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Intel Joins LibreOffice
New submitter dgharmon writes "The month of February is a month to remember for the LibreOffice project. They formally incorporated the foundation in Berlin, released 3.5 with major changes and now Intel is joining the foundation as a member. Intel will also make available the LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE in Intel AppUp center. Intel AppUp Center is an online repository designed for Intel processor-based devices."
Intel AppUp Center is an online repository designed for Intel processor-based devices.
Minor correction; its a windows only app store. Does not perform the miracle of running the same executable on mac osx, all linux distros, and windows. Just windows thats all.
libreoffice is available for all those platforms, just not available on the windows only appup
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The Document Foundation has a really nice graphics explaining who does which work:
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2012/02/02/fosdem-preview/
Looks like other companies plus volunteers are adding much more to LibreOffice now than Oracle contributed to OpenOffice.
Sorry, but Libre Office is an unusable mess.
1) Trying to update it. The updater complains about the quickstarter still running and it exits. It doesn't tell you what that is, or how to turn it off, or even present you with the choice of turning it off. So now what do I do? Any answer other than "Libre Office messed up the update process" is why Apple has too much money while the open source geeks are perceived as smelly losers.
2) Try to use Writer as anything more than a notepad? Forget it. I loaded our company's template that uses heading styles. It already had four headings which Writer numbers automatically 1 2 3 4. Fine. So I add another heading, expecting it to be "5". Is it 5? Of course not. Writer numbers my new heading as "2" with not a damn thing I can do about it. Does no one check the code for basic things here?
3) Try to use the export as PDF? You better check that PDF because if you think that in 2012 we are 20 years beyond WYSIWYG, think again. Export as PDF exported a mess with every single letter replaced with various-sized dots. Jesus wept, my Commodore 64 running GEOS outperforms that. And don't you DARE say there's something wring with my system becasue using a PDF print driver worked flawlessly.
So Intel, what are you gonna do about this?
There's something wrong with your system!
Here's the actual Document Foundation press release, without the adverts and typos:
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2012/02/23/the-document-foundation-announces-libreoffice-for-windows-from-suse-is-now-available-in-intel-appupsm-center/
Actually, among my other hats I'm a trained Technical Writer (in the superb Information Mapping methodology). I actually prefer LibreOffice to MS Word for just getting things done. LibreOffice doesn't has all the bells and whistles that MS Office does, and has the occasional glitch but MS Office is just painful to use. It's slow, it crashes a lot, I have to wrestle with it to get what I want done. I'm afraid I can't agree with your assessment. MS Office is worse than LibreOffice, at least for professional work. At the high end I wouldn't even use MS Office, Acrobat is much better, and beyond that is TeX/LaTeX (for pro-level typesetting). MS Word really is for n00bs that don't know much better and whinge if the interface doesn't look exactly like the version of MS Word they got their training on.
Oh, and complaining that a MS Word template doesn't work perfectly in LibreOffice is fairly lame. If you want to use Word templates you should pay for Word. How about you make a template for LibreOffice instead? - if you actually have the skill to do such a thing.
At least LibreOffice can display Word files, even a little junkily. Most versions of Word do an even worse job with Word files from different Word versions, and besides Word being so retarded it can barely deal with its own format it certainly can't deal with the formats of any other product (the bigger the organisation is, the more likely it is that they have critical systems that aren't Windows in addition to Windows desktops - but Microsoft want to pretend that this is not reality for the sake of their own business interests). If the person that made the company Word templates had instead made Open Document Format templates then things would have worked pretty sweetly for you, not matter whether you had used LibreOffice, OpenOffice or one of the other alternatives that use the (true) ISO standard format. It's just you are so inculcated with the Microsoft monoculture (you're certainly not alone in this) you blame LibreOffice for getting Microsoft's proprietary formats wrong (and Microsoft's ISO standardisation was a blatantly corrupt process and produced a 'standard' that is woefully underspecified). Please assign the blame where it is due, on Microsoft's proprietary doorstep.
Not much surprise there. Intel contribute a lot of development effort to Linux. Android is the marketing name of a customised version of Java on Linux. Should not be a surprise that Intel went down this road. You are right, this is a good thing and I also hope they are successful with it.
Android is not "a customized version of Java". Please avoid confusing people with this phrasing as Java is a trademark owned by Oracle and Oracle is trying to say that Android is Java when it's not so as to get billions of dollars out of Google and incidentally kill Android. The word "Java" by itself is taken to mean an operating environment similar to the Android operating environment, but they are separately sourced and not the same thing.
Android is an operating system that uses the Linux kernel. It uses a virtual machine system called Dalvik which is incompatible with Java virtual machines and bytecode applications. Android runs programs typically written in the Java Programming Language (the free language specification, not the copyrighted operating environment) but these programs are compiled to Java operating environment-incompatible Davik bytecode and linked to non-Java Android libraries. Android uses certain public Application Programming Interfaces in common with Java, for the convenience and familiarity of developers.
Android also runs native applications written in C, C++ and a number of other programming languages linked both against the Android libraries and other development libraries in the "Native Development Kit". Android has some similarities to Java, as Linux has some similarities to Unix - but Android is not, has never been, and will never be "Java" any more than Linux has ever been or ever will be "Unix".
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