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OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Oct 20, 2005 09:42 AM
from the i-like-toys dept.
from the i-like-toys dept.
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.
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OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released
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It's on time! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://jrascher.wordpress.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday June 22 2006, @10:09PM)
you eeeeediot moderators (Score:5, Informative)
(http://djdavetrouble.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 01 2005, @10:34PM)
Re:It's on time! (Score:5, Informative)
the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.
Re:It's on time! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://valdot.org/)
Re:Excellent!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Excellent!!!! (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.myspace.com/lykachamp)
Re:Excellent!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.internetisshit.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 03 2005, @04:42PM)
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!!!! (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.epscylonb.com/)
http://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/openoffice.org/
couple of mirrors
They promised... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.randominnovation.com/)
Re:They promised... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They promised... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://jamesots.com/)
Re:They promised... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They promised... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They promised... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They promised... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:They promised... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They promised... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:They promised... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.random--precision.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday May 17 2006, @10:35AM)
Re:They promised... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://jrascher.wordpress.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday June 22 2006, @10:09PM)
PDF is actually less dynamic (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.ganymeta.org/)
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:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 14 2002, @12:33PM)
Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.abisource.com/~dom/)
AbiWord --to=doc foo.odt
AbiWord --to=odt foo.doc
Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
10th? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 09, @10:43PM)
Ehh (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't help but wonder what kind of press release MSFT will put out today.
Re:America uses backwards date formats... (Score:5, Insightful)
ISO 8601 [wikipedia.org] is more consistent (to me at least, biggest to smallest). It also seems that it would be easier to sort.
Re:Ehh (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday July 26 2006, @07:26AM)
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.
why is this under Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:why is this under Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.stevenvansickle.com/)
"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.
Speaking of milk... (Score:5, Informative)
Bittorrent / P2P download links (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links (Score:4, Informative)
MS Office will catch up (Score:5, Funny)
OSX (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OSX (Score:4, Informative)
Torrent Links (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://lawpoop.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday May 28 2004, @06:51PM)
Re:Torrent Links (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.crazysquirrel.com/index.jspx)
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.
Mac OS X (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Mac OS X (Score:4, Informative)
(http://jahber.org/)
Re:Mac OS X (Score:4, Informative)
Congratulations Open Office folks!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Real work just got easier today. (Score:4, Funny)
(http://blueskytech.blogspot.com/)
Re:Real work just got easier today. (Score:4, Funny)
(http://blog.atlgeek.com/)
Grrrr (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.crazysquirrel.com/index.jspx)
I don't believe it! I only downloaded and installed RC3 4 hours ago. Grrrr.
Re:Grrrr (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.sucker.tk/ | Last Journal: Monday January 24 2005, @07:18PM)
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.
Must not be for real (Score:5, Funny)
Office Key... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.deadonque.com/)
Re:Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.ideaspike.com/ | Last Journal: Monday October 22, @04:43AM)
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. ;-)
It's in RPMs (Score:3)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 29 2006, @06:44PM)
Fantastic (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.dammfine.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 20 2005, @04:05PM)
Re:Fantastic (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday February 17 2005, @12:11PM)
Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem (Score:5, Informative)
(http://robert.aitchison.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 19 2004, @09:20AM)
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 [openoffice.org] 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 (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday December 06 2004, @10:11AM)
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 [linux.ie] of the guy working on it, it seems OOo 2.0 will follow as well.
Re:Java problem? Not. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.math.unl.edu/~rdieter/ | Last Journal: Friday June 21 2002, @02:57PM)
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.
Linux AMD64 port pleeeeease! (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://calum.org/)
Anyone know of any AMD64 v2 binary packages until that time? (Binary - I feel dirty saying that word.)
Creating ods is darn trivial (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.codepunk.com/)
Detailed Comparison of OO Writer and MS Word (Score:5, Informative)
(http://nedwolf.com/ | Last Journal: Friday September 30 2005, @01:10PM)
Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ! (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Sunday August 20 2006, @09:16PM)
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!
missing it's installer for linux (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://timgray.blogspot.com/)
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.
osx version (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenOffice (Win32) download sites without P2P... (Score:3, Informative)
(http://aqfl.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 09 2003, @01:16AM)
MS Office vs. OOo (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
OpenOffice on OpenBSD (Score:4, Informative)
(http://00f.net/)
Here are instructions to run it on OpenBSD: http://www.00f.net/php/show-article.php/openoffic