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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.
My milk hasn't expired yet.
...it would be before my milk expired. Well, they are a day late. This is just udderly devastating.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
That's l33t speak for 20th? : )
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
Surely cross-platform nature of OO.o is the whole point?
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.
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.ht ml
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.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
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.
This page has bittorrent links.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
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No support for the Mac OS X is a show stopper for me. :(
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!
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I feel a productivity surge bubbling up inside me.
Software freedom...I love it!
I don't believe it! I only downloaded and installed RC3 4 hours ago. Grrrr.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
It is not in portage yet, therefore it must not exist.
...
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.
music lover since 1969
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.
-Buddy of DoQ
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.
This is great! Congratulations to the OpenOffice folks. Now all OpenOffice needs is a good vi keymap.
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.
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.
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.)
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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.
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.
Not to totally plug my own article, but I have a detailed comparison between the two here that some might be interested in.
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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!
ISO 8601 is more consistent (to me at least, biggest to smallest). It also seems that it would be easier to sort.
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. ;-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
http://ftp.idilis.ro/mirrors/openoffice.org/stable /2.0.0/s table/2.0.0/
http://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/openoffice.org/
couple of mirrors
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
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.
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...
I dont see the osx version anywhere and there are three days left on my milk.
Ride recklessly only when safe to do so.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
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.
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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Although there is no native build for OpenBSD yet, OpenOffice.org 2.0 runs fins on OpenBSD through Linux emulation.e _on_openbsd
Here are instructions to run it on OpenBSD: http://www.00f.net/php/show-article.php/openoffic
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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.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?