OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released

Da Massive writes "The official release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been pushed to the download servers, as of Thursday the 20th." From the article: "OpenDocument is an XML file format for saving office documents such as spreadsheets, memos, charts, and presentations. It was approved as an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard at the beginning of this year. OpenDocument, set as a default in OpenOffice, is cited by proponents as a way of fighting vendor lock-in associated with proprietary formats. Already, it is the required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts." You can download, or read past coverage including a preview or a comparison with MS Office. Update: 10/20 17:22 GMT by Z : Made date reference more topical.

Comments

It's on time!

[bcat24]

My milk hasn't expired yet.

Re:It's on time!

[VStrider]

Parent is not offtopic. :) See http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/1 0/12/1610249&threshold=-1&tid=102&tid=11

the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.

Re:It's on time!

[Blimundus]

My milk expired even before they made the milk announcement.

Re:It's on time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep this was a good joke in my book. Very good form. I laughed out loud when I read it :)

Re:It's on time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good reference :)

Of course I have to say... I don't drink milk you insensitive lactose-tolerant clod!

Re:It's on time!

[Rude Turnip]

I'm lactose intolerant, you insensitive clod!

Re:It's on time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does soy milk expire?

Re:It's on time!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Microsoft reccomends milk be purchased in TetraPaks for the longest possible shelf life.

Re:It's on time!

[bcat24]

Yes, soy milk has an expiration date like just about any other food product. (Even bottled water has an expiration date.)

Re:It's on time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy cow!

Re:It's on time!

[Hurricane78]

I AM lactose, you insensitive clod!

Re:It's on time!

[Hurricane78]

> (Even bottled water has an expiration date.)

Wich is only a *recommendation* that exists beause
1. after some time, depending on the amount of baecteria in the food and the amount of air, heat and light it gets, it could be bad for your health to eat it.
2. if you could store it that long, the company would not earn money because you threw it away. (in the case of normal water without tons of bacteria or chemical substances [not noted on the bottle] inside.)

there is another kind of expiration date for stuff where it's pretty dangerous to eat it after that date. this is the case for stuff with much protein inside, because of the salmonellae that spread like mad. examples are: fish, egg-white, some kinds of cake (dunno how you call that cake called "bee-sting" here in germany...)

Re:It's on time!

[VinVinMa]

Please repeat this message every 108 mins. :-)

Re:It's on time!

[slavemowgli]

FYI, the cake is called "bee sting" (or "bee sting cake") in English as well. That being said, I think this is the first time I've ever heard anyone talk about *eating* water. :)

Re:It's on time!

[Hurricane78]

Well... my great-grandfather used to say: "Now I want to eat a morsel of coffee and a sip of bread!" (In luxemburgish of course, his mother-tongue!)

Excellent!!!!

[RapidEye]

I've been eagerly awaiting 2.0 Official release for 6 months - its about time!!!

Going to download and install it tonight - WOOT!

Re:Excellent!!!!

[MountainMan101]

So have I. I downloaded rc3 only yesterday though. Doesn't seem to be a 64 bit version yet - does anyone have any news about this?

Re:Excellent!!!!

[Wornstrom]

I push openoffice on anyone who asks me if I have a "copy" of office they can "install" on their new computer. Now with the more advanced Access style database stuff and general improvements, I couldn't imagine the "need" for MS Office anywhere. Except maybe in schools where the classes they teach on basic computer skills require that students have a copy of the latest version of Office. That is one thing that needs to be changed. Users are getting their basic education in productivity applications without any alternatives. Amazon is preselling the openoffice 2.x resource kit for $32.99, which comes with the cd with several versions (MS, Linux, Solaris, Apple) of OOo, plus macros and such. Might make a good gift for someone with the in-depth manual that explains how to do everything.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[ScottyUK]

Coordinated Universal Time?

Re:Excellent!!!!

[joeljkp]

I haven't tried 2.0 yet, but I've found Excel to have far more advanced charting options that are simultaneously easier to use than those in OOo.

If they've revamped charting in Calc, I'll be very very pleased.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[EpsCylonB]

http://ftp.idilis.ro/mirrors/openoffice.org/stable /2.0.0/
http://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/openoffice.org/s table/2.0.0/

couple of mirrors

Re:Excellent!!!!

[jamesshuang]

That is one thing distinctly missing in OO2.0. Charting options are the same as in OO1.0. In fact, almost all the features are the same, but the stability and the looks improved quite a bit.

As a college student in many labs, this lack of advanced graphing features is amazingly annoying- trendlines can't be extended, custom scatterplots are impossible. Hell, gnumeric does a FAR better job with graphing. Quite annoying in the end...

Re:Excellent!!!!

[cellocgw]

I haven't tried 2.0 yet, but I've found Excel to have far more advanced charting options that are simultaneously easier to use than those in OOo
True but not relevant. People use Excel for graphing only because it's there in front of them and they don't know any better. If you want high quality flexible format graphs, go get a graphing tool.
And to the poster who complained about extending trendlines and stuff like that: don't confuse data analysis with creating graphs. Get a real analysis tool, like MatLab or Regress+ or LabFit or aNova, do your curve fits and error analysis, then plot the results.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[joeljkp]

That other poster and I don't want high quality flexible format graphs. We want quick & easy graphs that can display basic information and statistical stuff and have good display flexibility. Excel does that far better than Calc, unfortunately.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[drsquare]

In other word: "We can't do it, so you don't need it."

Sounds like someone the Microsoft PR department would come up with.

Why would I want to pay hundreds for professional graph software? That pretty much defeats the whole point of free software.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[Nutria]

Coordinated Universal Time?

In French, of course... Why do they think that their language is still the lingua franca?

Re:Excellent!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, slant eyes, that's because Gnumeric is built for statisticians.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[MrKahuna]

Not French in fact. Agreement could not be reached on whether to use the abbreviation of the English word order, CUT (coordinated universal time), or the French word order, TUC (temps universel coordonné). So they compromised and picked UTC.

For more info see here: http://tf.nist.gov/general/misc.htm#Anchor-14550/

This concludes todays (off-topic) broadcast. Have a good evening.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[richlv]

there are plans to completely redo charting module, but they were somewhat set back by oo.org 2.0.
maybe you can participate in creation of specs, if you know what are your needs ?

see 'contributing' in www.openoffice.org

Re:Excellent!!!!

[An Onerous Coward]

Are you claiming that people won't switch because their current applications aren't compatable with OO.o? Or that OO.o is "not flexible or extensibly integrable enough for large-scale corporate use?" These are two completely different claims, and you don't even bother to defend the second one.

OO.o can work with databases, and can use Python as a scripting language. These two things alone should make it "flexible and integrable enough for large-scale corporate use," except to people who are already tied down to their current Office macros. So please, explain what specific features--or lack thereof--make OO.o "too inflexible", rather than simply "not compatable."

Re:Excellent!!!!

[mspohr]

The graphing features in Excel are very rudimentary and poorly designed. If you want to make real graphs, get a real graphing program (others have provided references).

Re:Excellent!!!!

[deaddrunk]

As if Access is suitable for large-scale corporate use. Large-scale corporate projects use proper databases. Please cite all you want, a big project will want DB2, Oracle, SQL Server etc not the joke that is Access. OO not understanding VBA doesn't make OO crap, it has a scripting language too. Just because it isn't VBA (which as a VBA coder I can quite happily say sucks) doesn't mean there's a flaw in the product.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[rainman_bc]

So have I. I downloaded rc3 only yesterday though. Doesn't seem to be a 64 bit version yet - does anyone have any news about this?

Can't you compile it from source to be 64 bit? Or is there problems with that?

Re:Excellent!!!!

[joeljkp]

I only wish OOo's graphing features could live up to the rudimentary, poorly designed ones of Excel.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[Doctor O]

Actually I found the opposite to be true - if Access is the answer, somebody has asked the wrong questions. We have lots of clients for whom we replaced existing Access processes because they find it performs poorly when you put it under real load - and most of those came to us because they found that they had to hunt down heisenbugs with every update of Access and MSSQL.

Please note that I blame the latter on the 'developers' who built the processes, not the software. I haven't been using Access much, but from what I have seen, it seems to be a good tool in the hands of someone who knows what he's doing. So the clients are rather switching from a 'have the secretary click together the logic' approach to an 'hire real developers for real-world stuff' approach.

(I've seen many *really* mindboggingly slow things, however, but this might as well result from bad practices, stupid code or any combination of the two.)

The bottom line is, among our clients are many global players and none of those would touch any solution with a ten foot pole if they include Access anywhere. Most have well-engineered in-house software, we are just helping them in adding web accessible interfaces. It always strikes me as funny that they have great in-house developers but need external help with web applications.

So, now we're as OT as we could be, but I wanted to add another perspective. And yes, I am aware that my experience probably isn't very representative.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[valkraider]

I couldn't imagine the "need" for MS Office anywhere

1. Job applications and resumes. Many companies require they be in Word format.

2. Contracting requirements. I have written many proposals in response to RFPs that specifically state "All documents will be in Microsoft Word, Excell, or Project format". If you want the contract, you use Word, Excell, or Project.

Right or wrong - that is the way it is. I need to eat....

Re:Excellent!!!!

[mspohr]

I'm not an Excel or a "graphing" wizzard and my use of graphs has been very basic but I don't see any difference between Excel and OO. They both seem to do basic graphs in about the same way.

Anytime that I've required "real" graphs, I've used an external graphing package with lots of bells and whistles.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[biryokumaru]

How?

I wanted to try the OOo 2 beta a long time ago, so I downloaded it. To my bemusement, it consisted of a series of RPMs. I do not use an RPM based distro, nor have any experience with RPMs, so I decided it wasn't worth the trouble and didn't install it. Now the release is just RPMs. Wtf do I do?

So I downloaded the source, and there's nothing there! It's three dozen folders which only have more folders in them! How it adds up to 250mb must have something to do with the fact that you have to dig 4 layers deep to find any files.

I've compiled from source before. Usually with nice, handy instructions, or with the normal autogen system. Heck, I even compile my own source with autogen now. But there's nothing like that here! And their help page (as of now) doesn't cover linux. They say they do, but the page just ends after the Windows part.

I told Konqueror to delete the folder with the Open Office source, and now it's up to 89220 files, so they're in there somewhere.

I wanna install OOo 2, but I cannot =[.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[kpharmer]

> True but not relevant. People use Excel for graphing only because it's there in front of them and
> they don't know any better. If you want high quality flexible format graphs, go get a graphing tool.
> And to the poster who complained about extending trendlines and stuff like that: don't confuse data
> analysis with creating graphs. Get a real analysis tool, like MatLab or Regress+ or LabFit or aNova,
> do your curve fits and error analysis, then plot the results.

Wow, your comments are so wrong that I almost wonder if you're a troll. Just try rolling out open office with the argument that missing features and capabilities that office people are using can be found in matlab, and you'll find that:
1. typical office users that require simple charting won't use matlab, and in fact are horrified by the
        notion of having to learn a serious piece of software for a relatively simple function.
2. your office replacement pilot will fail
3. your next job will be running the leaf blower in the parking lot

Seriously, this is simple functionality that tons of people use. It needs to be better.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[cellocgw]

Oh, I've no doubt that people will run screaming if their precious MsoftOffice is taken away. That doesn't mean that they're right. I don't expect to convince any business to train their staff properly. But Excel's graphing tools still are rotten, and mixing data processing with graph generating tools is still a poor way to operate.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, am stunned that an OSS project performs this way. Why, just look at the professionalism and loyalty shown in most other projects, MANY of which have been updated or maintained in the last four years.

Shocking.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[einhverfr]

That other poster and I don't want high quality flexible format graphs. We want quick & easy graphs that can display basic information and statistical stuff and have good display flexibility. Excel does that far better than Calc, unfortunately.

Gnumeric does a better job than any other spreadsheet I have ever used.

Calc is a nice basic spreadsheet. Excel is a better basic spreadsheet, but if you want to use something with *real* capabilities that does not sacrifice ease-of-use for basic work, use Gnumeric.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[einhverfr]

It seems to me that the key is understanding the needs of the customer. Then you can look at a real solution. While I agree with your points, I also think that those who are complaining and saying that they will stick to MS Office simply because of graphing in Excel are not right either.

I don't know whether you have worked with Gnumeric at all, but it is far and away the best spreadsheet for anything data related I have ever worked with. It is also remarkably well designed and easy to use (though old versions have annoying default font choices). It runs on Linux, Windows, etc. and is used in financial institutions among other places.

I don't use OOo much. I use it enough to help my customers (some of whom do use it), but for me Abiword is better for those lightweight documents where it is easier for me to use a word processor, while LaTeX is better for larger documents with more complex features.

However, going to best-of-breed applications like Gnumeric and LyX rather than MS Office is one way to cause a great deal of anxiety on the part of the users. Remember that most computer users are intimidated by their computers. They feel stupid, inadequate, etc. and IT Pros are often insensitive to this. For this reason OOo is a nice intermediate step. Once people say "I need the following charting/statistics/financial/whatever functionality in Calc" one can point them to Gnumeric. But doing this for every employee at the beginning is likely to be a problem.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[andrewman327]

In fact, almost all the features are the same

I beg to differ. To me, OOo 1.0 hardly even resembles this release. I consider the original only a poorly designed Beta test for this fantastic work.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[Nutria]

To my bemusement, it consisted of a series of RPMs. I do not use an RPM based distro, nor have any experience with RPMs, so I decided it wasn't worth the trouble and didn't install it. Now the release is just RPMs. Wtf do I do?

If you use a Debian-based distro, you can install OOo2 from

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experimental main

Re:Excellent!!!!

[Wornstrom]

OO.o gives you the option to save in all of the above formats.(except maybe Project, but that isn't a core part of Office?) Give it a whirl.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[SavvyPlayer]

Why would I want to pay hundreds for professional graph software? That pretty much defeats the whole point of free software.

It is this kind of thinking that is the bane of the open source community. Free and open source software are not incompatible with boutique high-end solutions offered by Dundas or Visual Mining. Freedom and OSS are about flexibility, rapid innovation, social-consciousness, and represent a silver-bullet solution to the inefficient, 30-year-old build (reinvent-the-wheel)-vs-buy question. F/OSS reframes this as a participate-vs-buy question, under which your development team may consist of 100 developers scattered around the globe, collectively working 24x7, vs. the customary 5 or 10 developers working 9x5 in a typical corprate setting, whose code is 95% likely to be completely wasted after a comparatively short period of time during which another team is likely to completely (and inefficiently) refactor the design for several reasons.

Choose the best tool for the job. If OOO can crunch numbers with the best of 'em, what's the problem? If you need sexy charts to sell your ideas, well thats why we have choice.

Don't like it? Spend some of your time and $$-saved using OOO seeding a new F/OSS charting package that meets your needs. Make a difference while coming out ahead: it's a win-win situation.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[valkraider]

I have. It is not 100% compatible. And in situations like those, you can't have random formatting errors, or screwed up bulleting, crappy graphics, or messed up tables.

I have yet to find an Office alternative that can handle a complex Word document.

And I *so* want to.... I dislike MS Office...

They promised...

[jferris]

...it would be before my milk expired. Well, they are a day late. This is just udderly devastating.

Re:They promised...

[SimilarityEngine]

Better lait than never :-)

Re:They promised...

[Fullwin]

Yeesh, don't have a cow, dude...

Re:They promised...

[dmaxwell]

Why are you getting so excited about one day? There's no need to get all cheesed off.

Re:They promised...

[acariquara]

Well, if you got the time to check their site on a dairy basis, you would get it sooner...

Re:They promised...

[Anonymous Coward]

We should stop with the milk references and just moooooooove on.

Re:They promised...

[jamesots]

It's not whey overdue though.

Re:They promised...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it's time to milk it for all it's worth

Re:They promised...

[multiOSfreak]

I just wish they could *churn* out the releases a bit faster.

Re:They promised...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just knew we could cownt on slashdot to moove on and not make all the bad spelling jokes and horrible puns. They don't put up with that kind of bull around there.

Re:They promised...

[TheLetterPsy]

But what if it was pasteur bedtime?

Re:They promised...

[Comboman]

Don't be so sour! Butter late than never.

Re:They promised...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Kwik-E-Mart is milk.
doh

Re:They promised...

[FusionDragon2099]

Okay, now you're just milking this joke for all it's worth.

Re:They promised...

[TwoTailedFox]

They've buttered up the 2.0 release, though.

Re:They promised...

[Flower]

Brie very careful with these puns. They're getting so thick that soon I'm going to let out a curdling scream.

Re:They promised...

[Anonymous Coward]

These jokes are enough to make my blood curdle.

Re:They promised...

[bcat24]

These jokes are really getting sort of cheesy.

Re:They promised...

[mvdw]

"milking" the joke. Heh. Yoghurt it?

Re:They promised...

[Per Wigren]

Yes, it makes me want to cream!

Re:They promised...

[MarkRose]

Yeah, don't have a cow, man!

Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[dsginter]

Can someone explain to me why the gang at OpenOffice can't create a printer for windows ala Adobe Acrobat in order to "Print to OpenDocument"?

This seems like the answer to all of the issues.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[Bert64]

Because PDF has a lot in common with postscript.. PDF is basically postscript with more dynamic content (dynamic table of contents, hyperlinks etc) whereas postscript is purely concerned with appearance since it`s for printing.. So by doing a print to pdf (or print to postscript and ps2pdf) you can achieve a basic PDF without any of the more complex features... Often such PDF`s will be of very poor quality, and using rasterised text instead of properly rendered fonts for instance..
On the other hand OpenDocument is very much unsuited to being used in this way, you`d end up with pretty much everything (including text) being converted into images.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[maxwell demon]

I guess the printed version would lack all logical markup. No problem if all you want to do is to view or print it, but a big problem if you want to work with it.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[mcn]

isn't that the purpose of the built-in filters? i suppose you mean some command line tools or simple gui to mass-convert documents to ODF?

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be their motivation to do something like that? Then people would just use MS office to print to open document instead of using OpenOffice. It doesn't need to be up to OpenOffice developers to solve this problem for Microsoft since they could just as easily add this feature, as it is an open standard.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[DrXym]

When you print from an application you essentially open a device context and send it a bunch of instructions to draw text here, a line there and so on. This can be captured PDF but is totally unsuitable to printing out an .odt file for instance. In the process of conversion you'd lose all meta info, any revision history, digital signatures, styles, hidden text, rulers, margins, links to other documents / graphics and basically anything else which goes to producing a document but doesn't appear in the end result. In short, a "Print to OpenDocument" would be worse than useless.

On the other hand, an import / export filter for MS Word to Open Document would be very useful. I assume that such a thing is quite possible, but how far along anyone is with producing such a thing (as open source), I have no idea.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[julesh]

Can someone explain to me why the gang at OpenOffice can't create a printer for windows ala Adobe Acrobat in order to "Print to OpenDocument"?

Simply put, the reason is this:

Printers take layout-oriented information (e.g. 'this character goes at this precise position, a line is drawn from here to here, start a new page for everything from this point on', etc.) and print it to a page.

PDF takes similar layout-oriented information and displays it on screen, and gives you an option to print.

OpenDocument, like most other word processor formats, uses structural information (e.g. 'these words are grouped into a paragraph, this paragraph has a box around it, these paragraphs should be on the same page as each other'), not layout information.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[LDoggg_]

What would be their motivation to do something like that?

Does it have to be microsoft?
Not rhetorical. Just curious about MS office's plugin architecture or lack thereof.

Having OpenDocument filters on MS Office would do wonders for spreading the use of OpenDocument. Imagine if there was a very small download for people to upgrade their MS office install with the new filters.
IMHO, once .doc is no longer the defacto standard, the use of OpenOffice.org even in corporate settings will skyrocket.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[Chandon Seldon]

The Microsoft Word import filter for OpenOffice is really good. It's significantly better than if you try to use a word document from the current version of Word in the last version.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[afidel]

Uh, the windows print system has nothing to do with postscript. The native windows format is EMF or Enhanced MetaFile. This is its own unique format and is tied to the windows GDI subsystem. It would not be overly difficult to create a print driver which could grab the information from the EMF file and process it into a working OpenDocument formatted document.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[MojoRilla]

Either someone could do the impossible (converting from layout data back into semantic information is very difficult if not impossible), or Microsoft could get off their lazy, arrogant asses and implement an import and export filter, like they did with five versions of Word Perfect, two versions of Works, three html versions, or eight older versions of Word. At least those are the options in Word 2003.

But clearly, supporting an extra set of filters is far too difficult. Clearly Microsoft customers don't want this. Clearly the unencumbered Open Document format is anti-competitive and unconstitutional. And clearly the only people that care are freaks and hippies.

The bottom line is that Microsoft can't compete with better products, so it is trying to bully the market with file format control.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[petermgreen]

i presume you mean text that has been converted to outlines not rasterized (converted to bitmaps)

the likely reason it looks bad is because what did those conversions didn't know it was going to be displayed on screen and didn't hint it accordingly.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[00lmz]

Yes, yes, yes, but as this poster said, it would contain no structural information. You probably meant to process it into a working OpenDocument formatted drawing?

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[n0-0p]

You're kidding right? Just because you get the text and formatting doesn't mean you'd have a usable document. You'd lose all of the necessary metadata. That includes most of the important functionality (such as text flow and soft line breaks) in the word processor. You'd lose pretty much everything useful from a spreadsheet because you'd have to try to rebuild the rows and columns based on text placement.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[BrokenHalo]

Printers take layout-oriented information (e.g. 'this character goes at this precise position, a line is drawn from here to here...

They certainly do. But (I'm admitting to some confusion here) what makes an OpenDocument? A regular postscript file? Is there really no way for winboxes to use these?

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[dominator]

One suggestion is to AbiWord 2.4 on the command line. It's as simple as:

AbiWord --to=doc foo.odt
AbiWord --to=odt foo.doc

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[OneSeventeen]

Can someone explain to me why the gang at OpenOffice can't create a printer for windows ala Adobe Acrobat in order to "Print to OpenDocument"?
This seems like the answer to all of the issues.

OpenOffice.org creates office software that saves to OpenDocument, but they did not create the OpenDocument standard. The real question is why isn't Microsoft creating a plug-in to save to OpenDocument?

Microsoft is just as entitled to the OpenDocument format as OOo is.

And my post wouldn't be complete without saying: Finally ! I was using Beta myself up til now, but now I can take MS Office off my wife's laptop and use OOo 2.0 instead!

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[mottie]

Microsoft never supported PDF. Why is it so prevalent?

They do now: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/10/ 01/476067.aspx

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[andymadigan]

OpenDocument is conceptually similar to Word Documents or the docs produced by most office suites. Postscript is basically output-only, Word documents and OO.org documents are editable. The OpenDocument is standardized and XML based (MS Office 12 will work primarily in XML format, but that format is not a standard).

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[DrXym]

I'm not talking about a converter which works on the command line. I'm talking about a converter that lives in MS Word, Excel etc and makes MSO support OpenDocument just as it supports WordPerfect, RTF etc. If you've ever used MSO you know that it offers various converters during installation. I don't know what the story is with Excel, Powerpoint or Acces, but in Word, these appear (or did appear last I looked) as .cnv files which are DLLs with certain entry points.

What I'm suggesting is creating a new converter dll that parses / writes OpenDocument files from doc files. As far as MSO is concerned, it will be just another file format. It even would appear in the Load / Save dialog as a format you could save as. When you chose to save in that format, Word would invoke the converter to convert from the native to the foreign format and vice versa for loading. I don't know what the status is with the API for converters, but a google for wordcnv shows at least one LGPL project which uses it.

How this converter could be written is up for grabs. I suppose it could be a dumb DLL that executes AbiWord / OO to do it, but equally, someone could split out the conversion routines from OO and package them in the converter. This could then be packaged as an installer for anyone who wants to use OpenDocument with MS Word. Refactoring the conversion code in OO is more daunting than a short paragraph would imply but it seems like a feasible project.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[ivoras]

I don't really know what the state of things is today, but in the time of Word 97, MS Word Import-Export filter hooks were well documented. One thing I remember is that the filter framework uses RTF as an intermediate format. I know that even today there are lots of third-party filters written for MS Word that support old or exotic formats.

So, it's not a problem. Basically, someone has to make a converter from RTF to ODT and study the MS manuals on how to plug it into MS Office applications.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[ncc74656]

So by doing a print to pdf (or print to postscript and ps2pdf) you can achieve a basic PDF without any of the more complex features... Often such PDFs will be of very poor quality, and using rasterised text instead of properly rendered fonts for instance..

FWIW, CutePDF (which is basically a Windows printing subsystem wrapper for Ghostscript) produces PDFs with text that can be selected and copied/pasted. Size, style, and font information get preserved for common fonts so you can paste text into a word processor (or whatever) that looks identical to what was in the PDF. For less-common fonts, while the appearance of the font is preserved in the PDF, a standard font gets substituted (the size and style are still preserved).

Printing to the "MS Publisher Color Printer" driver (which generates PostScript output) and washing this through Ghostscript to create a PDF produces similar results.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[petabyte]

I don't believe the second example will work (haven't tried it). Abiword-2.4.0's Release Notes indicated that OpenDocument export wasn't yet included (but would make it in during the 2.4 series). So, you can do .odt to .doc, just not vice versa (yet).

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[petabyte]

And then I noticed where your homepage was set to so I'm guessing you know this better than me. I'll stop being helpful now :).

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[dogfull]

uhm, no.

PS is turing-complete.
PDF isn't.

That's the only real difference.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[dzafez]

Bullshit, postscript is a Turing-Complete programming Language! PDF is not, so the comparison lacks a bit of depth. For a nice comparison, ceck out:

page 4 of these slides :
http://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/files/185 -inside-pdf-slides.pdf

they belong to this interesting speech from last year:

http://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/event/67. en.html

10th?

[Scrameustache]

That's l33t speak for 20th? : )

Re:10th?

[craigmarshall]

Are you sure they're not referring to rc3 that was released around the 10th? I think rc3 has now become 2.0, therefore anyone with rc3 doesn't need to do anything?

Craig

Re:10th?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it specifically mentioned Thursday the 10th.
October 10th hasn't been a Thursday since 2002.

Re:10th?

[Anonymous Coward]

On October 10th OOo 2.0-rc3 was released. Not having found major bugs, they decided to release OOo 2.0-rc3 as the official OpenOffice.org 2.0.

Re:10th?

[wmark]

No, I believe the 10th is l33t speak for the 2nd.

Ehh

[carguy84]

Did some one read the date wrong? 20/10/2005 is the 20th, not the 10th.

Can't help but wonder what kind of press release MSFT will put out today.

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

20/10/2005 is the 10th of Vicember in the USA.

Re:Ehh

[julesh]

Did some one read the date wrong? 20/10/2005 is the 20th, not the 10th.

Probably an American. They'd look at that date and say "tenth of the twentieth month? WTF?" ;)

(Just like I keep wondering why everyone's going on about the 9th of November...)

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

My favourite month is emacsember

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an Australian website so like alot of the rest of the world they use dd/mm/yyyy as their date notation and not the rather backward (pun intended) american mm/dd/yyyy

Re:Ehh

[Mjlner]

"Did some one read the date wrong? 20/10/2005 is the 20th, not the 10th."

Argh... All these problems stemming from different systems. We non-US people always forget that the American year has 30 months (sometimes 31) and 12 days in a month.
In other news:
Rest of world still waiting for America to adopt the metric system

Sure, mod me a trolling flamebait, you humourless twat.

Re:Ehh

[hyperstation]

several non-US countries use the mm/dd/yy format incorrectly, and put the day first.

Re:Ehh

[carguy84]

You forgot 28/29. Febuary always getting the shaft...

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

The "10th" is binary... it's version 2 after all.

(I'm sure that's what they meant. Yeah.)

Re:Ehh

[Peter La Casse]

Actually, the rest of the world doesn't use dd/mm/yyyy for their date formation. Billions of Chinese use what is known in the West as the ISO standard date format.

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. An Australian site happens to write the date in DD/MM/YY format.. the format Australia and most of the non-US world uses.

And someone modded that 'insightful'?

Idiots.

Re:Ehh

[tehshen]

Nearly every country ignores the ISO 8601 and puts the date last. The highest value always goes on the left, people!

Re:Ehh

[AGMW]

Actually, the rest of the world doesn't use dd/mm/yyyy for their date formation. Billions of Chinese use what is known in the West as the ISO standard date format.

Indeed, and they were expecting this release in 2nd quarter Monkey, and weren't expecting to have to wait another 5 Water Buffalos to get the release!

Re:Ehh

['nother poster]

I use that format myself for apps that create files at time intervals. It allows them to be sorted in time order by default. I almost wish the US would adopt it since it makes more sense to go from largest unit to smallest unit. We do it with time.

Re:Ehh

[romeo_in_blk_jeans]

I can't be sure that I'm down with that. Sounds like it has too much to do with emasculation. /knows what emacs is //likes vi better

Re:Ehh

[xs650]

Argh... All these problems stemming from different systems. We non-US people always forget that the American year has 30 months (sometimes 31) and 12 days in a month.

You're just jealous because we have more months than you do and they're all the same length.

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

You and your metric system can go to hell!!!

my car gets 40 rods to the hogs head and that the way I likes it!

Re:Ehh

[bohemian72]

All these comments on the way most U.S. citizens format their dates!
While other arrangements may or may not make more sense, particularly to those who already use them, no one seems to point out that we (in the U.S.) write our numbered date in the same order that we usually speak the dates. For instance, I was born on January 10th, 1972. So in the U.S. we'd write that 01/10/1972. Now maybe most people in Europe would say the 10th of January, 1972. I don't really know, but maybe they do. In which case they also write the numeric date in the same order they would say it.
Unfortunately the two systems can get confusing during the first twelve days of the month, but otherwise there should be no confusion. Otherwise, a tad of contextuality is called for, and even then it's not usually a problem.

Re:Ehh

[CxDoo]

They also use a chinese billion which is somewhat smaller than our 'billion'.

Re:Ehh

[elgatozorbas]

Now maybe most people in Europe would say the 10th of January, 1972

We do.

Re:Ehh

[Neoprofin]

When everyone drives on the right side of the road and spells words like armor, color, and favorite correctly maybe we'll consider it.

Re:Ehh

[richlv]

seems you think that everyone in europe speaks english. only. well, that's understandable, i guess...

http://theonlyway.net/americans_and_geo.wmv

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the obvious solution is to only do important things on days that have the same number as the month. For example, I was born on October 10th. You see a date starting with 10/10 and you're set. No confusion.

Re:Ehh

[bohemian72]

Sorry, I didn't realize that I had to translate my posts into a score of languages or more to fully represent Europe. I guess I made the mistake of thinking most slashdot readers would be intelligent enough to understand that I meant in what ever language they speak, Eurpoeans might say the date before the month.

Actually I don't think I was mistaken, most are, just not you.

Re:Ehh

[einhverfr]

Argh... All these problems stemming from different systems. We non-US people always forget that the American year has 30 months (sometimes 31) and 12 days in a month.

Real geeks follow the SQL standard in all dates. That is 2005-10-20 to you :-) Wholely unambiguous :-)

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, thats the way it should be... makes much more sense.

Even so, I still don't understand why merkins have to be so beligerant in mis-spelling things and displaying dates in silly orders etc... I blame the US government ;)

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

In norwegian we say (translated) "10th of january, 1972" so 10/01-1972 makes sense

Re:Ehh

[Petrushka]

You're just jealous because we have more months than you do and they're all the same length.

Yes, but you must admit it's odd that the number of months in the year varies depending on what day it is.

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

I was born on October 10th

So was my mother! Is that you mom? Where's my dinner?

Re:Ehh

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats that holiday you guys have? oh yeah The "4th of July"

Re:Ehh

[wxjones]

That's why I write dates 2005-10-20

Re:Ehh

[bohemian72]

Hence my use of the word "usually" rather than "always."

Re:Ehh

[aaronl]

Heh, I stopped using full numeric dates just because of that. I tended to do DD-MM-YYYY, but I'm in the US, and this format caused great confusion for too many people. Now I do DD-MMM-YYYY, as in 21-Oct-2005. That one is definitely not ambiguous.

Re:Ehh

[richlv]

sorry about my post ;)

actually i don't think it is a good idea to relate short form to the way date is spelled.
exactly because you can say that differently in the same language, not only in different ones.
for example, in latvian normal text flow would be "2005. gada 13. janvris". year-date-month.
i guess you could find every possible combination in different languages, so linear sequence is a must (biggest-smallest or the other way around), as in this case it is impossible to mix them up. biggest-smallest is the best as it sorts easily, so that's what i have been trying to stick with lately.

ps. umm. does your last sentence really imply that you think most of europeans speak english as their primary language ?

Re:Ehh

[bohemian72]

Sorry 'bout that, you caught me at a bad time.

Of course I don't think most Europeans speak English as their primary language. However, most Slashdot readers are at least familiar with English I would say. My original point had much more to do with the order of the items and not that Europeans use words like "the (xx) of" or call the first month of the common year "January" exactly.
I just didn't feel like spelling it out in every language from Gaelic and English in the North-West to Serbo-Croatian, Romanche and Ukrainian in the South-East to Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish in the South-West to Lap, Finnish and Russian in the North-East, nor every language in between.
There are way too many Eurpoean languages to give them each their due, and since we are in an English forum, I felt safe using it.
Now I fear someone will accuse me of being a stupid ignorant geographically challenged American for forgetting some language that farther out than the ones I mentioned. ;-)

why is this under Linux?

[aurelian]

Surely cross-platform nature of OO.o is the whole point?

Re:why is this under Linux?

[Iriel]

I see your point, but keep in mind that when OO.o has been a major factor in companies switching from Windows systems to Linux ones.

"What will happen to all our Word documents, and spreadsheets, oh! oh! and what about PowerPoint?"
Say it with me together now: OpenOffice!

Yes, MSOffice compatibility has become a nearly ubiquitous feature by now, but not too many offices switch from Windows to use Joe. So the strength it has given to the Linux community as an alternative to 'get everyday tasks done' can't be stated enough. Hence, this appears in the Linux section of Slashdot.

This public service annoucement was brought to you by penguins, and a OSS/Linux advocate.

Re:why is this under Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think it's probably because that most people using Windows haven't even heard of OpenOffice before?

Re:why is this under Linux?

[Tim C]

That may all be true, but it doesn't change the fact that OO.o is not available only for Linux, or even mainly for Linux. Unless v2 is only currently available for Linux, it's in the wrong section.

Re:why is this under Linux?

[BrokenHalo]

Surely cross-platform nature of OO.o is the whole point?

Cross-platform under X11, at any rate. I'm a big fan of Linux, but when I was setting up my wife's Mac, it seems the only really good option is NeoOffice.

Re:why is this under Linux?

[Bert64]

The windows version works fine..
The mac version is OK, but not as good as one using the native gui would be, still it's good that it's so easy to port software to mac nowadays.. Now that it`s running through X11 people can concentrate on making a native interface for it.
It would have been much harder and slower to port it to windows, and that only got done quicker because of greater demand.

Re:why is this under Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

And... there's still nothing that is as easy to use for ad-hoc databases as MSAccess. Nothing that allows users to create datasets, copy them around, make quick backups of tables, create reports, all packaged into a single file that users already know how to manage.

Need to make a backup of your working database? Easily done via Windows Explorer, just like when you want to make a backup copy of your document or spreadsheet files.

In addition, you can keep your datasets right with all of the other files associated with the project.

/shrug

Maybe someday we'll be able to switch away. But MS-Access is one of the key features that we depend on daily.

Speaking of milk...

[Anonymous Coward]

Directly after the release this morning, Mad Penguin published a lengthy interview with OOo's Lois Suarez-Potts which represents part 3 of their OpenOffice.org interview series (part 1 and 2 were covered previously on Slashdot). The article is 3 pages long but an excellent read all the same.

Bittorrent / P2P download links

[Anonymous Coward]

http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.ht ml

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[youngerpants]

However, these bittorrent downloads still point to the 2.0b product, not the new release

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[Anonymous Coward]

Bittorrent and Slashdot... the ultimate combination. It does not get better than this.

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[lawpoop]

What is the filename of the 2.0b product? The torrent page that I linked to has a filename of 2.0.0.

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[Anonymous Coward]

magnet and eDonkey links

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[cetan]

I'm getting 2.0.0 via the torrent. Seems to be the real-deal to me.

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[Danathar]

Since you are downloading it....could you do everybody a HUGE favor (Really!)

If you use Azureus could you post the Magnet URI address for the dht: network? The Torrent site is overloaded. At least I could join the swarm without having to connect to the tracker.

thanks!

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[lostlogic]

Not only are they bittorrent links but they are hella faster than the mirrors. I tried to get it from two mirrors and got stalled downloads, then downloaded from the torrent at 1 meg per second for the windows installer and 2.7 megs+ for the linux installer. (and am now seeding from that same connection for the rest of you)

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[Anonymous Coward]

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DD3CA4757LNNLEMGSQIN5JMPK23B62 NB

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[Danathar]

Do you have the bittorrent Magnet URI? (for use in Azureus)

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[christopherfinke]

If you use Azureus could you post the Magnet URI address for the dht: network?

Is this what you need? magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DD3CA4757LNNLEMGSQIN5JMPK23B62 NB

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[cetan]

It looks like others have responded, but hey, i've not posted in a while :)

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DD3CA4757LNNLEMGSQIN5JMPK23B62 NB

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[borft]

or check it directly (since openoffice.org is swamped)
http://borft.student.utwente.nl/~adrian/

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[Anonymous Coward]

No, as I'd need the torrent itself to generate those. It's just for use with Shareaza and other gnutella(2) clients. If I could generate the URI with just the file, I'd add them, though.

Thursday the 10th?

[ReformedExCon]

The 10th was on a Monday. Or will the release be next month when the 10th actually falls on Thursday?

I'm confused because the editors didn't even do the smallest amount of fact-checking. Thanks, guys!

OpenOffice 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

... will be the suite by which all others in your life will be judged, and found wanting.

MS Office will catch up

[krygny]

Soon, MS Office will have native support for PDF (like OOo has always had). Now, all they have to do is add support for ODF, give it away free along with the source code, and it will be almost as good as OOo.

Re:MS Office will catch up

[joeljkp]

To be accurate, I believe OOo has only had PDF export since 1.1.

Re:MS Office will catch up

[ke4qqq]

Not true!, Office 12 will initially only be available Windows, with a purported mac version in the works, while OOo is multiplatform, Mac, Linux, Unix, and Windows.

Re:MS Office will catch up

[Bert64]

Nah, msoffice isn`t so cross platform, doesnt have regular expression searches and doesn`t let you write macros in 4 different languages (3 of which are usefull languages, not forcing you to learn it's own proprietary macro language which is useless for anything else)

OSX

[fatwreckfan]

It'd be nice if they released a build for OSX. The only 2.0 build they've had for as long as I've been checking is a development build in french.

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that is a bug in their website. if you go to one of the mirrors http://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/openoffice/contrib /MacOSX/ you will see that this is an english version 1.9.130. Note that OO.o is not yet stable in OS 10, this is still a development version. Personally, I have not had any problems using it, but I do find it to be slower compared to other platforms. The lack of integrated Carbon/Cocoa/etc steers me away. OSX is supposed to be pretty IMAO! Nonetheless, kudos to the OO.o team on a significant accomplishment.

Re:OSX

[Walrus99]

Yes, how can they say there is a "Bias towards Apple" when we can't even get Open Office on OS X. And don't tell me to use X-11, I tried it and its way to complicated.

Re:OSX

[ev3rywh3re]

The build for M113(?) using Apple's X11 is out there, but you either have to be on the dev-porting list, or surf the dev-porting archives to know how to find it. I'd throw out a link, but you should read the threads anyway so you know what you are getting into. It's been been working fine for me since build M103 I think.

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a native Cocoa version planned. Until then, Mac users will have to live with NeoOffice/J.

Re:OSX

[tuggy]

i'm using m133 now.
get it from here: http://ooofr.org/telechargement/macosx/2.0/
its english :)

Re:OSX

[peragrin]

using Open Office under X11 on OS X isn't had for me it registered with file types, and would open both X and Open Office with a double click on the app.

On the other side it took a long time to start up, looked ugly on the mac, and was functional but not overally useful.

I have switched to Abi-word for my word processing documents but keep a copy of Neo J office around for accessing spreadsheets.

Re:OSX

[VValdo]

RC3 here. Release to come soon no doubt.

W

Re:OSX

[nine-times]

The word is that they're working on making a Cocoa-based version (which will be really nice for Mac users). In the mean time, NeoOffice is the best thing going for a port of OOo to OS X, though it lags behind the other OOo ports (it's not a port from this newly released OOo 2.0, but more like 1.1.4, I think).

BTW, what's IMAO?

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

screw OSX I want a release for OS8.6-os9

there are many older MAc's that cant run OSX that have lots of useful life in them and getting a way to make these recycled powerpac 9600's extremely useable to people by having a legal office suite on them is a bigger bonus.

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

In my assinine opinion?

Re:OSX

[Halfbaked Plan]

I thought the mantra was that 'Mac OS X is a UNIX so you always get all the good UNIX tools on it.'

And here we are, waiting for a proprietary GUI version of OpenOffice to be made, which will probably be a major code fork from the main OOorg codebase.

Mac is and has been and always will be 'different for the sake of difference.'

Re:OSX

[nine-times]

More like, "OSX is a UNIX so you *can* get the good UNIX tools, but the good UNIX apps that run on X11 will look like crap, and fail to use many of the advantages of the operating system"

And what do you mean by "a proprietary GUI version"? It's still open source. OpenOffice always had a GUI. There are already ports to different operating systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, FreeBSD) and different platforms (x86, SPARC, PPC). Yes, there's already an OSX port, but it just uses X11, which is a problem. There's already a working Carbon port which was written, from what I understand, by 2 (yes, only 2) programmers, who were working in their spare time.

If you ask me, the fact that OpenOffice has ignored OSX for so long is a little silly, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have their reasons.

Torrent Links

[lawpoop]

This page has bittorrent links.

Re:Torrent Links

[squoozer]

You've got to just love P2P for things like this. My country mirror is already doing a good impression of a three legged dog but the torrent has more seeds than a farmer at harvest time.

Re:Torrent Links

[kalirion]

70% Insightful? Shouldn't this be 100% Informative?

Re:Torrent Links

[MooUK]

I'd love it, if this damn university didn't entirely block almost everything. I think I'll have to wait for the normal servers to calm down a bit.

Re:Torrent Links

[lawpoop]

I don't get it either. I wasn't karma whoring -- just trying to get better pooling for the torrent I was downloading! ;)

Re:Torrent Links

[joranbelar]

You've got to just love P2P for things like this. My country mirror is already doing a good impression of a three legged dog but the torrent has more seeds than a farmer at harvest time.

Which is how many, zero? Don't you mean sowing time? ;)

Re:Torrent Links

[GweeDo]

"has more seeds than a farmer at harvest time"

Um, aren't the farmers reaping what they sowed at harvest time? So in turn...they won't have to many seeds then. Maybe you meant at planting time?

Re:Torrent Links

[Knuckles]

You might not remember, but before Monsanto took over, farmers usually didn't purchase patented, genetically crippled (can't reproduce) seeds. Instead, they used part of their harvest as seeds for the next year. Thus, they would have most seeds at harvest time. ;)

Re:Torrent Links

[Timmy]

If it was a corn farmer, or really any sort of vegetable farmer really, they would have dozens, hundreds of times more seeds at harvest time than they would at planting time. You do know where seeds come from, don't you?

Re:Torrent Links

[se7en11]

From the P2P download page: "Download and install an appropriate P2P client" Man and to think I almost got the "P2P Nazi" client. Now that would have been inappropriate.

Re:Torrent Links

[rob_squared]

Well, think of all the seeds in the stuff you just grew, that's a lot more than you probably started with.

Unless, of course, you're growing a seedless fruit. :)

Re:Torrent Links

[tkw954]

"has more seeds than a farmer at harvest time"

Um, aren't the farmers reaping what they sowed at harvest time? So in turn...they won't have to many seeds then. Maybe you meant at planting time?

I hope you're joking. I really do.

Re:Torrent Links

[Beren]

"Um, aren't the farmers reaping what they sowed at harvest time? So in turn...they won't have to many seeds then. Maybe you meant at planting time?"

Umm... where do you think that farmers get their seeds? (Other than Monsanto, of course...)

Re:Torrent Links

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know Dan Rather posted on /.

Re:Torrent Links

[squoozer]

Yes and no. I was thinking specifically about harvesting corn where you collect the seed. As such harvest time is when you have the most seed even though you are going to grind most of it to make flour. If you were thinking about carrots or some other such crop where you rarely let them go to seed then yes you are correct you would have no seeds at harvest time.

In my defence however I offer these two bits of evidence. Firstly, most (western) people consider harvest time to be when the corn is collected since that is the staple food stuff of most (maybe all) western countries. Secondly, since corn easily the most grown crop I think it would be a fair bet that the amount (number) of seed produced easily outweighs that produced for any other crop.

Re:Torrent Links

[maxume]

For many plants, the parts that are harvested are seeds. Think about corn or pretty much any grain. The gp post makes perfect sense.

max

Re:Torrent Links

[olddotter]

So that page had links to download Bit Torrent. I was hoping to find links to use bit torrent to download Open Office. Doing a search just gave an error.

Please post direct links please.

Re:Torrent Links

[squoozer]

Please read this post it will, I hope, clear up any confusion about what a seed is (hint: 9 times out of 10 it's what the farmer is collecting at harvest time).

Re:Torrent Links

[GweeDo]

Almost scary I was deemed "Insightful" :)

And crap...I like in Western Kansas!

Re:Torrent Links

[Maxo-Texas]

Well... since you what you harvest most of the time is mature seeds, I think you have a lot more seeds at harvest time than you do at sowing time. You hold some seeds back from the harvest to plant at next planting season.

Feel free to say "DOH!" at your leisure.

Re:Torrent Links

[assassinator42]

I had no problems at all getting it from the Univertiy of Illinois mirror. Why use bittorrent when you can get it faster via http?

Re:Torrent Links

[Halfbaked Plan]

That means you're harvesting your asparagus WAY WAY TOO LATE, dude.

Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

No support for the Mac OS X is a show stopper for me. :(

Re:Mac OS X

[fernique]

May be to use NeoOffice instead?

Re:Mac OS X

[dmaxwell]

You have to do some digging but there are unofficial OS X builds that even do the ".app" stuff properly and launch X and so forth transparently. It looks and feels quite nice (though not "Maclike") for all that it is an X11 application. A major fly in the ointment is that it only uses fonts that come with it and can't recognize the Mac format fonts on the system (dfonts and so-forth). Additional fonts can be installed but the process is clunky.

Re:Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

See this post.

Re:Mac OS X

[DisownedSky]

I have NeoOffice at home and it's quite stable and useful. It will probably be a bit behind the mainstream release. I havent seen a schedule for when they expect to bring it up to the 2.0 code base.

Re:Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Use NeoOfficeJ. It is OpenOffice repackaged to use Java for certain bits, and it is well intergated with OS X. It is a close as OpenOffice will get, without being rewritten in Cocoa.

Re:Mac OS X

[zombie67]

NeoOffice can't read OO 2.0 documents.

Congratulations Open Office folks!!!

[MCHammer]

A great accomplishment. I've been using the product for a couple of years now and really love it. My wife's entire business is based on Open Office as well. Thanks for all of the hard work!

Re:Congratulations Open Office folks!!!

[xtracto]

Inded, OpenOffice 2.0 is a great product, I saw the release story sooner today at OSnews as I said here

Now I wonder the following, in about 6 months or so, Microsoft will "unveil" its new Office suite (it may be in a Beta), along with the new Windows Vista technology. What does this has to do with OpenOffice you may ask, well, as I can see right now in the OO.o document I am writting, the interface of OO is (as all the interfaces in ALL the OS right now) "menu" driven.

As stated on thi link the new version of Microsoft Office will have a completely different option selection approach, and after looking at some Windows Vista reviews it seems MS will make a lot of programs share this "Tab based" approach.

I have never liked the menu based interface (from ANY of the programs) where you have to navigate around 10x10x10 submenues to be able to find how to "crop" a part of the image (really try to do it in OO 2.0, just press PRINTSCREEN key then paste the clipboard to the OOo document and try to crop the bottom and top of it).

My point is, it seems (and I am just waiting for it) what will happen is that applications will try to catch on with this new "tab based" option selection interface, and the question will be Is OpenOffice.org going to change that? , or more to the point, will OpenOffice copy the new MSOffice options selection behaviour?.

That will be an interesting issue, when the new MS Windows Vista comes with these approach, It will be nice to see how does that "affects" the OpenSource software relases (Linux distros, OSS software on windows, etc). And then we will see the real "influence" of Windows and MS over OSS.

I hope Slashdot does not take this as trolling, I am glad OpenOffice has come to what it is (I used it sometime when it was StarOffice 5.0 and they gave freecd's[or at least I got one for free =oP]). [Un]fortunately currently I use Latex as text creating package, and I do not have a lot of touch with any kind of WYSIWYG office documents. But, I do have installed OpenOffice and it has come a very long way.

Re:Congratulations Open Office folks!!!

[lahvak]

I am completely with you. I also use primarily TeX, and I totally dislike the menu interface that most of current gui software uses. I am a long time Unix and Linux user (I learned Unix before I learned Windows) and I generally try to avoid Windows like the plague, but I am really intriqued by this new interface they are implementing.

rc2?

[fernique]

Are there any major changes between RC2 and release?

Re:rc2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!

A great bug with exporting images with transparency.

[;)]

Looks Great!

[B11]

I'm upgrading tonight.

After using OO for nearly 6 months, I wonder why anyone is still using MS Office? Is it habit? If it is its like cigarettes, an expensive habit to keep that is bad for you.

Re:Looks Great!

[Solr_Flare]

It's habit and name. Your average Joe doesn't like a lot of change. For the longest time MS Office was "the" way to go. So, it is easy to get latched on to the software suite because you know the name and software.

That said, more and more people are slowly switching over to OO or an equivilant, in large part because they are free versus MS's insane pricing of MS office. The trick is getting people to make the leap to try it out. But once they do they usually go "Hey, this works pretty good, and you can't beat free."

Re:Looks Great!

[julesh]

After using OO for nearly 6 months, I wonder why anyone is still using MS Office?

* Word 97 starts much faster than OO.o 1.1. Don't know about other versions though.
* OO.o 1.1 cannot load a lot of Word documents correctly.
* OO.o 1.1 cannot load WordPerfect documents at all.

I'm hoping the above have been fixed for 2.0. :)

Re:Looks Great!

[everphilski]

Cause Word doesn't segfault when trying to load a .png into a report. Happened to me several days ago. I was writing a report on my linux box at work, tried inserting .png files into the document. First two worked fine, third one segfaulted the program. No autosave, no graceful exit. Generally word gives some indication when it is going to crap out, and/or has an autosaved copy.

This was with a recent (stable) copy.

-everphilski-

Re:Looks Great!

[MooUK]

VERY fixed. Compatibility has always been considerably better in the 2.0 betas, and almost all MS Word documents load perfectly, apart from a few weird things, the last time I checked. From my experience of Word XP on my uni's network (I'm not spending any more money on M$ than I have to, and I don't have to spend any in this case even without piracy), it's slow and sluggish. OO.o 2.0 seems faster, mostly. (Now, to convince the Uni to install OO.o 2.0 on all the network machines - they already use Firefox!)

Re:Looks Great!

[s4ck]

Looks great but I still got too many issues when I open up MS excel files into OOo. I'm not gonna spend a whole day (days?)reformatting so that it fit OOo.

i've got both installed on my pc and wish for the day when i'll be able to go totally OOo. i really do. will it be today? i'm gonna upgrade and see how it goes.

way to go OOo! It's always great to see OSS coming to some sort of completion. Gratitude!

Re:Looks Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it expensive beyond the initial purchase price? I know people still happily working along with Office97 as it does everything they need.

What happened to this communities mantra of finding the right tool for the job? Or is that only the case when that tool happens to hang around the "penguin" circle?

Congrats to Open Office and hope that they continue to build new releases that address some of the complaints I have about it (we offer it alongside other options here at this school board), and for anyone who has ever tried it here, the slowness with which it opens and the random crashing seem to always end up being deal breakers.

Re:Looks Great!

[petermgreen]

try that png again if it crashes it in a repeatable fasion then see if you can find out if the png is in some way malformed or just strange then submit a bug report.

p.s. does this png contain private information or is it something you could post here for us geeks to have a look at?

Re:Looks Great!

[16K Ram Pack]

I'll tell you exactly why:

Compatibility or

Because it's not my money

People in large corporations don't care. If they install OOo, they save a bunch of money from the corporate budget, that doesn't affect them. On the other hand, if it all goes horribly wrong, the finger points at them.

For small businesses, they want to deal with everyone else, who uses Word.

Personally, I'd love to hear good ideas to get people switching. I'll be sending clients PDFs and anyone who wants to sell to me is going to have to use OASIS documents. And that's for practical reasons. I'm tired of having a document corruption that I can't fix.

Re:Looks Great!

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Word 97 cant load Open Document document.

I for one, welcome our bittorrent OO.o overlords.

[saskboy]

BitTorrent I'm downloading it right now. I've used the beta and RC1 version for months now, and I've only seen it crash once, and I've used it on various computers.

A million Microsoft shareholders cried out in pain today.

Real work just got easier today.

[rheotaxis]

I feel a productivity surge bubbling up inside me.

Re:Real work just got easier today.

[the unbeliever]

Nah, dude, it's just gas.

Re:Real work just got easier today.

[sharkey]

Drank the expired milk, huh?

Re:Real work just got easier today.

[einhverfr]

I feel a productivity surge bubbling up inside me.

If productivity was all-important, we would all be using Gnumeric, Abiword, LaTeX, etc....

OOo is nice, and it is *really* nice to have a nice alternative to MS Office, but IMO, it is still stuck in a number of bad ways of doing things that are really annoying when you have real work to do.

The issue is that everyone wants an MS Office replacement.

This being said there are a few things I actually like. OOo Base is a nice alternative to MS Access though it will need some pollishing....

Re:Real work just got easier today.

[WuphonsReach]

OOoBase?

Sounds interesting.

The primary issue for us in using MS-Access is that we work on a few hundred projects per year. Each project only runs for a few weeks (sometimes longer) and each data set is pretty much unique to a particular project. During data collection, we use a database server, but the project gets tested using MSAccess databases and then archived for posterity in an MSAccess database file. (The MDBs are kept with the rest of the project documentation in a versioned source control system.)

I'll be keeping an eye on OOoBase, from browsing the forums and without looking at the project, some of the things I think will cause issues are:

- Can't go straight from a table/query to a CSV file (yes/no?)
- I would imagine that the .odb files be used as an ODBC data source in Windows?
- Sounded like the form/report designer needs more work.
- Conversion pain combined with the "network effect" (all of our clients use MSOffice and we frequently exchange files)

Re:Real work just got easier today.

[einhverfr]

Can't go straight from a table/query to a CSV file (yes/no?)

I don't know. I would think so given that OOo calc can do this.... I haven't tried but OOo 2.0 is so darned integrated (for better or worse) that I would be highly surprised if this was not easily possible.

I would imagine that the .odb files be used as an ODBC data source in Windows?

HSQLDB is the backend. I have been unable to locate ODBC drivers for it. Are there ODBC drivers for JDBC data sources?

Grrrr

[squoozer]

I don't believe it! I only downloaded and installed RC3 4 hours ago. Grrrr.

Re:Grrrr

[krygny]

I don't know, but I don't think there is any functional difference.

Re:Grrrr

[sucker_muts]

No problem, apart from it's name, RC3 is 100% identical as 2.0.

They just updated the version number thoughout and made sure beta was mentioned nowhere anymore. Once they were sure no (major) bugs were found in the latest beta they could push it as a final version.

Just keep your RC3, it's the same as 2.0 final.

Re:Grrrr

[Stephen R Hall]

On the MD5 sum page on the OOo website, it states that the final release is the same as RC3, so if you've got RC3, you don't need to download this.

Re:Grrrr

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the same file...

[;)]

Re:Grrrr

[Skjellifetti]

They just updated the version number thoughout and made sure beta was mentioned nowhere anymore. Once they were sure no (major) bugs were found in the latest beta they could push it as a final version. Just keep your RC3, it's the same as 2.0 final.

That'll work until the first time he tries to install some other program and gets a dialog box that says: Please install Open Office version 2.0.0 or greater before installing this program.

Re:Grrrr

[krelyk]

wow, that's bad form - the source even extracts to ./OOo_2.0.0rc3_src ... weak

Re:Grrrr

[amembleton]

They just updated the version number thoughout and made sure beta was mentioned nowhere anymore. Once they were sure no (major) bugs were found in the latest beta they could push it as a final version. Just keep your RC3, it's the same as 2.0 final. That'll work until the first time he tries to install some other program and gets a dialog box that says: Please install Open Office version 2.0.0 or greater before installing this program.

And what programs require OpenOffice.org 2.0?

Re:Grrrr

[petermgreen]

i suspect none YET ;)

doesn't mean that none will though.

Must not be for real

[Odocoileus]

It is not in portage yet, therefore it must not exist.

Re:Must not be for real

[halivar]

Real men unmask their portage packages.

Re:Must not be for real

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is in portage - /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice-bin-2.0.0

Re:Must not be for real

[lengau]

sudo su emerge --sync ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge openoffice-bin for amd64, the same but ~amd64 instead of ~x86

Slow as molasses

[moronikos]

Well the startup time is awfully slow for OO Writer. I'd rather use MS Word or AbiWord.

you eeeeediot moderators

[djdavetrouble]

Off topic my shiny metal ass... a simple google search for openoffice milk expired would have led you to this article. Now wait until after noon before you smoke any more crack.

Re:you eeeeediot moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just wait long enough and you have some form of mozzarella cheese, your expired milk is again usable...

I can't say that I tasted that piece of cheese, the smell was ok though.

Sab.

Office Key...

[Buddy_DoQ]

I just recently restored my laptop, and rather than go fishing for my MS Office 2001 disk with the faded product key, I opted to give OpenOffice.org a shot. For me, a casual .doc reader who just needs something light and quick to open and read with, OO.org is a great solution. It does just about everything a cheap guy like me could want. Plus I didn't have to dig in that dreaded closet of PC past and type in a cd key I can barely make out anymore. I had no idea a new version was coming out so soon, so this is great news to me! I even began spreading whispers about it at work, it may not be the juicy Lost roundtable, but a free alternative to something Microsoft for our Macs always perks some ears.

Re:Office Key...

[julesh]

For me, a casual .doc reader who just needs something light and quick to open and read with, OO.org is a great solution.

If you only want to display MSOffice documents, MS have a free download of a viewer program on their web site. It's lighter and faster than OO.o, and probably opens a larger percentage of docs correctly.

Re:Office Key...

[OlivierB]

Didn't know OpenOffice.org ran on Macs natively (except NeoOffice).
Does OO.org 2 run natively?

Re:Office Key...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are probably the only person on the planet ever to describe OpenOffice.org as "light and quick". Gigantically bulky and slow it be...

Re:Office Key...

[digidave]

"If you only want to display MSOffice documents, MS have a free download of a viewer program on their web site. It's lighter and faster than OO.o, and probably opens a larger percentage of docs correctly."

It's reasonably safe to assume that he needs to occasionally modify or create a new document. Most people do.

I also wouldn't count on Microsoft's own reader opening older .docs better than OpenOffice. Word is notorious for failing to open its own documents when they are not created in the same version of Word.

Re:Office Key...

[vistic]

You can run it using Apple's X11 (included with OS X) or XFree86 if you prefer. But it won't have the usual Mac look and feel.

Re:Office Key...

[lahvak]

He accidentally downloaded Abiword

Re:Office Key...

[NoOneInParticular]

Let alone the couple of cases I witnessed where Word was unable to open .docs created by itself, on the same machine by the same user. Opening it in openoffice and saving it again in .doc format saved the day.

Re:Office Key...

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, a casual .doc reader who just needs something light and quick to open and read with, OO.org is a great solution.

Could I please have some of what you're smoking?

Re:Office Key...

[Hazzl]

For me, a casual .doc reader who just needs something light and quick to open and read with, OO.org is a great

I would never have thought that I'd hear somebody call OOo "light and quick" :-) Watch out, guys there ought to be flying pigs around here...

Speed

[aerthling]

I've been using OpenOffice 2.0 betas and RCs for about 5 or 6 months, and the only gripe I have with it (apart from the occasional crashes) are that it's noticably slower than Word 2003. However, that probably has something to do with my aging Duron 1200+.

Re:Speed

[Tomchu]

No. It doesn't have anything to do with your Duron 1200. It *is* slower than Office 2003. The lower the speed of your processor, the more pronouncable the difference will be -- but the reason OpenOffice is slower than Word 2003 isn't because of your Duron, unless AMD has somehow managed to pick out OpenOffice code and slow it down deliberately, on the silicon. :)

Re:Speed

[julesh]

[...] it's noticably slower than Word 2003. However, that probably has something to do with my aging Duron 1200+.

Hah! I've been using it on my PII-400. 1200! I should be so lucky.

Re:Speed

[diegocgteleline.es]

"It's noticably slower than Word 2003. However, that probably has something to do with my aging Duron 1200+."

Well - is not that a new processor is going to make openoffice faster than word...

Re:Speed

[Zapdos]

Office 2003 is preloaded at login. So office opens faster, but this is not without other costs.

one complaint

[b17bmbr]

i've always had one complaint, that the whole thing loads on startup. why can't they separate the components? i know it is a petty thing to ask for, but it would reduce the startup times alot, plus, how many times do you need every tool? if MS did anything right, it was to load only what's essential, then load everything else later. yeah, they preload alot of libraries, and most users don't know it, but word starts quick even on a P2 or P3. OO.org is a dog compared to it. since what was it, 5.2, they got rid of the desktop thingy which was a joke. i like abiword because it loads fast. i also have used pages and it rocks.

Re:one complaint

[garett_spencley]

I don't think that's petty at all. I don't use OO currently .. but that is one reason that I'm aprehensive about starting it.

I don't use a lot of office tools. Mostly I use a spreadsheet for updating some statistics every day .. but aside from e-mail (which I use Thunderbird for) that's pretty much the only "office"-type tool I use regularly. Excel loads pretty instant on my computer. If I had to wait for everything in Office to load just to open a spreadsheet and update some stats I would find something else.

I do use a word processor every now and again .. but the sheer thought of having to wait for every office app to load just to type up a quick document and print it or whatever makes me cringe. MS Word loads almost instantly on my PC.

Re:one complaint

[Skjellifetti]

I want the subapplications separated, too, but for a different reason. There is nothing quite as annoying as Exiting from a doc and discovering that you have also inadvertantly killed 4 other spreadsheets/docs that were completely unrelated to the doc you were trying to quit.

ahhhh.....

[xao gypsie]

....dammit. I just deployed the 2.0 rc on several systems where I work. Now I have to go touch them all again...
Good thing they pay me by the hour.

Re:ahhhh.....

[MRoharr]

i did the same yesterday. too bad i don't get paid by the hour.

Linux?

[MetalliQaZ]

How is this linux? OO.org runs on linux, BSD, Windows, OSX... Yet, it gets the linux tag?

-d

Re:Linux?

[fyngyrz]

OO.org runs on linux, BSD, Windows, OSX...

No, it does't run under OSX. It runs, poorly (meaning, without access to system fonts because it's an xwindows app, not an OSX app) on PPC Macs but not as released (you have to dig up the right copy) and it's not integrated with the OS in terms of style which annoys a lot of OSX users (which is one of the claims for OO 2.) It doesn't annoy me, I can deal with whatever interface, but the fact that it can't access the system's fonts is a stone killer problem.

I'm a little worried about the decision to use Java for the DB, too, but I may be buying trouble that doesn't exist. I'm just going by the various interplatform/interapplication incompatibilities that I see on web pages because the wrong Java is installed (eg, flickr works on firefox but not on omniweb, etc.)

Too bad they didn't write it in python. Make java look like the c-descended nightmare it is. ;-)

Re:Linux?

[ThinkingInBinary]

it's not integrated with the OS in terms of style which annoys a lot of OSX users

Frankly, I think a lot of people could care. Someone's putting in a ton of effort to write a program, get it to read and write tons of formats, make it almost completely compatible with the main competitor (MS Office), and run it on multiple platforms, and you whine because it doesn't look like your other apps? Gimme a break! The mere fact that you refer to the UI as "style" instead of "user interface" shows that you're thinking along the lines of a Mac user who cares far more about how their OS looks and whether everything that moves on the screen is transparent, fades in and out, and is fuzzily antialiased. Thankfully, you disagree with that:

It doesn't annoy me, I can deal with whatever interface

But the whole Mac mentality of "aesthetics are all that matters; performance, compatibility, market share, software availability, and price don't matter" is stupid. That, and Apple's inane penchant for replacing useful parts of Unix (init, cron, inetd) with insanely large, bloated, and overengineered replacements (launchd) in the name of "enhancement".

Re:Linux?

[cavebear42]

But the whole Mac mentality of "aesthetics are all that matters; performance, compatibility, market share, software availability, and price don't matter" is stupid.

AAPL

Re:Linux?

[fyngyrz]

...and you whine because it doesn't look like your other apps?

No. I don't. Try to read for comprehension instead of maximum possible hysteria.

My primary objection was it doesn't use native fonts; my secondary, and noted as tentative, objection was that they used java for the DB component. The former is a functionality problem, a big one for people who do DTP and have an artistic and financial investment in fonts, the latter is a potential problem that I've seen bite other applications. I did mention that the UI is an issue for some Mac users; that is nothing less than the truth. However, it is not for me. I run Linux, Mac and XP, jumping about as I need to all day long. Doesn't bother me a bit. In fact, it's kind of fun.

Gimme a break!

....erm, well, if you insist. However, perhaps you would reconsider that, considering the hint my URL gives you. :-)

But the whole Mac mentality of "aesthetics are all that matters; performance, compatibility, market share, software availability, and price don't matter" is stupid.

Actually, since that's not the Mac mentality at all, your accusation is without any basis in fact.

For example, most of the Mac applications that I use whip the living heck out of the linux and XP apps in the same genres, not only in functionality but in reliability which is something that has great, and legitimate, value. On top of that, OSX is basically linux/unix/bsd-like under its skin, and that means that the really cool stuff that we find for linux can often be made to run there — examples of such things include Apache, PostgreSQL, and about every H/M/L-LL you can think of (including python, he said with great satisfaction.)

Performance... it's there. Compatibility is decent, depending on what you're looking for. It's quite commonly a graphics platform (just as linux is quite commonly a server platform) and compatibility (and performance and features and etc.) in that area is outstanding. Price... I can't see it as a problem. Does $500.00 for a really functional (and pleasing) RTR computer feel like too much to you? If it does, OK, but I'd have to say you are in the minority in that case. Sure, you can buy expensive Macs, but you can buy expensive PC's, too.

That, and Apple's inane penchant for replacing useful parts of Unix (init, cron, inetd) with insanely large, bloated, and overengineered replacements (launchd) in the name of "enhancement".

I will say this: They know their customer base pretty well in the general sense, and if they think that a touchy-feelie GUI thing is a better idea than hand-editing your crontab, I'm unlikely to be the one to step into the aisle and try to second guess them. There are other issues, too: Installations tend to be very heavy because they install everything you might need, regardless of if you actually need it or not. You can get hundreds of megs of storage back on a typical Mac just by pulling out localization resources you won't ever use. And so on. Every OS has high points and low points. But running OSX is, frankly, a very reasonable and pleasant experience. Installing software just works (I won't bore you with the linux experience, I'm sure you know exactly what the issues are there.)

With regard to OO, it has some distance to go before it can offer the functionality you can already get on the Mac, and that assumes that there is a native install that integrates well with the OS (fonts...) at some point. Without that, I can tell you frankly that a lot of Mac users will stay away. You can rant and scream about it all you want, but the fact is, the UI on the Mac is extremely consistent and consequently many users have a very narrow view of what is acceptable.

It's in RPMs

[Nimey]

Has anyone repackaged it in a straight tarball? This is inconvenient for people who use other distributions.

Re:It's in RPMs

[SimilarityEngine]

Try here - seems to be .tar.gz, about to download now ..... :-)

Re:It's in RPMs

[Anonymous Coward]

rpm2tgz - a script that wraps around cpio to convert an RPM into a tarball. use Slack or die;

also OO.o should have releases in a .sh or .bin GUI-installing format, which i like since it makes installing to your $HOME a breeze.

Re:It's in RPMs

[Derek Pomery]

I believe the ebuild uses rpm2targz.
* app-arch/rpm2targz
            Latest version available: 9.0-r3
            Latest version installed: 9.0-r3
            Size of downloaded files: 2 kB
            Homepage: http://www.slackware.com/config/packages.php
            Description: Convert a .rpm file to a .tar.gz archive
            License: as-is

Slackware, interestingly.

Re:It's in RPMs

[Nimey]

It's a collection of RPMs inside that tarball.

Re:It's in RPMs

[SimilarityEngine]

D'OH!!! Sorry, just had a proper look.

Re:It's in RPMs

[ttsoares]

This is insane !!!

I refuse to convert a bunch of RPMs to TGZs...

Do you belive that the install will be a plain installpkg *.tgz... ? ...and this will works ! Bwwwwaaaaaaaaaa....

Re:It's in RPMs

[Nimey]

Converting that wad of RPMs using rpm2tgz and then untarring all of them using a for loop (yeah, Slackware) wasn't all that hard, and it even worked! Thanks everyone.

Re:It's in RPMs

[MightyMartian]

The last time I used rpm2tgz to make a Slackware package out of OO, it totally munged it up. Guess what guys, Redcrap isn't the only distro out there.

Re:It's in RPMs

[BenjyD]

tar, alien *.rpm and dpkg -i *.deb worked for me on Ubuntu.

Re:It's in RPMs

[lengau]

RedHat may not be the only Distro out there, but (1) RedHat and RedHat-based distros make up the bulk of mainstream users and (2) RPM is a standard (LSB). Any reasonable distro can read RPMs. I use Gentoo, and I'm busy installing it right now.

Re:It's in RPMs

[ebob]

There is a pdf installation guide on the download page with instruction on how to install in different OSs including OSX, Solaris and FreeBSD, and other Distros including Debian, Gentoo and Slackware. It's here:

http://documentation.openoffice.org/setup_guide2/2 .x/en/SETUP_GUIDE_draft.pdf

Still dissapointed, but happy

[bogaboga]

I wish they made the Linux version's icons look more like those of StarOffice on Windows. I find those of OpenOffice.org huge and not that pleasant to look at. Plus, the text lokks blurry...why?

Re:Still dissapointed, but happy

[Mjlner]

"Plus, the text lokks blurry...why?"

Bartender! I'm having whatever this guy is drinking!

U.S.S.M.

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Massachusetts, office format requires you!!!!1

Re:U.S.S.M.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a while since I laughed at one of these... I didn't with this one either.

Re:U.S.S.M.

[Mikaelk]

I laughed. Or atleast sniggered.

Re:U.S.S.M.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only old Koreans don't laugh at these jokes.

Re:U.S.S.M.

[stinerman]

U.S.S.M.?

Massachusetts is a commonwealth, not a state.

Re:U.S.S.M.

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be M.S.S.R. (Massachusetts Soviet Socialist Republic).

Which Thursday?

[Lord Byron II]

You mean today? The 20th? Or November 10, which is also a Thursday?

Fantastic

[damm0]

This is great! Congratulations to the OpenOffice folks. Now all OpenOffice needs is a good vi keymap.

Re:Fantastic

[numbware]

This is great! Congratulations to the OpenOffice folks. Now all OpenOffice needs is a good vi keymap.

And maybe a better spell checker. It didn't even pick up that you spelled emacs wrong.

*ducks*

Re:Fantastic

[lahvak]

Who in the world moded this funny? That's insightful! AMOF, I would say that's the most insightful post in this whole discussion!

Slackware howto?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just paste the request I sent to groklaw (they had the news first!)
----
I'd love to install it - I've downloaded the .tar.gz both at home and at work.

But it seems to me there are no install instructions beyond "unpack the
rpms".

What happened to the nice installer previous versions of Openoffice had? I don't
remember difficulties installing 1.2 or 1.4 on my machines (all slackware in
case you were wondering).

Please please please can someone tell me if it is possible to install OOo 2.0 on
slack 10.0?

Re:Slackware howto?

[dduardo]

tar -zxvf OOo_2.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz cd OOO680_m3_native_packed-2_en-US.8968/RPMS rpm2targz * rm *.rpm for i in `ls *.tar.gz`; do tar xzf $i; done su mv openoffice.org2.0 /opt/ ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice /usr/bin/soffice ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/swriter /usr/bin/swriter ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/scalc /usr/bin/scalc ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/sdraw /usr/bin/sdraw ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/sbase /usr/bin/sbase ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/smath /usr/bin/smath

"Linux: OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only released for Linux? When do the Solaris, Windows, Be, Unix, and Mac versions come out?

FTA: "OpenOffice.org 2.0 runs natively on Windows, GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris, Mac OS X (X11). Other platforms are also supported."

They're out? I'm confused... or maybe Zonk is.

OO2beta crashes

[pekoe]

OO2beta has been excellent for me, with exception of table pasting suckage and crash issues which I have experienced. If they've fixed these as well, well that's just wonderful. I use the Windows version.

Re:OO2beta crashes

[psbrogna]

Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?

Re:OO2beta crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

They haven't gone away in 2.0 stable..just got crash after copying from a browser to Writer..

Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[raitchison]

I have the distinct feeling I'll be losing some Karma for saying this but I'm REALLY disappointed that they didn't solve the Java issue.

According to the System Requirements page it still requires the Sun JVM.

Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.

I've said it before but I really don't see the advantage of having an OSS product if you are still dependent on a definitively non-open product. Ofr course I know it's completely different sice Sun isn't evil like Microsoft is.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[amrust]

You just hit on the ONLY knock I've had with OO since I discovered it.

I agree they need to move away from Java, ASAP.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[k98sven]

Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.

Red Hat is getting OOo to play with the GNU compiler for java (gcj). They shipped OOo using gcj with Fedora Core 4, and according to the blog of the guy working on it, it seems OOo 2.0 will follow as well.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun aren't about to build the windows version without Java deps. if they can help it, it's the only reason a lot of users might ever have for installing the JRE these days, i suspect that the major linux distributions will package versions compiled with GCJ, but i'm not holding my breath for such things on windows.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[GooberToo]

I don't understand why they don't go with Python and jump Java. Python is already cross platform, easy to learn, and can be easily embedded into the binary.

All problems would be solved. Not to mention, the memory foot print required for OO would probably drop considerably.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[mechsoph]

Because open OOo is sponsored primarily by Sun.

Also, the best way for them to drop the memory usage would be to stop bundling every library known to man and just use the shared versions already on the system.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[GooberToo]

I guess that is the obvious answer...doh! Fair enough.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[iabervon]

The only thing in Java is HSQLDB (and, presumably, some trivial code to interface to it). So all you have to do is write a full-featured, file-backed, in process, SQL database in Python. Or you could write it in C++ and not require a language that OO doesn't already use.

(HSQLDB is a database that works a bit like MS Access, except that it works correctly, for cases where you want to have database files and send them to people in much the same way that you move spreadsheet files around, rather than use The Database Server with The Database on it. As far as I know, there aren't any other open source projects that do this.)

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could stop being bitchy and use Blackdown's jdk, which is what I've been doing.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I've heard that some of the OpenOffice.org accessibility features depend on Java. If that is in fact the case, I'm surprised that some distributions (such as Ubuntu because it supposedly has a strong focus on accessibility for all) decide to include it.

I could be wrong though as I have never needed to use those features myself.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[bmalia]

The Sun JVM is free (as in beer). So, I don't see what the big deal is about using it. It's a superior product that doesn't cost a dime. There are free (as in speech) JVM's out there, but why would OO/SUN want to promote those?

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[midnightblaze]

Uh, where does it say it requires Sun Java? All I see are version numbers. Doesn't Fedora Core use open source runtimes for the Java components of OOo?

Java is a wonderful technology. Personally, I'm glad OOo uses it. I myself certainly do.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[hikerhat]

You could. But you still have to be bitchy, since Blackdown IS Sun's JDK. Blackdown is just a port of sun's java to linux. ftp://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/blackdown/JD K-1.4.2/i386/02/LICENSE

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[GooberToo]

http://www.pythonweb.org/projects/snakesql/

If I remember correctly, there are several other pure python, SQL databases available too. Not to mention, if the need were there, it would/could certainly be developed quickly enough.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[tritonic]

Hmmm, I'm confused. What's the difference between Blackdown and the Java you can download from Sun's website?

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[hikerhat]

Many moons (1997) ago the JDK didn't run on linux. So I guess blackdown helped sun port it or something. I'm not clear on all the details. http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id =4097810

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats New In The Latest Version?
 
    * Foreign Key Constraints
    * Simple Joins

<sarcasm>Yeah, you're right. Let's go with this Python one.</sarcasm>

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[GooberToo]

You were too busy being sarcastic to use your brain. What a surprise. As I said, I believe there are several others available. I found that one after 5-seconds on google.

Shooting it down with your brain turned off, only makes you an ass...which explains why you hid anonymously.

Linux AMD64 port pleeeeease!

[caluml]

I'm hoping to be able to run v2 on my AMD64 box sometime - but reports of it even compiling are pretty sketchy, and it runs like a dog, unless you disable java in the build. (Why are the words java and slow always appearing in the same sentence...)
Anyone know of any AMD64 v2 binary packages until that time? (Binary - I feel dirty saying that word.)

Re:Linux AMD64 port pleeeeease!

[julesh]

Why are the words java and slow always appearing in the same sentence...

Because the Java standard library is incredibly bloated and has ridiculous interdependencies that mean huge portions of it have to be initialised at startup of just about any application.

Re:Linux AMD64 port pleeeeease!

[greg_barton]

(Why are the words java and slow always appearing in the same sentence...)

Dunno. Maybe because you keep putting them together?

Re:Linux AMD64 port pleeeeease!

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand OOv2 is still not 64 bit clean, why not use the 32 bit binaries in ia32 compatibility mode? (Works very well BTW). The whole reason for AMD64's success is running amd64 and ia32 binaries simultaneously. How to get the ia32 compatibility libraries is distro-specific, see your vendor/provider for details, there is a very big chance that you already have them.

Regards
RDK

Re:Linux AMD64 port pleeeeease!

[greg_barton]

...and has ridiculous interdependencies...

Those interdependencies you speak of...that wouldn't be code reuse and OO design, maybe? And what would be a nonridiculous interdependency?

Re:Linux AMD64 port pleeeeease!

[huwnet]

A windows x64 port would be nice too!

Re:Linux AMD64 port pleeeeease!

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not the only one. Have you not read the rest of the comments yet?

Adoption WIll Still Be Slow

[alucinor]

... in America at least. But overseas, where Microsoft is viewed as a foreign entity, migration to ODF, and by effect, OpenOffice, will be swift.

I think more American companies will begin migrating to ODF as a web-services ecosystem builds up around the format. Everyone who thinks that "web office" is a good idea is silly, silly, IMHO. Instead, what's really exciting is the ability of ODF to accomplish in a real way what everyone thought barebones XML was going to do for inter-company document processing.

Re:Adoption WIll Still Be Slow

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the State of Massachusetts will quickly adapt this.

Cool API, could become web services stack

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who don't know, openoffice has an excellent API. It will run in server mode with an open port on the server so you can query it and perform almost any operation including File conversion, pdf export, calculations, etc. Check it out!

http://api.openoffice.org/

HIT THE TORRENTS

[cerelib]

The have a link to torrents. I highly suggest that. I am seeding right now so come and get it.

Re:HIT THE TORRENTS

[myz24]

Awesome...where is the link to the torrent? OOo is dead...

Re:HIT THE TORRENTS

[Anonymous Coward]

The torrent downloads are going way faster than the official download mirrors.

I was getting between 0 and 12k/sec from the mirrors. I am getting about 170k from torrent.

Re:HIT THE TORRENTS

[cerelib]

Windows
http://borft.student.utwente.nl:6969/file?info_has h=%18%F6%20s%FD%FA%DA%D5%91%86%94%10%DE%A5%8FV%B6% 1Fi%A1

Linux x86
http://borft.student.utwente.nl:6969/file?info_has h=%90%F7%EA%13%9AC%1E%05V%97%05%E2%5D%96%07%E40%CD l%B2

I call dibs on month 20 to be called...

[dwayner79]

Dwayneuary

August named for Augustus
July named for Julias Ceasar
Dwayneuary named for ME... I called it first!

Re:I call dibs on month 20 to be called...

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

I vote we call it Next-August.

ISO Dates NOW

[mechsoph]

And this is why we should all start using the ISO date format. Today is 2005.10.20. If you can get confused by that, congratulations.

Also, the current temperature here is a dismal 48 degrees.

Re:ISO Dates NOW

[CortoMaltese]

Umm, you mean it's 2005-10-20?

Please POST bittorrent MAGNET links!

[Danathar]

The torrent tracker site is swamped...somebody PLEASE post the bittorrent Magnet addresses for the torrents so we can join without having to get the tracker file.

Re:Please POST bittorrent MAGNET links!

[sh0dan]

Found these on the official site - Are these what you need:

Windows (x86) - 75.2MB: magnet.
Linux (x86) - 101.7MB: magnet.
Solaris (x86) - 95.4MB: magnet.
Solaris (Sparc) - 104.3MB: magnet.
Source - 260.0MB: magnet.

WTF is with that "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 17.0)". Since when is a large number of characters per line a sign of a good post? At least I hope this rant fills up enought characters to please the bot.

Re:Please POST bittorrent MAGNET links!

[Danathar]

Those are edonkey and other network Magnet URI's....NOT Bittorrent Azureus Magnet link URI's.

Re:Please POST bittorrent MAGNET links!

[sh0dan]

Ah - I'm not the best at these new fancy P2P features ;)
Found this in Azureus. It should work for the Win32 binary:
Win 32 binary.

Re:Please POST bittorrent MAGNET links!

[Danathar]

Thnaks for the link. Personally I think they (whomever tries to post slashdot bittorrent links) should post the Magnet address instead. It takes the load off of the tracker.

Re:Please POST bittorrent MAGNET links!

[clheiny]

Anyone have the Azureus magnet link for the Linux x86 installer?

Re:Please POST bittorrent MAGNET links!

[fritsd]

is this what you mean:

OOo_2.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:SD36UE42IMPAKVUXAXRF3FQH4QYM23 FS

also for the source:
OOo_2.0.0_src.tar.gz
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:MBWGXEM4K24HSEIZCHOZ7AUV5B7JHQ MP

and for MS Windows:
OOo_2.0.0_Win32Intel_install.exe
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DD3CA4757LNNLEMGSQIN5JMPK23B62 NB

Re:Please POST bittorrent MAGNET links!

[clheiny]

Hmmm. The Linux URI was OK, but the source URI isn't working for me. I eventually got through to the tracker and downloaded the torrent, but wound up with
        Linux: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:SD36UE42IMPAKVUXAXRF3FQH4QYM23 FS
        Source: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:NBLH57XACLSOXY7KTKCRE2TWCAEMJN 5G
as the URIs.

Now that it's all here, I'm burning a bunch of CDs to pass around the company.

Good for the wife factor, too

[Prairiewest]

This is great news for me - it should make my wife happy!

I switched over to OS X for our home computer when Apple came out with the Mac Mini (I love iMovie, it makes great movies of the kids). It's been mostly painless, except for one thing: MS Word Documents. My wife needs to open and edit .doc files that she gets sent via email.

I tried installing OpenOffice 1.4, but it was slow and felt unpolished. More importantly: she didn't like it. We tried NeoOffice/J but the Java startup time is a pain, too. The AbiWord OS X port doesn't look done. And I did't think that Word 2000 running inside an emulator was going to cut it for her. Up to now, I have had to keep our old WinXP box around just to keep her from strangling me.

I welcome the opportunity to finally donate my WinXP box to the local kids computer recycling program!

Re:Good for the wife factor, too

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that there's an OS X port of Office?

Re:Good for the wife factor, too

[Prairiewest]

Yes - sorry, I forgot to mention that I didn't want to pay the hundreds of dollars for MS Office. Neither do I wish to pay Intuit for Quicken on the Mac. I don't want to send any more of my money toward either of those companies.

I know, I shouldn't subject my wife to my own political bent, but hey she makes me do some strange things (like shop certain places and not others), so I feel a little justified.

Re:Good for the wife factor, too

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are looking for a way to open and read MW Word .doc files on a Mac under OSX why not simply buy MS Word. They do make a Mac version of word.

About Open Office being slow. YOur problem is the Mac Mini not Open Office. The Mini is not the world's fastest machine. On a dual Xeon system with 4GB ram and scsi disks OO never has any noticabe delays no matter what I try. I imagine you'd see the same speed on a Power Mac or heck even a G5 iMac.

Re:Good for the wife factor, too

[DaveM753]

I'm sorry, but I disagree somewhat here. Sure, the Mac Mini's aren't exactly speed demons. But OpenOffice.org takes an uncomfortable amount of time to load, whereas other, similar apps do not.

I have a Mac Mini 1.42ghz, and a Windows box (AMD 1.3ghz) that is about 4 years old. Both of them seem to have similar performance on applications like iTunes, Firefox and Thunderbird. However, OpenOffice.org, opens up VERY SLOWLY on the Mac Mini. It has to open and start X11 first, then X11 starts OpenOffice.org. When I first got the Mac Mini w/256mb of RAM, this process took upwards of 90 seconds. I upped the RAM to 1gb, which helped significantly, but OOo still takes between 20-45 seconds to load (depending on how many other apps are running). NeoOffice/J takes about 10-30 seconds, which is much better.

Creating ods is darn trivial

[codepunk]

I created a program for here at work just yesterday that logs machine PLC data to a ods formatted sheet. I just created a ods template and my logger program written in python opens content.xml and feeds the log data into it. Now of course I could do that with office also but it would require either macro programming and or automating excel to do it, far uglier than just producing straight ods output from a program. Not to mention having to run a office suite on a server just to produce a document. For the developer ODF is a god send!

Re:Creating ods is darn trivial

[T-Ranger]

Tell me, how is writing something in Python not the same as "either macro programming and or automating excel"? I can see how the Office solution would require installing Office on the server, but with ADO/ActiveX/DDE/WTF I dont know if it qualifies as "running it".. At least not the UI part, which would be the resource hog.

I dont disagree that having a nice documented format is a good thing, but the older OOo docs are too, as is the native formats for Abiword. If what you want is scriptability, you can do that with Office just fine.

Re:Creating ods is darn trivial

[Tony]

If what you want is scriptability, you can do that with Office just fine.

Not on a non-MS-Windows server, you can't.

Re:Creating ods is darn trivial

[codepunk]

In this case I am not using a macro, or scripting internally my program is outputting a
populated ods document based on a template I created with open office. One hell of alot easier than trying to automate ms office and my program is kept small and simple.

America uses backwards date formats...

[CausticPuppy]

Probably an American. They'd look at that date and say "tenth of the twentieth month? WTF?" ;)

(Just like I keep wondering why everyone's going on about the 9th of November...)

Yeah, the rest of the world has it right... smallest units to largest units. It's more consistent that way.
This is also why, in Europe, the complete date and time would be given by (as an example):

56:32:11 20/10/2005 (ss:mm:hh dd/mm/yyyy)

(This is, of course, the current time in the Eastern US daylight time zone)

Re:America uses backwards date formats...

[julesh]

Hell, yeah. And we all use GMT all of the time, cause it's the only thing that makes sense. And we've metricated time...

Hang on a kilosecond.

Maybe not.

Re:America uses backwards date formats...

[Isaac-Lew]

Yeah, the rest of the world has it right... smallest units to largest units. It's more consistent that way.

ISO 8601 is more consistent (to me at least, biggest to smallest). It also seems that it would be easier to sort.

Re:America uses backwards date formats...

[Directrix1]

I agree. If you want to sort just key off of:
YYYYMMddhhmmss
or more legibly
YYYY-MM-dd hh:mm:ss
Either of those ways will sort real perty like.

Re:America uses backwards date formats...

[Sgt_Peppers]

America doesn't use backward date formats, the UK (and anyone else) which uses the dd/mm/yy format uses backward dates. The US mm/dd/yy system is just rendomly messed up.

Re:America uses backwards date formats...

[haralder]

No way. In basque, a language spoken in a region in Spain, the order is from largest to smallest, which makes more sense. You start with the most general info (the year) and go to the specific (the day, or even the minutes).

And it's much better for sorting, so my backup files are whatever_20051021.tgz, just sorted by date.

Re:America uses backwards date formats...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the rest of the world has it right... smallest units to largest units. It's more consistent that way. This is also why, in Europe, the complete date and time would be given by (as an example): 56:32:11 20/10/2005 (ss:mm:hh dd/mm/yyyy)

Ugh... Then you ought to reverse the digits of numbers as well. The units digit is smaller than the tens digit, right? It's 31:41:02 02/01/5002 right now!

That's why the best, most unambiguous date possible is 2005-10-02. Soon as you see the year, you know the format for the rest of it. In normal usage, though, I stick to 20-10-2005; at least they're in an order. Why would anyone put the day between the month and the year? WTF?

(Yes, I know that's the way they're generally placed in written English. Written English obeys no logic whatsoever. But these are numbers... numbers are supposed to make sense, I say!)

Re:America uses backwards date formats...

[Anonymous Coward]

ISO 8601 is more consistent (to me at least, biggest to smallest)

...and has the further advantage of allowing you to specify the date/time with as much accuracy or generality as you wish, merely by choosing how long you make your output string.

"the fifth day of the fourth month of 1981 is written 1981-04-05 ... you may write 1981-04 to mean April, 1981 ... Or you may even write 19 to refer to a century."

Sweet!

Re:America uses backwards date formats...

[jesterzog]

ISO 8601 is more consistent (to me at least, biggest to smallest). It also seems that it would be easier to sort.

I usually use largest ot smallest when I'm writing a date that'll need to be sorted for exactly this reason. It slots into an alphanumeric sorting system much more easily. To be honest, though, I much prefer smallest to largest when I'm writing and reading dates in day-to-day life.

Stuff I do tends to fluctuate much more on a day and month level within the groups that I deal with it, so it makes perfect sense to have the most commonly changing parts of the date given at the beginning. If the year was first, I'd forever be locating the month and day in the middle, and that takes longer.

The standard US system of mm-dd-yyyy just seems strange to me. It doesn't seem to make sense, and I don't use it unless I'm forced to. (eg. Some software requiring it as an entry format.)

PDF

[kurtis25]

Can I open and Edit PDF's in OOo?? Ie. If I have a PDF document created in Acrobat can I open it up on OOo and change the text of the doucment?

Re:PDF

[Petrushka]

No. That's not what PDFs are designed for. Even doing it in Acrobat can be a nightmare. As a workaround, it is possible in Acrobat Reader 7 to export a PDF to RTF.

Install Script

[dduardo]

tar -zxvf OOo_2.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
cd OOO680_m3_native_packed-2_en-US.8968/RPMS
rpm2targz *
rm *.rpm
for i in `ls *.tar.gz`; do tar xzf $i; done
su
mv openoffice.org2.0 /opt/
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice /usr/bin/soffice
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/swriter /usr/bin/swriter
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/scalc /usr/bin/scalc
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/sdraw /usr/bin/sdraw
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/sbase /usr/bin/sbase
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/smath /usr/bin/smath

Re:Install Script

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks - that was easy - I'm up and running now.
If you don't mind I'll copy your script to groklaw in answer to my question there - since others are asking similar questions.

ps:

2 changes:

rpm2targz *.tar.gz

mv opt/openoffice.org2.0 /opt/

andy.

Re:Install Script

[Anonymous Coward]

You could alternatively rpm2tgz the rpms then installpkg the tgzs.

Re:Install Script

[Anonymous Coward]

On Debian extraction of the rpms's can be done by:

for i in $(ls *.rpm); do rpm2cpio $i | cpio -id ; done

Requires rpm and cpio

So...

[fyngyrz]

...you were "pool whoring"?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, that sounds like fun. Now all I need is a pool and some whores.

Re:So...

[lawpoop]

Bitwhoring.

Torrentwhoring.

Doesn't help

[overshoot]

Real men unmask their portage packages.

Have you tried building OO.o v2 on Linux?

Damn near impossible.

Re:Doesn't help

[oasisbob]

I've tried twice, and I must be lucky because it compiled perfectly both times (rc2 and rc3) using Gentoo.

So it may be temperamental for some, but it's far from being "damn near impossible."

Re:Doesn't help

[Bert64]

It`s quite flakey to build, and takes a long time..
Gentoo seems to have issues with java-config (java-config is a python script, OOo includes its own copy of python which is missing the java-config modules) it doesnt work if you`ve upgraded python to 2.4 etc..
Also on AMD64 you need to use the linux32 command to fake your uname as 32bit..
I ended up building a 32bit chroot on my AMD box using versions of python/gcc/etc i knew worked, and building it there.

Also the openoffice build process is very different to most apps, it has a configure script in a subdir, a seperate bootstrap script and finally it`s own make program that doesn`t seem to work with multithreading.

2.0 Download Mirror

[Ashcrow]

Here is one I found and am using. It's not too bad, 170kb/s so far ....

http://openoffice.mirrors.ilisys.com.au/stable/2.0 .0/

suse 10 release candidate?

[stampsc]

does anyone know if there were any changes since the suse 10 OSS release that came with the open office release candidate?

3 bitches

[Anonymous Coward]

I just "installed" the linux version, I have some gripes ...

1) Not easy to install on Linux.
2) Can't (easily?) force it to open a text file as a spreadsheet.
3) Graphicing either doesn't work or is not very intuitive in the spreadsheet.

worse than 1.X : not ready for enterprise

[Her0]

released with inability to open files from network (smb) folder (not mapped to letter) on ms-win98 (on XP - able).

just like microsoft do - release not redy product (with repeadly delays), fix late.

Re:worse than 1.X : not ready for enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

released with inability to open files from network (smb) folder (not mapped to letter) on ms-win98 (on XP - able). What enterprises are using windows 98??

Re:worse than 1.X : not ready for enterprise

[jwd-oh]

I call B.S. I just tried this and it works fine.

Detailed Comparison of OO Writer and MS Word

[L. VeGas]

Not to totally plug my own article, but I have a detailed comparison between the two here that some might be interested in.

Re:Detailed Comparison of OO Writer and MS Word

[sheepoo]

Nice!
Very well done

Re:Detailed Comparison of OO Writer and MS Word

[davide marney]

This is the most even-handed and intelligent comparison I've read yet. No agenda, no filler, and completely fair to both products.

Re:Detailed Comparison of OO Writer and MS Word

[Edax Rarem]

Well done!
Do you have a comparison of the spreadsheets.
Using something other than Word is easy (I hate Word). But XL I will have a hard time breaking away from unless I see some convincing eveidence.
I did here google was working on a spreadsheet.

Re:Detailed Comparison of OO Writer and MS Word

[justins]

Not to totally plug my own article

That expression would have been more appropriate if, you know, you had done anything at all other than plug your own article. :D

Re:Detailed Comparison of OO Writer and MS Word

[gral]

Good breakdown. One of the reasons we haven't been adding Clipart is because of download size. (Currently around 71Mb for Windows.) For Clipart, we have been using http://openclipart.org/ (Which appears to be down at the moment.)

Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ!

[Danathar]

If you are downloading via Azureus...PLEASE do the following

Post the Azureus Magnet URI to Slashdot by doing the following

Go to "My Torrents"

Right click on your torrent and choose "Copy Magnet URI to clipboard"

Please paste this in your post.

This will allow people to join the swarm without having to get the tracker file which is TOTALLY swamped at the moment.

thanks!

Re:Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ!

[Fr4ncis]

Here it is.. magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DD3CA4757LNNLEMGSQIN5JMPK23B62 NB How do you use it?

Re:Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ!

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

It was mentioned in a couple comments above.

Re:Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ!

[GrueMaster]

Here's mine. magnet:?xt=urn:btih:SD36UE42IMPAKVUXAXRF3FQH4QYM23 FS I just finished downloading, and will leave my torrent running for a while (it's better to give than to receive). GrueMaster

Re:Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ!

[Anonymous Coward]

here's one i prepared earlier

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:SD36UE42IMPAKVUXAXRF3FQH4QYM23 FS

Re:Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ!

[fritsd]

OK then, here comes my first slashdot contribution..

is this what you mean:

OOo_2.0.0_src.tar.gz
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:MBWGXEM4K24HSEIZCHOZ7AUV5B7JHQ MP

OOo_2.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:SD36UE42IMPAKVUXAXRF3FQH4QYM23 FS

OOo_2.0.0_Win32Intel_install.exe
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DD3CA4757LNNLEMGSQIN5JMPK23B62 NB

Re:Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ!

[Danathar]

Assuming you have the correct ports opened for Azureus to connect to the distributed has table database (you can see if you are connected at the bottom by a green icon with the number of users connected..if not it should be yellow or red) you take that address (minus the space before the last two characters, slashdot mangled it.) and put it in the address window when you do an "Open Location" from File --> open location.

The Best and the Worst of it.

[Qwavel]

For OpenOffice 2.0...

- The best feature/decision is support for OpenDocument. Not only do I think this is important, but it is getting lots of media attention. It appears that everybody thinks this is important. Good move!

- Worst feature/decision that is understandable: the tie-in to Java, and Sun's java in particular. Oh well, I guess it was inevitable.

- The worst feature/decision that makes no sense: the use of a custom GUI api. People think it uses native widgets/chrome but it is faking it so it will be 'off' in small ways that are confusing and annoying. Even worse, they are working with a unique and reasonably innaccesible code base rather than participating in an existing GUI technology. I shouldn't refer to this as a 'decision' though. The discussions on the lists led to the decision that an existing technology would be chosen (eg. SWT, wxWidgets, GTK) but somehow it never happened.

Are there plans to fix this?

yee haw!!

[jkind]

From another review:

OpenOffice.org 2.0 introduces a comprehensive XForms creation and editing capability. In conjunction with improvements in the suite's ability to export XHTML 1.0 Strict code, OpenOffice.org can now be considered a mature web authoring tool.

Sorry, Java bigots.

[greg_barton]

Already I'm reading posts saying, "The Java problem hasn't been solved! WAAAAA!"

Sorry, you Java bigots. You're just going to have to deal. And, by "deal," I mean "stop bitching and start pitching in."

Re:Sorry, Java bigots.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, people that use Java tend to be bigots but still they should be ashamed of the performance.

People, this is why real programs are written in "C".

Re:Sorry, Java bigots.

[jonabbey]

Except when they're not.

Any changes since RC3?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't feel like redownloading ~90MB of stuff :(

More seriously, I'll check it out

[Dink Paisy]

I've criticized OO.o in the past for being a second rate program. When I tried it previously, it was lacking in a lot of areas (in particular I recall issues with import and export of Word files and slow load times). I could ignore most things, but some features involving numbered lists that I use regularly did not work, and when I went to report the bug I discovered it was in the database for many months, had been assigned once, and then unassigned.

I'll try it again now. I am a skeptic, but if it is really good, I will admit that, and if it is superior, I will use it.

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[killjoe]

The fact that OO is unable to import and export undocumented file types protected by patents and other intellectual property is not their fault. You need to take this up with Microsoft. Perhaps they could support the OASIS standard in their product, I hear some of their customers have been asking for it.

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[assassinator42]

Open Office imports/exports .doc files much better than it handles the documented MS XML files. In a beta I was using at least, if you saved a file as XML in MS Office 2003, and edited it with Open Office, the indentations at the beginning of paragraphs and such would be gone when you tried to open it on MS Office. I don't know if they fixed this or not. But it seems like Open Office has much better support for .doc than .xml, so I just use .doc for interoperability.

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[killjoe]

Once again any faults with the import and export of proprietary, poorly documented, patent protected and non licensable formats is not the fault of the open office developers. They have done the best they can even though they have all risked being sued or even jailed under the DMCA.

Why don't you complain to Microsoft? Maybe they can support OO format, after all one of their largest customers is asking for it.

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[assassinator42]

Well, it certianly is licensable. It also seems pretty well documented.

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[ClosedSource]

"The fact that OO is unable to import and export undocumented file types protected by patents and other intellectual property is not their fault."

You're right, but the fact that they claim they can import and export MS Office files and don't sucessfully is 100% their own fault. Nobody is forcing them to make these claims.

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[kbielefe]

Check out this interview with OO.org developers (milk joke source) that discusses the importing attempts. Basically, only the content portion of Microsoft's XML format is documented. The layout portion is all lumped into one giant obfuscated binary tag (as most slashdotters predicted when they first heard of the format, I might add). I don't know about the newer versions of MS Office, but I have never personally seen one of these word xml documents "in the wild." Do I even need to mention the stupidity of documentation that requires Windows to view? The documentation of their "open" format isn't even in an open format.

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[killjoe]

The license itself is prorietary. As for the documentation your use of the weasel words "seems to be" is aporpos. It "seems to be" well documented but in actuality it's not well documented. Nice use of weasel words by the way, are you a professional astro turfer?

In any case the MS proprietary format is patented, this means that MS can sue anybody who not only implements it but actually saves files in their format from another program. Of course MS probably won't sue, they will fund another company to sue just like they did with SCO.

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[danny]

Microsoft claims that newer versions of MS Office can import older MS Office files, but they don't do so successfully 100% of the time. That's Microsoft's fault, as no one is forcing them to make that claim.

Incidentally, I've had quite a few users come to me with damaged Word documents that no version of Microsoft Office could open - but which I successfully salvaged using OpenOffice.

Danny.

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[ClosedSource]

"Microsoft claims that newer versions of MS Office can import older MS Office files, but they don't do so successfully 100% of the time."

Actually, I'm not sure if MS actually makes such a claim, but it has nothing to do with the claims that OpenOffice makes.

"Incidentally, I've had quite a few users come to me with damaged Word documents that no version of Microsoft Office could open - but which I successfully salvaged using OpenOffice. "

Great, if I have damaged Word documents, I'll keep OpenOffice in mind, if they're undamaged I'll use Word.

missing it's installer for linux

[Lumpy]

Yuck. they screwed up big time by getting rid of the linux installer.

now those of us that do not run a popular rpm based distro are forced to fight our way into installing it.

they had a great graphical/text installer that worked very well even had provisions for network based install and they dumped it.

worst move they could have made. I really hope that someone digs out the old installer and makes it work with 2.0 so we can get back to advancing linux software instead of stepping backwards by getting rid of the installer.

Re:missing it's installer for linux

[cdwiegand]

Are you nuts?! Now those of us who run multi-machine networks can push this out to our computers without having to run to each one and manually reinstall it on each machine. We can push the RPMs out. And rpm is available for Debian-based and Slackware-based distributions. (Or use alien from Debian to convert it if you wish.) I hope that they never resurrect that monster. Horribly non-compliant with modern (or even archaic) packaging management. Even with a response script, it's simply not professional enough.

Re:missing it's installer for linux

[Linker3000]

Are you nuts!?

We should have the choice to use a friendly installer - super gurus like yourself can obviously cope but for the average, linux-keen Joe (or Joanna) and 'slowly being persuaded' IT Manager, to be confronted with a pile of rpms with no obvious installer is a showstopper and a kick in the teeth for mass Linux adoption.

Providing no simple installer for Linux is stupid, stupid, stupid.

Re:missing it's installer for linux

[jmorris42]

> now those of us that do not run a popular rpm based distro are forced to fight our way
> into installing it.

Good riddence. This isn't the early 90s anymore and package management is mandatory on machines not in someone's dorm and most of those are running Gentoo; which does package management.

For a major package like OO.o the best source should be your distribution itself. If yours doesn't have a package for OO.o 2.0 yet just wait a bit, most will probably roll one soon enough.

Re:missing it's installer for linux

[lengau]

NOTE: THIS IS JUST A GUESS. I DON'T HAVE ANY REDHAT/DEBIAN/ETC MACHINES CURRENTLY, SO I CAN'T TEST IT.

RedHat based: yum install openoffice or apt-get install openoffice
Debian based: apt-get install openoffice
Gentoo based: emerge openoffice-bin

OKay, for Gentoo, it's actually ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge openoffice-bin
but that's just because it hasn't been tested and proven stable yet.
It might be similar on other distros too. On debian you probably have to use the unstable archives.

Re:missing it's installer for linux

[Anonymous Coward]

nope he is simply one of those that do not WANT anyone but phd's in CS to use linux.

basicaly a linux bigot that demands things to be a PITA.

only a complete and utter moron thinks the way he does. everyone else wants an installer.

Re:missing it's installer for linux

[WWWWolf]

Yup. I thought the graphical installer was a bit silly though, they could have just gone for "untar this to wherever the hell you want this, create symlinks or stick it to the path if you want, and then run oowriter or whatever".

But as everyone knows, binary releases are only for those who are waiting for their distribution to get up to the speed. I just twiddled my thumbs and used 1.1 until today when I noticed 2.0 was in Debian too. =)

(By the way, as a consolation I can say anyone suggesting "umm, try Alien" with 30 RPMs, when the instructions also specifically say "pick the ones that apply to your distribution", is definitely nuts. =)

Re:missing it's installer for linux

[Eli Gottlieb]

I would just like to note that this thing is sheer Hell-On-Earth to install from source. What the flying fuck were they thinking "oh, everyone has an RPM-using machine"?! Linux From Scratch and proud of it!

10th????

[Anonymous Coward]

Try '20th'...there ain't no Thursday in October 2005 that falls on the 10th.

Torrents here ...

[kwanbis]

http://borft.student.utwente.nl:6969/

Tub of lard

[oxfletch]

And in other news, a huge 55 gallon drum of lard flew past the window really, really slowly, after taking 5 minutes to launch itself off the ground.

If they focused on making the thing lean and mean, rather than a bloated collection of more and more features, maybe it'd be more interesting.

Re:Tub of lard

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Abiword still exists.
LaTeX still exists.
TROFF, Emacs, and Vi still exists.
Some people _like_ usability and features.
Some people think their productivity is more important than memory or processor usage on their machine.

But hey..
complain about a product with a perfectly valid (and rather important) purpose because
it is doing what it needs to do and filling a void in the OSS world while doing
you absolutely no harm.
Whatever makes you happy.

biased comparison

[crowdofone]

You can download, or read past coverage including a preview or a comparison with MS Office.

I love openoffice an everything BUT ...

Seeing as how the MS vs OOo comparison was blasted for its bias (old version of word etc.) and maybe shouldn't even of made slashdot, was it really wise to refer to it again...

Why is this under the LINUX topic?

[WidescreenFreak]

Okay, I realize that /. is a Linux user's haven; however, OO is a multi-platform application (or set of applications, depending on how you define it). It is available on Windows, Solaris, and Mac as well as Linux. I know that people are thrilled that an office suite of this nature is available for Linux, but let's keep it in perspective, shall we? I'd be much more excited to hear if OO is becoming more accepted on Windows and Linux for obvious, anti-Microsoft-Office reasons.

So what are we talking about here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has OpenOffice upgraded their website to 2.0 or what?!?!?

OpenOffice.org is a /product/ name? WTF?

Way to be needlessly confusing!

Seriosuly, can someone edu-ma-cate me on this? Is this a splinter of OpenOffice? Did the name change when they went 2.0? Has anyone ever used a URL as the name of a product before? Why?

osx version

[raceface]

I dont see the osx version anywhere and there are three days left on my milk.

Re:Java problem? Not.

[rdieter]

According to the System Requirements page it still requires the Sun JVM.

Note: System Requirements say:

The minimum JDK/JRE version required to use OpenOffice.org features that require java(emphasis mine) ...

So, java is *not* required to use ooo. You get extra features if you happen to have it installed, that's all.

(*)burp(*)

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me.

Lemme axe you sumpin ...

Why didn't you just write a LOG file as a text file?

For crying out loud.

Re:(*)burp(*)

[codepunk]

Read my reply because I generate charts out of it..

-1, just plain wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The bittorrent downloads are the final 2.0 release.

What we need now is...

[spect3r]

An alternative Mail client, such as MS's Outlook that comes packaged with Office. Alternative to Outlook, I use Thunderbird; but for work.. it still isn't up to par. I rely (shudder) heavily on outlook's calendar and task system. It's good for what it does, but I'd rather have it all Open Office if possible. Unless I'm missing something here.

Re:What we need now is...

[dudus]

have you ever heard about evolution?

open office by microsoft

[dudus]

I heard one of my teachers say that open office code is 70% done by microsoft. How is that so?

Re:open office by microsoft

[cyborg_zx]

Your teacher's an idiot?

Re:open office by microsoft

[bach37]

Yeah no kidding. More like 80% of the coding done by Sun.

Screenshots can be found here:

[Martin Marvinski]

http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/ooo20/index. html

Cheese it!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the mods!

*ducks*

20/10/2005 = October 20, 2005, Not October 10th!

[Cruxus]

Da Massive writes "The official release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been pushed to the download servers, as of Thursday the 10th."

The article is dated 20/10/2005, but they're in Australia! It's not some 20th month, 10th day. 20/10/2005 = 10/20/2005! It was released as of Thursday the 20th!

Talk about careless editing and reading.

Broken :-(

[laughing_badger]

I was hoping that this would contain fixes for the problems that exist in the pre-2.0 version that shipped with SuSE 10.0, but no they're still there:

• General input/output error on trying to read files on NFS mounts.
• SEGV after opening local file and leaving the window alone for half an hour.

I'm glum...

NeoOffice is decent

[abb3w]

I have a few loaner Macs that are somewhat elderly (4+ years). Rather than try and keep an up-to-date copy of Microsoft office on these seldom used machines, I leave the version that they came with (Office 98, whee!) and put NeoOffice on instead. The combination seems to leave everyone content.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

administrator privileges needed on windows?

[kbielefe]

Anyone know why 2.0 requires admin privileges to install on windows when 1.x didn't? Anyone know how to work around that?

Can't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to use the OO Base program, but the documentation is lacking.
If only I could figure out how to hide the OO Base GUI from the end-user of forms...

He said "Mac"

[metamatic]

Microsoft don't offer a viewer for the Mac, as far as I can tell.

Java only superficially influenced by C

[Anonymous Coward]

Java has similarities with C as far as some of the keywords, etc, but underneath the covers it is very different from C (and C++). Although the confusion definitely trips people up who think because it looks like C, it works the same. Not so. Java is an object-oriented language, and was heavily influenced by Objective-C, Modula-3, and Smalltalk.

Re:Java only superficially influenced by C

[fyngyrz]

I was referring, not very clearly and for that I apologize, to the bracing mess that is Java and comes all the way back from C. Being a fan of Python as I am, I'm a proponent of forgetting about braces altogether, as they seem to me to serve the compiler and not the programmer. Indentation, on the other hand, serves both and losing braces is a matter of considerably increased clarity — to me.

I didn't mean to say that java's functionality was comparable or descended from C. I realize it's object oriented, like Python, just not as clean and clear and uniform in implementation as Python. :-)

To wit:

if python:
[indent] dependent_clause

if (java) [random_uncontrolled_whitespace]
{ [random_uncontrolled_whitespace]
[random_uncontro lled_whitespace] dependent_clause [random_uncontrolled_whitespace]
}

(...runs away from crowd of Java programmers waving pitchforks, tar, and feathers...)

"Syntactic sugar causes syntactic diabetes"

PDF is actually less dynamic

[jonabbey]

PDF is actually less dynamic. A PostScript file is actually a computer program that, when executed in a PostScript interpreter, winds up executing instructions to draw marks on a rendering surface. You can't, in principle, know what a PostScript file will end up looking like, until you run the program to its per-page completion. If the PostScript winds up looping forever or takes up too much memory, either a user or the printer has to be smart enough to cancel the job and report an error.

People have done crazy things with PostScript in this way, actually. I've seen PostScript print files that print out digits of Pi, using the printer's CPU engine to calculate the digits!

PDF, on the other hand, is basically a flash-frozen listing of those rendering instructions. That's why a PDF file can be edited with the appropriate Adobe software.. it just goes in and changes the rendering instructions.

Back in the day, when Adobe introduced PDF, the big excitement was that PDF's font support was fancy enough so that if your printer didn't have a font that the PDF specified, the PDF reader could just tweak the size and shape of a standard font in order to make the spacing and visual quality come out looking right, anyway, without having to stuff a bunch of full spline definitions for fonts into the PDF file. This fit into the goal of allowing PDF files to be efficiently compressed.

So, PDF is good stuff! PostScript is the dynamic one, though.

Re:PDF is actually less dynamic

[BritneySP2]

using the printer's CPU engine to calculate the digits!

I do remember them saying that in those days printers' CPUs were more powerful than the computers': PCs were too slow at interpreting PostScript. Too bad that these days' printers aren't that brainy any more: they all rely on drivers...

OpenOffice (Win32) download sites without P2P...

[antdude]

Click here if you can't or don't want to use P2P method. Note this is Windows version.

Debian package?

[antdude]

Is there a Debian package of OpenOffice.org 2.0 yet?

Re:Debian package?

[zerk]

Just use alien... I just did, and OO 2.0 installed fine for me.

alien -k --force-overwrite *.rpm

Re:Debian package?

[awehttam]

Ah dude, thank you so much for this.

professional quality OSS charting

[StandardDeviant]

Gnuplot. Gri. R w/ gnuplot. Octave w/ gnuplot. Asymptote with LaTeX. etc. etc.

I produced many, many, many data analyses and so forth along with heavy scientific charting requirements using tools like that finishing up my chemistry degree. (Gnuplot and octave in particular I got a lot of mileage out of.)

Most of those should be able to export the graphs from your analyzed data into something like a png, eps, etc. that you can then embed in your word-processing program's report/paper document.

Frankly, as a scientist, Word kind of sucks, and Excel is a really shitty platform for data analysis for anything more complex than sophmore-level undergrad labs. At the least, using a dedicated analysis and charting tool or set of tools is like a breath of fresh air after dealing with Excel's cramped, business-oriented data toolset.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[dhowe01]

not exactly userfriendly when I can fire up excel and produce a nice graph. Just last week, I tried to use openoffice to plot some chemistry data. I was not able to plot a regression line. So I had to go back to Excel. If your saying the OpenOffice solution is to download another tool, well that's not gonna cut it for the general public.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[drsquare]

No offence but if I need to download, install, configure, and learn how to use a third-party program, then work out how to integrate it with Open Office, I'll just stick with Excel.

Excel is a really shitty platform for data analysis for anything more complex than sophmore-level undergrad labs. At the least, using a dedicated analysis and charting tool or set of tools is like a breath of fresh air after dealing with Excel's cramped, business-oriented data toolset.

You're assuming everyone uses Excel for serious, hard-core scientific analysis. I use it for trivial purposes, in which case user-friendliness and an easy interface are more important than accuracy to 80000 decimal places.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[StandardDeviant]

I wasn't talking about the general public, because the general public has as much use for good charting and solid data analysis tools as a nematode does for a subscription to Physical Review Letters. ;) If you can handle the complexity of the sciences or engineering fields and need the precision, you can handle the complexity of good tools. Actually, I'd say that they're less complex becuase while the learning curve is steeper, they generally won't bite you in the ass in subtle ways like Excel and co. can.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[StandardDeviant]

No, I wasn't assuming that at all, I gathered from the thread that people were complaining about not being able to get good data analysis (in a science-ish context) out of it. If there are problems that "mom" or "pop" or "mba brown k. noes" has with it, that's not really a user domain I know much about and thus have nothing much to say on it. But for people that have serious data analysis needs, a spreadsheet isn't really a good tool, there are better ones, thus my reply.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[mvdwege]

not exactly userfriendly when I can fire up excel and produce a nice graph.

A nice graph does not equal a correct analysis of the data.

In order to perform correct analysis of data, one requires a decent grounding in mathematics, specifically statistics. That by itself is not userfriendly. Any moron can produce a graph using the Excel wizards. It takes some education and training to get something meaningful out of the numbers.

And since we should expect the analyst to have some training already, I fail to see why we shouldn't expect them to have the training necessary to use real analysis software.

Mart

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[Blkdeath]

And since we should expect the analyst to have some training already, I fail to see why we shouldn't expect them to have the training necessary to use real analysis software.

Let's see, I want to create a graph of how many units we sold each month this year. Which college should I attend in order to learn the complex skillset required to accomplish this task?

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[Anonymous Coward]

> In order to perform correct analysis of data, one requires a decent
> grounding in mathematics, specifically statistics.

So on what way does this excuse OOo Calc for making SIMPLE data analysis and presentation more difficult than its competitors. Let's say I'd like to make a Beer's Law plot (absorbance of light at a certain wavelength vs. concentration). With appropriate dilutions, the relationship is linear. So a quick linear regression with corresponding plot (to check the linearity of the data) is all that is required. Why can't I have OOo print me out a simple chart with the data and the regression line on it to paste in my notebook along with the data? OOo (like Excel) can calculate the line for me and display the line itself on the chart. However, there's no easy way to actualy display the EQUATION of that line on the chart. For that, I have to print ANOTHER part of the spreadsheet (wastes space and looks ugly).

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[dhowe01]

RE: Any moron can produce a graph using the Excel wizards. It takes some education and training to get something meaningful out of the numbers.

Exactly, and that's why Excel is a better charting tool; Because any moron can use it and get a graph. Those moron's dont need in depth staticical analysis. They just want the graph.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[rtb61]

If you are using excel for trivial purposes, why on earth are you paying for it in the first place (or is yours a free version). Why wouldn't you use quality free software that is widely accepted in the market place. I mean there are some ego points for showing off in an overhyped cars, boats or airplances but computer software (there is soem fun in open office because of the community of users growing around it but M$ office is just a boring bloated excersize in marketing).

User friendliness, thats a laugh. I found M$ software became more and more user unfriendly as they dumped more and more useless features into them whether they worked or not just so they could differentiate it from previous versions basically the same program. Product quality, nah pure marketing and greed, the pointless upgrade cycle, well pointless to the customer, for microsoft it's just more money in the bank.

The best that they have managed to achieve with a clear and simple interface is office 97 and since then it has been doing nothing but getting more bloated and clumsy (who can forget the introduction of clippy).

It is the annoyances in microsoft office and the marketing nonsence coming of of microsoft that gets people to switch open office. I swapped over and have not looked back. Open office it does the job, save the B$ for M$, microsoft the software for you when all your pursuits are trivial, interesting marketing concept, I have to give you a pat on the back for that one ;-).

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[mvdwege]

But now you are moving the goalposts. The original discussion was whether or not Excel was any good as a tool for scientific analysis.

Mart

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[HuguesT]

If you just want to do that sure, Excel will do fine. However I've been in many business settings when the available data needed to be massaged a little more, e.g. find averages, medians, extrapolate to next year, find a model that fits, explain away a few outliers, etc.

Quickly Excel is no longer up to the task. If you want to do real statistics you need to be careful with Excel too.

Many people think that basic stats are easy to understand and their data is simple to manipulate. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[joeljkp]

No, my post was the original one, and it just said Excel is better than OOo for graphing, no qualifiers attached.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[drsquare]

If you are using excel for trivial purposes, why on earth are you paying for it in the first place (or is yours a free version). Why wouldn't you use quality free software that is widely accepted in the market place.

Because I don't like the free software. I'm using Office 97, I've had it for nearly a decade, it does its job. Also sometimes it's worth paying for software which is easy to use and doesn't look a mess.

The lastest version of gnumeric I used had an unusable file dialogue. I'm confused about that because the previous version's file dialogue was fine. It seems to be regressing. I couldn't find something so I opened the help file: the program crashed.

Openoffice seems to take a week to start (after a week to download!).

Corrupted file

[Shoto]

am I the onlyone to get a corrupted installer for the win version?

Re:Corrupted file

[lengau]

Download again. That's happened to me with Firefox previously. run some checksums.

Lockdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic case of lockdown to proprietary format! Now pay shitload to M$ and enjoy.

Another mirror...

[kcb93x]

I just put this one up.

http://www.bnac.biz/downloads/openoffice.org/

Don't hurt me, I recommend the torrent if you're capable. Mirrored primarily for those on dialup, or with P2P blocked.

Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages

[zooblethorpe]

In answer to your question why anyone would still use MSO, there is still some functionality that OOo cannot match. Word count stands out as a biggie for most professional writers. Some of the things we need any word count feature to do include:

1. Count words / chars for the whole doc
2. Count words / chars for a portion of the doc
3. Include or exclude footnotes from the count

OOo has long had the ability to do #1 above, and, cosmetically, has moved the word count function since the 1.9 series to where MS Word users expect it -- not in doc stats under the File menu, but rather under the Tools menu. OOo has also finally came up to par for #2, allowing us to count words for selections. However, OOo is still incapable of #3, ensuring that no one in academia (a notable target population) can use OOo for serious paper writing.

Another important facet of any major international office suite is the ability to handle multiple languages. I'm a Japanese translator, and CJK support is an absolute must for any product I'll consider. OOo has happily had Asian language support for as long as I've known it, but word count falls through again. Any professional writing in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean requires:

4. Count of any non-CJK words, together with a
count of any CJK characters, not including spaces

MS Word has done this since at least 1998 (provided you had the right options installed), yet OOo fails, and thus renders itself unusable for those of us dealing with CJK text in a professional setting.

Issue 17964, focusing on these word count issues, has been open for more than two years now. While it's good to see some progress (counts of selections), the lack of proper CJK counting means I still have no other option than to use MSO for my business needs.

Sure, the OOo source is freely available, and, in principle, I could develop a proper word count on my own. But I must point out again that I am a translator, not a coder -- and though I have fun learning about programming in my spare time, I don't have much of it, and I already have a product that does the job for me: MSO. I have no need to fix OOo, and I haven't the time or expertise to do so. OOo's shortcomings simply prevent me from adopting it for myself, and worse, prevent me from promoting its use in my office. There are many things about OOo that would be fabulous to be able to use, from the better data source integration to the open XML doc format and file import/export XSL transformation capabilities. But the lack of an adequate and accurate CJK count is a show-stopper for all of us at my workplace.

Re:Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages

[kelnos]

Why is word count such an important feature? I'm not trying to troll or flame; I'm not a professional or academic writer and I'm honestly curious.

Re:Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages

[innocent_white_lamb]

Many (most?) publications pay for articles by the word, or give assignments like "write 1700 words on subject x for the next issue."

Re:Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages

[Khaed]

I've never written a paper in which the header and footer counted towards word count... and I've written a lot of papers. As for the rest of the post, yeah, you're right.

(unrelated to parent poster, but I don't feel like making a second post:)
Past that, my main complain with OOo until today was the interface. The last version I used (1.6 or something) looked like a Windows 95 application. Now, I'm one of those who turns that blue taskbar off in Windows XP, so I'm not all about the graphics, but Word is just more pleasant to look at than OOo.

That said... it's nice how you can open a 44kb .doc, save it with OOo as a .doc, and it's half the size. Makes me wonder what that extra space was used for.

Re:Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages

[zooblethorpe]

In my case, I have translation clients that insist I bill by the Japanese no-spaces character count of the source document, which also usually includes some Latin-based text that they don't want me billing for, hence the need to have CJK chars counted separately. In Japanese business and academia, writing assignments are usually restricted / ordered / billed by the character count, with 400 moji (characters) a common size. I also have clients that insist I bill by the English word count of the target document, in which case a separate CJK count helps me see if I've missed anything. MS Word's counter seems to check for double-byteness, as double-byte Latin text is counted as if it were CJK characters. This is actually usually a good thing, however, as double-byte Latin text can sometimes be hard to spot visually, but can bork a doc for someone on older OSes, or without the right fonts installed.

Cheers,

Re:Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages

[zooblethorpe]

I've never written a paper in which the header and footer counted towards word count... and I've written a lot of papers.

Actually, that's precisely my point -- OOo's current word count seems to include the headers and footers, and there's no option I'm aware of to exclude these. So any attempt at writing a paper in OOo based on that word count will wind up giving you a paper that's shorter than you think it is.

I agree with you about file size, that's quite nice. I've also been able to use OOo to "fix" files that Word had corrupted to the point that Word couldn't open them anymore -- a quick open and save in OOo, and suddenly Word could read them again. Interesting, that -- the OOo team seems to understand the MS Word format better than MS does. :)

Re:Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages

[Khaed]

Oh, it does count headers. I misunderstood what was said, then. I guess I'm just wordy enough that a few words in the headers and footers has never really made a difference.

Parent has great article.

[dwayner79]

Plug away... that was very well done. Thanks

Massachusetts is a Commonwealth

[SUB7IME]

Where are all the Massholes out there who should be screaming about how Massachusetts is a Commonwealth?

Re:Massachusetts is a Commonwealth

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm originally from the Boston area. Here is a scream for you AAAHHHHHH!!! There, satisfied?

Re:Massachusetts is a Commonwealth

[SUB7IME]

Perfect! Thank you, much better now.

what about iWork/Pages

[cecirdr]

I think Apples wordprocessor reads office files. I don't know much else about it though except it's more "freeform" according to some reviews so it's probably a bit of a paradigm shift. Just a thought....

Huh?

[Risen888]

Why the hell is this in "Linux"?

How?

[Mad Ogre]

How do I get this thing to install in Linspire 5.0?

How to set default font size? And default template

[Futurepower(R)]

I installed OO 2.0 and can't find any way to set the default font size. It always is set at 12 points. The installation program said it would respect the settings of previous versions of Open Office, and did not do so.

Native ODF for MSO being developed

[Master Of Ninja]

Someone is already making an MSO filter for ODF. See here: OpenOffice.org Newsletter story

Maybe it is better to wait for version 2.1.

[Futurepower(R)]

Maybe it is better to wait for version 2.1. OO has already crashed more than once. When it crashed, it mis-reported the version number.

The information in the Help for templates is incorrect, apparently.

The de-installation program is more primitive that previously, and does not offer to uninstall all files.

MS Office vs. OOo

[Angst Badger]

Whenever OOo comes up, I make the same complaint, and invariably, someone tells me I'm a clueless asshole, but it's gotten to be a tradition now, so I'll do it again.

My benchmark for office suite comparisons is MS Office 97. I have used all of the subsequent versions of MS Office at work, but I always install Office 97 on my own machines. The reason for this is that, aside from functionality mostly aimed at group collaboration, there have been no significant changes in Word or Excel in the last eight years, so why bother upgrading?

Well, there has been one significant change -- the same functionality requires vastly more resources in later versions of Office. Office 97 runs comfortably on an old 120MHz Pentium I laptop with 32 megs of RAM that I like to haul around when I'd rather not risk losing my more recent and expensive desktop replacement laptop. Office 2003 or XP? Forget it.

As near as I can tell, OpenOffice has reached feature-parity with MS Office for single-user purposes; I can't speak to its collaboration features. There are some aspects of its interface that I don't much like, but I suspect that's mostly a matter of familiarity. But it is a giant, shrieking, slow resource hog, and I wouldn't use it on anything other than a fairly recent machine. It is, moreover, slower than Office 2003.

Now, as I noted at the start of the post, someone will inevitably -- and generally without much tact -- argue that some theoretical user population, like corporate office users, will have the latest machines and not be bothered by this. That might even be true in some cases, though my experience has been that most companies don't upgrade machines unless they absolutely have to. But that's the point to some extent: why should anyone have to perform a hardware upgrade to get the same level of functionality that was available back in 1997? Word processors and spreadsheets are mature application categories; shouldn't they become more efficient as time goes by?

Make no mistake about it, I am not a Microsoft partisan. I am as enthusiastic about the promise of FOSS as I was a decade ago. I am thrilled that OpenOffice exists. But I am deeply disappointed that in so many cases -- and OpenOffice is but one of many -- free software is just as bloated as its commercial counterparts. It may be that in the corporate environment, the cost of hardware upgrades is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of endless Microsoft software licenses. (In fact, I'm pretty sure it is true.) But for the private individual, that's often not the case.

Re:MS Office vs. OOo

[Just-some-person]

I agree. OO.o is a huge bloated monster. That's why I use KOffice and GNOME Office when I've to use an office suite (otherwise I use XHTML/CSS).

Re:MS Office vs. OOo

[Petrushka]

As near as I can tell, OpenOffice has reached feature-parity with MS Office for single-user purposes; I can't speak to its collaboration features. There are some aspects of its interface that I don't much like, but I suspect that's mostly a matter of familiarity. But it is a giant, shrieking, slow resource hog, and I wouldn't use it on anything other than a fairly recent machine. It is, moreover, slower than Office 2003.

On the whole I agree, though for most purposes I'm an OOo fan. Office 97 won't cut it for me for interoperability reasons (I want an open document format, not to lose access to all my files in a few years' time), though when I see a copy on the local equivalent of eBay I'm willing to put in a bid of $10 or so. AbiWord is also sub-optimal, in that I want much more control over styles than it allows me (plus it's irritating that I can't install plug-ins from the HDD and it can't see through my company's firewall -- so no plug-ins).

Nonetheless I'm probably going to switch to AbiWord for most purposes -- even on the 2 GHz Celeron box in my office, which is certainly overpowered for a glorified typewriter -- once AbiWord has OpenDocument support fully implemented.

Re:MS Office vs. OOo

[evilviper]

Parent should be modded "Funny" if anything...

KOffice requires all of KDE to be loaded-up, which will eat more resources than OOo. If you already run a full KDE install, then you aren't loading all of it up just for KOffice, and it's tolerable. However, the same is true for OOo.

If you already have a GTK-based desktop environment loaded, OOo start-up time, and resources dedicated just to it, isn't so bad.

GNOME Office, I'm sorry to say, is like putting Wordpad, Paint, and Calc together, and calling it "Windows Office". The Gnome office apps are not at all impressive, I'm sorry to say. I'd love to have a GTK-based alternative to OOo, other than loading up all of KDE just to open a spreadsheet.

Re:MS Office vs. OOo

[managerialslime]

The reason for this is that, aside from functionality mostly aimed at group collaboration, there have been no significant changes in Word or Excel in the last eight years

I support a CRM/Enterprise Industry Vertical System for a living. The product is based on the BASIS platform. (www.basis.com) Our customers (users) depend on their ability to execute complex SQL queries from MS Office (Excel, Access, Visio, and by the way, Cognos and Crystal as well,)against our system.

As MS has upgraded MS Office over the years, the DLLs involved in SQL querying have definitely changed. As a result, my support team has to configure BASIS ODBC drivers according to the version of MS Office being used.

This is painful and time consuming.

We are only now starting to get requests to support ODBC from OO and I'm not even sure where to start. Even after we figure out how to do this, we are scared of being put in the position of supporting different configurations for different versions. Yes, I know that this may be less of a problem in OO, but who can tell?

Part of my reality is that we can't dictate to our customers that they MUST upgrade to the latest MS Office (or OO) at any given time.

As a result, we wind up with a proliferation of possible combinations.

ODBC was originally thought of as a potential way for any (MS) application to communicate with any back-end database. Later, JDBC was supposed to succeed where ODBC fell short.

Today, this whole topic is FUGLY beyond belief and I know of no Source Forge or other project to finally accomplish this requirement.

The combination of XML and PDF have resolved about 90% of topics in terms of document sharing and printing. It is time someone came up with A BETTER IDEA for resolving the ODBC mess.

I got an "Input/Output" error.

[Futurepower(R)]

When trying to save a template, I got an "Input/Output" error.

Would it suffice ...

[KlaymenDK]

Would it suffice if we drive on the correct side of the road and spell words like armour, colour, and favourite right?

Just kidding, I'm Danish.

By the way -- just so you know what we're talking about -- it's true that only a few countries have left-hand traffic, but when you factor in the populations of those countries you're looking at a solid third of the world's population.

All your Base are Belong to OOs - vs MySQL?

[billstewart]

yeah, yeah, but _somebody_ had to say it...

So how does OoBase compare to MySQL, Postgres, DB2, Oracle, etc.? Sure, it's as good as Access, but is it something that can support real database applications, or is it just a nice toy?

Re:All your Base are Belong to OOs - vs MySQL?

[einhverfr]

So how does OoBase compare to MySQL, Postgres, DB2, Oracle, etc.? Sure, it's as good as Access, but is it something that can support real database applications, or is it just a nice toy?

Access fills two very different roles in businesses:

1) For small ad-hoc databases. OOo Base does this reasonably well. They use HSQL for their backend engine.

2) For ad-hoc front-ends to other read RDBMS's (Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, etc). OOo Base does this reasonably well and is built into the UI better than Access.

There is a third role, where Access is sometimes used to manage data in multiple databases on different systems. This is not as well supported in OOo but you can build it into your PostgreSQL database using DBI-Link.

OOoBase Reports lacking key features

[harlequin516]

I like the grouping features of MS Access reports, and the grphical layout. I find OpenOffice Reports very lacking coming from MS Access (The only app that makes M$ worthy). While I realize this is a paradigm that may not be the best or most intuitive way, at least the M$ Access Report Writer is feature complete. I even tried to code my own reports with Maco automation once, but abandoned this thinking it is inefficient and non-portable. There seems to be no reference for how to make reports, with very common features, like grouping,group headers/footers, subtotals, counts, or further aggregations. I know that people used to use M$ Word to make complex reports, but I cannot even find docs about how to use OOo Writer to do this. I really miss the style of Paper Docs that came with old storebought packages. They really were excellent. Jasper Reports and iReport, look very promising for those MS Access Report People. Though not a full db base solution, it seems to provide the missing pieces.

Admin rights needed to install

[pmsyyz]

Unfortunately, to install it on Windows, you still need admin rights.

An alternative is Portable OpenOffice.org, although the version currently listed is 2.0 Beta.

http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_ope noffice/

OpenOffice on OpenBSD

[chrysalis]

Although there is no native build for OpenBSD yet, OpenOffice.org 2.0 runs fins on OpenBSD through Linux emulation.
Here are instructions to run it on OpenBSD: http://www.00f.net/php/show-article.php/openoffice _on_openbsd

Re:Java problem? Not.

[Kristoffer Lunden]

Well a help system is a pretty central feature. Especially when it often wants your attention (the lightbulb) and then fails when you give that attention.

sweet thing

[shoelessone]

I hear that you can play lots of awesome games on linux, all the while having it be easy to use... Is this "open orfice" one of them?

How fortuitous

[Montagnard_Army]

On the day that a bug in 1.9.129 bites me in the behind and causes data loss, 2.0 comes out.

I've actually still got the buggy document. It causes 1.9.129 to crash really hard. If anyone wants to duplicate it, let me know.

OD not required for MA yet

[Bnonn]

OpenDocument is not "already" the required document format for Massachusetts. The requirement to save all files in OpenDocument only takes effect from January 1, 2007.

Access is the answer.

[Burz]

The question is: How do tech-savvy office clerks and frontline managers automate data that is too extensive or dependant on forms/reports to handle in a spreadsheet? Especially when they need to apply this on a relatively small scale within a large corporation?

Of course, another answer is to impose a locked-down environment where very little is programmable and worker initiative is viewed with suspicion. I've experienced that too, in the form of mainframe- and Unix-centric environments. This MS-hater will happily take the Access-riddled workplace over that any day.

But finally having a widely-deployable (and FOSS) alternative to Access makes this a moment of great joy for me!

2005-10-20 indeed!

[J_Omega]

I didn't realize that it was the "SQL" or any other standard. To myself, it just makes sense. I've used that format for years whereever possible: filenames, my laboratory notebook, memos, heck even personal checks!

Viva la YYYY-MM-DD-tion!!!

Re:2005-10-20 indeed!

[Ernesto Alvarez]

It's a standard: ISO-8601.

It's something like YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.xxxxxxx TZ (you may remove the unnecesary parts and the "T" that marks the hour part if you wish and it's unnecesary).

I've used that format for years, it's unambiguous and very practical. I accept the little-endian format too, since it's commonly used here. However I could never understand that middle-endian freak the Americans use. I know it's a direct copy from the full length version, but it's too easily confused with the little-endian version and not as practical.

740kB/s !

[bburdette]

I think that's a new record for azureus on my machine. Downloaded in 3min flat.

Oh yeah? I just finished gentoo's rc3 EMERGE!

[J_Omega]

and I don't mean the openoffice-bin emerge either... the 250+ MB from-source one!!

I should've known better, seeing as how the final 2.0's were showing up on mirrors yesterday.

Of course, I should know better than to emerge the new 2.0 from source instead of the bin, becuase we'll prob see minor patches with it being mainstreamed now.... but that won't stop me!

ODF the most significant thing

[solferino]

Quote from the interview:

MP: In your view, what is the most significant thing about OpenOffice.org 2.0?

LSP: Our use of the OpenDocument format--the ODF--is the most significant thing.

More comments

[einhverfr]

- Sounded like the form/report designer needs more work.

Yes. That is why I said it needed some more pollishing...

- Conversion pain combined with the "network effect" (all of our clients use MSOffice and we frequently exchange files)

Always a pain.

However, in your specific case, I think you have you have another big one.

MS Access really is at its best when it is being used for management of external data. You can thus have various tables in various DB's and accessed via ODBC. Among other things, it makes it really easy to migrate all your data to the new database manager. I am not sure if OOo has the same concept of linked tables. In this case, you have to rebuild your database schema, and export/import your data. This is not easily automated in the system.

To accomplish this sort of mix, I would instead use PostgreSQL and DBI-Link to make it so I could access information in different databases. OOo Base is designed mostly to be a front-end, not the whole thing.

how about a visio replacement?

[kpharmer]

what are people using for a viseo replacement?

i think we probably use viseo more than word or excel...

Yes, but

[einhverfr]

As a college student in many labs, this lack of advanced graphing features is amazingly annoying- trendlines can't be extended, custom scatterplots are impossible. Hell, gnumeric does a FAR better job with graphing. Quite annoying in the end...

Gnumeric rocks. It is the best spreadsheet I have ever used. Comparing even Excel to it is going to have a specific outcome... Again Gnumeric rocks....

Large migration to OOo comments

[solferino]

Groklaw has a piece by a member of COSPA on their experience in migrating several thousands of desktops to OpenOffice.org (v1) in many sites across Europe.

quasi-on-topic ... concatenating OO.o files?

[timothy]

Hey, it's about OO.o after all, eh? :)

I have a bunch of OO files I'd like to combine -- they contain classnotes, one file per class per day over the past 2 months.

I could just open each one and dump the result at the bottom of a single new file until the contents are all in there, but it sure would be nice to say "Make me a big file, with the following smaller files as inputs." (The file names all start out with the date in YYYYMMDD format, so the order would be easy to deal with I think.) Something like "cat file1 file2 file3 > files-1-through 3" but for other than text files :)

Since it's XML and open, I wonder if anyone else has done this, and given the world a nice script resulting :)

timothy

Re:20/10/2005 = October 20, 2005, Not October 10th

[lengau]

Well thank you for pointing that out to all the ignorant Americans who were too confused. And yes, that is kind of silly of them to write "on the 10th", but the article is dated correctly.

OOo CDs make a great gift!

[Ikester8]

Nothing says love like a CD you burned yourself...

OOo on the Mac.

[Anonymous Coward]

NeoOffice/J.

Azureus (Bittorrent) Links for Linux _and_ windows

[IBitOBear]

Howdy,

The Linux magnet is magnet:?xt=urn:btih:SD36UE42IMPAKVUXAXRF3FQH4QYM23 FS
The Windows magnet is magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DD3CA4757LNNLEMGSQIN5JMPK23B62 NB

For whatever reason, the SlashDot system _adds_ a space before the last two letters. Take that out when you pase the links. (e.g. it isn't "23FB", it's "23FB").

To use this, start Azureus and then File->Open->Location (or ctrl+L) and paste the magnet string into the dialog box.

CoralCache of Bittorrent list, with magnets

[IBitOBear]

CoralCache Link To P2P Downloads

CoralCache Link to regular downloads

For Azureus Users:

The Linux magnet is magnet:?xt=urn:btih:SD36UE42IMPAKVUXAXRF3FQH4QYM23 FS

The Windows magnet is magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DD3CA4757LNNLEMGSQIN5JMPK23B62 NB

For whatever reason, the SlashDot system _adds_ a space before the last two letters. Take that out when you pase the links. (e.g. it isn't "23FB", it's "23FB").

To use this, start Azureus and then File->Open->Location (or ctrl+L) and paste the magnet string into the dialog box.

Stop coming to slashdot, anonymous users!

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 16 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Nice system. I truly hope CmdrTaco never has a baby, or that said baby
never rests in dirty bathwater while he is on the watch.

Plonk, back into the hosts file slashdot goes.

No, EVERYONE has the date format thingy wrong

[managerialslime]

Yeah, the rest of the world has it right... smallest units to largest units. It's more consistent that way.

There are other approaches that can work even better depending on the application. I train my staff to start most of their document names with yyyy.mm.dd.hh.mm.

example: "2005.10.22.14.01 Department Budget Draft.xls"

By using the largest-to-smallest convention, everything sorts nice and neatly on display. (Don't tell them to sort on date column, that will change as the document is re-edited.)

It can also serve as a poor man's version control. I train them NOT to use "File Save." Instead, use SAVE AS and then update the time.