The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
CyricZ
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
rdwald
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
I guess that's why it takes 5 hours to compile in Gentoo, then. I wish I were exaggerating.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
CyricZ
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's a massive piece of software. Of course it's going to take hours, literally, to build. It's just a matter of OpenOffice being so massive.
It'd be like building a bridge across the English Channel. It will take longer to build such a bridge than it would to build a bridge across a 10 m wide stream.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:Version 1.1.5?
by
sinewalker
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
me too.
I think 1.1.5 is a back-port of some stuff? The homepage mentions OpenDocument support.
This new slashdot layout is freakin me out... looks cool, but I have to look around to find things again. Strange parallels with OOo...
-- “Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Kjella
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Lots of people are ready. The users don't want to.
-- Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
Spoing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I need help.
I have a good chance to include the OpenOffice format (specifically, a reference to the Oasis Open Document specification), as part of a specification for a US Federal Government system. The current specification includes MS Office formats as acceptable document formats for reports, etc...and OpenDocument would be inserted along with MS Office as an acceptable report format. This specification will be the basis for a few more related specifications.
What I need are references to other US federal (preferred), US state/local, or non-US government use of OpenOffice (the app) or OpenDocument (the Oasis document standard). The higher profile the better.
So far, I've scraped up a couple references but not enough to make a simple and direct case for the inclusion of OpenDocument. (The practical and technical benifits are not always a good argument to make...who's using what seems to be more effective.)
-- A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
zerblat
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Start by contacting OOo's marketing people, I'm sure they can help you. Also, the OOo Newsletter usually has a section listing high-profile success stories.
-- Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
soullessbastard
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size? Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out? This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code. Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long. gcc4 may spit out a warning at you, but it'll still be valid C.
I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...I almost can fathom spreadsheets, but really the unsigned int row index will bite you in the ass *waaay* before a 2GB per process memory limit:)
ed
Re:Sweet!
by
Neil+Blender
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Does this open MS Office files better?
In addition, can it open spreadsheets with more than 32,000 lines? I know Excel tops out at 64,000 which for my needs sometimes is not enough. I have searched the prefs in previous versions but can't find any way to open files with that many lines. Well, the open, but the cut off anything after the max line number. I regularly get csv files with 50-75K lines that are of different formats and would like to be able to open them in a spread sheet, especially OO. I usually have to resort to perl or awk to find what I need, but spreadsheets are quicker if you need to perform a bunch of ad hoc searches and calculations.
Sweet: just installed Beta 2 on Ubuntu Linux
by
MarkWatson
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It was a small hassle: installed the zillion RPMs with "alien -s *.rpm" and then changed the ownership of/opt/openoffice.org1.9.125 to my user account and I had to set some execute permissions in/opt/openoffice.org1.9.125/programs. Not sure why everything was root with no permisions; maybe I missed an option on running alien. Nice though, runs well, and looks great.
I hope that the Ubuntu team packages the latest beta of OOo with the next Ubuntu release.
I have been running beta 1 when I need to run Windows for a long time.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
c.r.o.c.o
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The MS Office interface is very well established, and most (if not all) people are used to it. For people to migrate easily to OOo, it has to feel like a clone of MS Office. When its userbase will be significant enough, it will afford deviating from the norm. I am sure that MS Office implemented a similar interface to its precursors (WordPerfect et al) when it was introduced, and added new features gradually. And by the way, OOo did have a very different interface when it was still called StarOffice 5. It had a desktop manager, file browser, etc, but unfortunately, it felt cumbersome, and the suite ran slowly even on systems with reasonable specs. Moving to the current interface improved things significantly.
I have used OOo exclusively for the past two years, mostly for school work. Between taking notes in class, typing assignments, etc, I spent many hours using it. While I also have MS Office 97, 2k and XT, I stuck with OOo because of a few default behaviours and features. First, it does not bullet, tab, etc by default. You have to actvely format the text. When taking notes in class this is crucial, because I really do not have time to fuss around with how the text looks like. MS Office was driving me crazy with its auto-everything behaviour, which cannot be turned off (it can be undone on a case-by-case basis, but that is not good enough for me). Second, it can export the file as PDF. When sharing files, this is amazing. Not to mention that most people cannot edit your work if you chose not to let them. And upon completing a course I can just archive the material as PDF, without having to worry about installing OOo or MS Office in order to read it. MS Office however, does not (or at least did not) have this feature.
Re:Sweet!
by
Neil+Blender
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Dude. Try a relational database.
Examining the file is the first step towards inserting the data into a database. I work in bioinformatics. I get files from customers which often share only two common characteristics - they hold some data, and they are tab or comma delimited. Other than that, they could be two columns with 50 rows, or 100 columns with 75,000 rows. Opening the file and looking at it is the first step. A spreadsheet is a handy tool for doing that. I'm not sure if you have used a text editor or used "more" or "less" to look at file with 75 columns, but it is pretty hard to decifer it that way. A spreadsheet is also handy for quick check validation of the data. I can't find the median of 75,000 numbers or search for the values of particalur identifier if the spreadsheet only reads in 32,000 lines. Sure, I could write a script to do all the various things, but a spreadsheet that could read in 100,000 lines would really ease my life. And, as I said, it is only the first step towards much more complicated calculations which do, in fact, use a relational database.
Slashdot Mirror
The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
me too.
I think 1.1.5 is a back-port of some stuff? The homepage mentions OpenDocument support.
This new slashdot layout is freakin me out... looks cool, but I have to look around to find things again. Strange parallels with OOo...
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Lots of people are ready. The users don't want to.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I have a good chance to include the OpenOffice format (specifically, a reference to the Oasis Open Document specification), as part of a specification for a US Federal Government system. The current specification includes MS Office formats as acceptable document formats for reports, etc...and OpenDocument would be inserted along with MS Office as an acceptable report format. This specification will be the basis for a few more related specifications.
What I need are references to other US federal (preferred), US state/local, or non-US government use of OpenOffice (the app) or OpenDocument (the Oasis document standard). The higher profile the better.
So far, I've scraped up a couple references but not enough to make a simple and direct case for the inclusion of OpenDocument. (The practical and technical benifits are not always a good argument to make...who's using what seems to be more effective.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size? Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out? This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code. Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long. gcc4 may spit out a warning at you, but it'll still be valid C.
I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...I almost can fathom spreadsheets, but really the unsigned int row index will bite you in the ass *waaay* before a 2GB per process memory limit :)
ed
Does this open MS Office files better?
In addition, can it open spreadsheets with more than 32,000 lines? I know Excel tops out at 64,000 which for my needs sometimes is not enough. I have searched the prefs in previous versions but can't find any way to open files with that many lines. Well, the open, but the cut off anything after the max line number. I regularly get csv files with 50-75K lines that are of different formats and would like to be able to open them in a spread sheet, especially OO. I usually have to resort to perl or awk to find what I need, but spreadsheets are quicker if you need to perform a bunch of ad hoc searches and calculations.
It was a small hassle: installed the zillion RPMs with "alien -s *.rpm" and then changed the ownership of /opt/openoffice.org1.9.125 to my user account and I had to set some execute permissions in /opt/openoffice.org1.9.125/programs. Not sure why everything was root with no permisions; maybe I missed an option on running alien. Nice though, runs well, and looks great.
I hope that the Ubuntu team packages the latest beta of OOo with the next Ubuntu release.
I have been running beta 1 when I need to run Windows for a long time.
* Healthier hacking: http://cjskitchen.com/
The MS Office interface is very well established, and most (if not all) people are used to it. For people to migrate easily to OOo, it has to feel like a clone of MS Office. When its userbase will be significant enough, it will afford deviating from the norm. I am sure that MS Office implemented a similar interface to its precursors (WordPerfect et al) when it was introduced, and added new features gradually. And by the way, OOo did have a very different interface when it was still called StarOffice 5. It had a desktop manager, file browser, etc, but unfortunately, it felt cumbersome, and the suite ran slowly even on systems with reasonable specs. Moving to the current interface improved things significantly.
I have used OOo exclusively for the past two years, mostly for school work. Between taking notes in class, typing assignments, etc, I spent many hours using it. While I also have MS Office 97, 2k and XT, I stuck with OOo because of a few default behaviours and features. First, it does not bullet, tab, etc by default. You have to actvely format the text. When taking notes in class this is crucial, because I really do not have time to fuss around with how the text looks like. MS Office was driving me crazy with its auto-everything behaviour, which cannot be turned off (it can be undone on a case-by-case basis, but that is not good enough for me). Second, it can export the file as PDF. When sharing files, this is amazing. Not to mention that most people cannot edit your work if you chose not to let them. And upon completing a course I can just archive the material as PDF, without having to worry about installing OOo or MS Office in order to read it. MS Office however, does not (or at least did not) have this feature.
Dude. Try a relational database.
Examining the file is the first step towards inserting the data into a database. I work in bioinformatics. I get files from customers which often share only two common characteristics - they hold some data, and they are tab or comma delimited. Other than that, they could be two columns with 50 rows, or 100 columns with 75,000 rows. Opening the file and looking at it is the first step. A spreadsheet is a handy tool for doing that. I'm not sure if you have used a text editor or used "more" or "less" to look at file with 75 columns, but it is pretty hard to decifer it that way. A spreadsheet is also handy for quick check validation of the data. I can't find the median of 75,000 numbers or search for the values of particalur identifier if the spreadsheet only reads in 32,000 lines. Sure, I could write a script to do all the various things, but a spreadsheet that could read in 100,000 lines would really ease my life. And, as I said, it is only the first step towards much more complicated calculations which do, in fact, use a relational database.