you're pretty much set.

      --
      I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  19. Enough with the startup time complaints! by BuddhaDude · · Score: 3, Insightful
    This seems to be the single most commonly voiced criticism of Open/Star Office. How often do you really need to open your wp or ss during the day? I've been using OpenOffice every day at work this year, and here's how I get around this "problem":
    1. Fire it up at the beginning of the day.
    2. Work.
    3. Shut it down at the end of the day.
    And if you're the type who leaves the computer on overnight, you don't even have to re-open it the next day. Let's get real, folks.
  20. Here, I'll start a Linux torrent by tugrul · · Score: 4, Informative

    Doesn't seem like anyone else has.

    OOo_1.1.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz.torrent

  21. Re:Just tried it [KDE LOOK ICON SET URL] by ShadeARG · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hyperlinking the URL would fix the problem and make access convenient. Why not try it?

  22. Fix The Installer.. by wfberg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why a .zip file that contains compressed installer files? Couldn't there be one big executable that's the installer and contains the compressed files? Or even an installer that looks around whether the compressed installation files are on the disk itself, or whether it should download them (if the user chooses to install components which are not available)...

    If you use MSIE, it will first download the .zip in a temporary directory, then COPY the .zip to your download directory (not an atomic MOVE!), then you have to unzip, then the installer has to decompress files.. Quite a lot of disk activity and space being wasted there..

    --
    SCO employee? Check out the bounty
  23. other missing features by commodoresloat · · Score: 3, Funny

    I can't get any work done with a word processor that doesn't interrupt every fucking letter I try to write with unhelpful advice. Until OO gets this kind of functionality it will be useless to the majority of MS Office users.

  24. Re:Print to PDF from Mac is inefficient by Alderete · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I love the capability of Mac OS X to print anything to a PDF file, it's a great feature to use in a pinch. But it's no substitute for a real PDF generation tool, like Acrobat, or functionality built into OpenOffice.

    The file size different noted here (22MB vs 2.3MB) is hardly unusual; indeed, it's the rule, not the exception. In dozens of attempts, I never made a PDF file remotely close to what Acrobat Distiller was capable of doing, size-wise.

    If your job doesn't depend on being able to send people PDF files, the built-in version is fine. But if you share your PDFs regularly, spend the time or the bucks to get a real PDF solution.

  25. Yay! by achacha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I for one am very happy they released version 1.1. I am a happy user of version 1.0 on Windows ME. I had a choice of installing OpenOffice and buying MS Office.

    I thought about what I wanted to do, and came up with a small list:
    1. Read .doc files that people use at work (don't really care about formatting or power features, just want to read the content)
    2. Read Excel files and generate simple spreadsheets

    That is all.

    For email I use emacs, for a database I use mySQL.

    Microsoft Office offered nothing for me.

    I do NOT want VB script (as most MS bugs are rooted in that god awful script).
    I do NOT want Outlook, while it may be nice at work to schedule meetings and manage internal email, it is not suited as an email reader in the age of viruses and worms. Pine is just fine. (no rhyme intended).
    I do NOT want power point (as it is equivalent to brain rot and no one pays attention to those presentations anyways, easier to just give handouts and a URL).
    I sure as hell do NOT want Access database as it is inferior in every way to mySQL.

    So after much thought, I decided that MS office is not worth the money and installed OpenOffice and to this day I am happy with my decision.

  26. Re:A day too late... by swtaarrs · · Score: 3, Informative
    Actually, rc5 is the same as 1.1. It's not uncommmon with many apps for the final release candidate to be rereleased as a stable version. For those of you who might not believe me, here are the md5sums of the two install zips (ignore any spaces that may get shoved in there..):
    4e38b597c1e646d07bb83153b73fe5d3 *OOo_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install.zip
    4e38b597c1e646d 07bb83153b73fe5d3 *OOo_1.1rc5_Win32Intel_install.zip
    Of course, you have to trust me to believe those md5sums, but life's tough, ain't it? :)
  27. Dont forget to checkout the OpenOffice themes! by -unta · · Score: 4, Informative


    I really like OpenOffice but gawd it's ugly! If your running it under *nix make sure you check out the Toolbar themes addon.

    http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=713 1

    You can replace the normal toolbar icons with ones to match your desktop environment, but pretty-much any of the included ones are FAR better than the OOo ones. Please, someone at OO merge this into the main tree!!!

  28. Really fast startup times with preliink by AstroDrabb · · Score: 3, Informative
    I just used prelink on OpenOffice 1.1 and get a 4 second startup time the first time I start it and 2 second startup times after that. I don't think you can get much better then that. This is on a P4 1.7GHz, 512MB laptop, so it is not the fastest box around. To prelink OOo-1.1 try this:

    #cd to where you installed OOo
    prelink -vm --ld-library-path=/opt/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/program soffice.bin


    Replace the --ld-library-path= part with the directory where soffice.bin is installed. You need to do this as root unless you installed OOo as a normal user.
    --
    If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
    it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
  29. Good stuff by soloport · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just put a new installation through it's paces. Nice work! It is faster. Actually (just started it again to check), it's DAMN faster! In fact it seems everything's sped up a bit -- e.g. menus.

    Also tried the PDF exporter and brought the copy up in Mozilla (using the Adobe's reader for Linux). Yep. Looks like a real PDF to me. Haven't tried the MySQL interface, yet, but am excited to get away from the proprietary one.

    FWIW, YMMV

  30. 1.1 RC5 is the same as 1.1 final by Compact+Dick · · Score: 3, Informative

    Those who downloaded 1.1 RC5 for win32 can save themselves a 63.5 MB download and simply rename OOo_1.1rc5_Win32Intel_install.zip to OOo_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install.zip as they share the same checksum "4e38b597c1e646d07bb83153b73fe5d3".

    I am not sure about the other platforms but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the same. Find out by checking out the OpenOffice 1.1 final MD5sums list.

    Riding the first post to save bandwidth and unnecessary downloads.

  31. Make OOo look pretty and match your desktop... by dotgod · · Score: 3, Informative

    Download this to make OpenOffice match your icon theme. Then use this guide to get your fonts looking good. In Gentoo you can get Microsoft's fonts by emerging corefonts

  32. Feature: One-click Export to PDF by Radical+Rad · · Score: 4, Funny

    Watch out! I think Amazon has already patented that one.