Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Announcements Software Sun Microsystems

OpenOffice.org Hits 1.1 490

Posted by timothy from the native-pdf-is-sweet dept.
sander writes "OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet). The announcement is here, there is a really nice features page and a long list of mirrors carrying the goodies." OO.org releases for languages other than English should be here soon, too.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

OpenOffice.org Hits 1.1 More

OpenOffice.org Hits 1.1

Comments Filter:

  • Start up time? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by n1k0 ( 553546 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:26PM (#7106588)
    Has the start-up time been reduced for this release? When last I tried (a few weeks ago), it was rediculously slow.

    Here's hoping,

    -Nick

    • Re:Start up time? (Score:5, Informative)

      by madfgurtbn ( 321041 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:39PM (#7106795)
      Has the start-up time been reduced for this release?

      It looks like their website is groaning under the load right now, so I can't give you a link, but there is a roadmap up somewhere which says startup time is one of the highest priority goals for version 2.0.

      Startup is still quite slow even on speedy hardware, but I don't think it has been one of their highest priorities yet.
    • I recently installed the last release candidate, and the startup time was nothing compared to the sluggish feel of the app itself versus the relatively responsive 1.0.x releases (though the startup time there was bad too). I'm wondering if this has been improved.

    • Re:Start up time? (Score:5, Informative)

      by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) * on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:54PM (#7107020)
      I'm running on a hotrod 1466Mhz athlon / 768MB/ 10GB running gentoo. First load takes about 11 seconds (that's a long time) but subsequent loads are pretty zippy. I suggest you either prelink the app (which I don't do) or put a script in your init.d directory to recursively cat the /opt/OpenOffice directory to /dev/null, that would effectively 'precache' the application.

      Also, try building from source if you can, you'll be able to set the optimization and several options that you don't see with a binary-only install.
      • $ emerge oooqs
        That'll fix your startup times, and the tray icon is pretty handy.

      • Re:Start up time? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by BrookHarty ( 9119 )
        Wouldnt cat'ing a whole directory during bootup take more time and resources? I know there all these stories about speeding up booting for linux, wouldnt you do this after you boot into X? Save the cache for the initial processes and X startup. Then cache all your applications, terminals, office, mozilla, xmms, etc. Thou, seems like overkill for a couple seconds off the application start time, to read the file twice. (My head hurts thinking about it)

        Kinda like windows, it boots up into the login screen, th

    • Re:Start up time? (Score:5, Informative)

      by BlackBolt ( 595616 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @03:50PM (#7107702) Homepage Journal
      The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness. *In comparison* to either MSOffice or Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 or 8 on Windows it is abysmal.

      Please note: I put "in comparison" in asterisks because the trolls think people should "get faster computers, fool". My friend was given OO.O recently and was immediately disgusted by the startup speed compared to MSOffice. "You get what you pay for", she said. NOT a good showing for open-source software. The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.

      • Re:Start up time? (Score:3, Informative)

        by ekuns ( 695444 ) *

        The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness [snip] "You get what you pay for", she said. [snip] The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.

        Wow, do you see the irony there? Someone complains that "You get what you pay for" and then pirates commercial software? I have no sympathy, nor respect, for people who pirate software. You mention that person's complaint like it's someone whose opinion should be taken seriously. Someone who is

  • Just tried it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KrackHouse ( 628313 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:27PM (#7106600) Homepage
    IBM should help out with the marketing of this, it's really great. Get better icons, etc. here -> http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7 131 It seems faster than 1.0, more polished.

  • My favorite feature (Score:5, Insightful)

    by carl67lp ( 465321 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:27PM (#7106609) Journal
    My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF. It's one of the reasons why I still use OO even though I almost always have access to Microsoft Office.

    That, and there's something to be said for the ability to literally unpack a saved file, look at the raw data, and get exactly what you need. (I had to do this on a spreadsheet before I installed OO again, and was able to retrieve an important CD key. ;-) )
  • I would be particularly interested in hearing from those that have tried OO1.1 and StarOffice 7.0. Specifically, what are the differences? What does StarOffice 7.0 have that OpenOffice 1.1 does not?

    • Re:For those that have tried both.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:32PM (#7106678)
      StarOffice 7 has a database component (AdabasD) that is not OSS, since its not created by Sun. SO7 also has more clip-art style stuff, a WordPerfect filter (also not OSS due to 3rd party code), and a different spelling checker (same thing again).

      And it costs $79 (OpenOffice.org 1.1 is free), but you get Sun support with it.

      Dan
      fa@ooo

  • Excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:29PM (#7106629) Homepage Journal
    I've been using the 1.1 beta, and this is exactly what Linux needs to show it's "ready" for the corp desktop. Combine OO with Evolution, and what else do most (90% of corp users) need?

    CB

    • Re:Excellent! (Score:3, Funny)

      by t0qer ( 230538 )
      what else do most (90% of corp users) need?

      An OS compatible with the "Just install this dialer to get access to TONS OF PRON!" software that I so often find on the laptops of company officers?

  • uprgradeable thu? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cyrax777 ( 633996 )
    I just wish there was a simple patch to upgrade the old one instead of having to download the whole thing all over agien. But hey its FREE and alot better then MS OFFICE imho so ill take what I can get.
  • And since he metamorphoses in a glittering blue-steel engine of destruction when threatened, I wonder how he's going to handle this one....

  • A day too late... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kadagan AU ( 638260 ) <kadagan@NOSpam.gmail.com> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:30PM (#7106654) Journal
    Yeah, I saw this announcement on newsforge earlier today, and I had to hit myself. Just yesterday I downloaded and installed the winblows version of OOo1.1rc5, and now I've gotta update to the final ;). If I had only been slightly more patient!!

    • Re:A day too late... (Score:4, Informative)

      by swtaarrs ( 640506 ) <swtaarrs AT comcast DOT net> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @05:08PM (#7108454)
      Actually, rc5 is the same as 1.1. It's not uncommmon with many apps for the final release candidate to be rereleased as a stable version. For those of you who might not believe me, here are the md5sums of the two install zips (ignore any spaces that may get shoved in there..):
      4e38b597c1e646d07bb83153b73fe5d3 *OOo_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install.zip
      4e38b597c1e646d 07bb83153b73fe5d3 *OOo_1.1rc5_Win32Intel_install.zip
      Of course, you have to trust me to believe those md5sums, but life's tough, ain't it? :)

  • RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lord Satri ( 609291 ) <{alexandreleroux} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:31PM (#7106662) Homepage Journal
    FYI, received this interesting info from OOO's staff :
    In my enthusiasm for OpenOffice.org 1.1, I neglected to clarify a point (see http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ ReadMsg?msgId=848545&listName=announce ).

    OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 is *identical* to the recently released OpenOffice.org RC5.

    Therefore, if you have downloaded RC5, there is no need to download 1.1.
    • Good bit there, but wouldn't/shouldn't the 1.1.0 version have the debugging stripped out to lean it up a bit? Just my opinion. OO's been perfect for an Office replacement for me. Granted, these days I do very little word-processing and even less with a spreadsheet, but when I needed to type up something, it's done me right. I'm using the beta still where my roomie is using rc1. Time to upgrade when I get home.

      Let the sucking of the bandwidth BEGIN!
      • Good bit there, but wouldn't/shouldn't the 1.1.0 version have the debugging stripped out to lean it up a bit?

        I've been bitten by leaving debugging symbols out of open-source software I've compiled. On the occasions that something crashes a program, being able to get something other than gibberish out of a core file is very helpful. It also allows people to e-mail a stack trace along with bug reports. Even though debugging symbols add bloat, I'm almost in favor of distributions leaving them in by defaul
        • There's also the issue that under some compilers there are different things that occur when you compile in debug mode and when you compile in "release" mode.

          The most common one I've seen is that debug mode will automatically initialize variables to a known value (usually 0), while that's not done in release mode. This makes finding bugs that are exposed by this particularly fun to find (the most common issues are counters or pointers that are never initialized -- in debug they'll be nicely set to 0 or NULL

    • Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Delirium Tremens ( 214596 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:51PM (#7106962) Journal
      Therefore, if you have downloaded RC5, there is no need to download 1.1.
      That is not exactly true because there was actually 3 rc5 release attempts, the latest one even being called rc5b.
      So your RC5 being the same as the final version really depends on which RC5 you actually downloaded.

  • Here's a nice page (Score:5, Informative)

    by zr-rifle ( 677585 ) <`moc.rdez' `ta' `rdez'> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:31PM (#7106676) Homepage
    with the complete illustrated feature list.
    http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features /1.1/

    Loading times seem to have been improved, that's great news since that's what's keeping me using Abiword for common word processing jobs at uni. Let's see if there's already an ebuild for it...

  • 1.1 final is the same as RC5 (Score:3, Informative)

    by kg4eyf ( 232264 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:33PM (#7106689) Homepage
    The zip file is identical to the RC5 release. If you got it already, then there's no need to download it again.

  • Macro recorder, native PDF, and Flash? If I wasn't so grumpy about downloading OO.o 1.0 just a few weeks ago, I'd jump right on it.

    Apart from the sluggish startup, I've been nothing but impressed by OpenOffice.

  • If it helps... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Sir Haxalot ( 693401 )
    Here's the Google Cache for the Openoffice Homepage [216.239.59.104]

  • What a great office suite (Score:3, Informative)

    by Kadagan AU ( 638260 ) <kadagan@NOSpam.gmail.com> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:35PM (#7106732) Journal
    Hey, for those who haven't read all the details of 1.1, I thought I'd point out that this really looks to me like it's far better than MS Office. Not only does it have 99% of the standard functionality that MS gives, at a much much smaller (read: free) pricetag, but it gives some great bonuses! OOo Draw seems like it's got most of Visio's functionality (a $400 app for the pro version, from MS), it also has built in PDF writing capabilities ($450 from Adobe)! Also, as far as I know, the last version (1.0.1) couldn't actually write .ppt (powerpoint) files, it could only view them. 1.1 is supposed to support writing them as well. Overall this looks ultra-damn-sweet!

  • The ultimate crime! (Score:3, Funny)

    by ctid ( 449118 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:39PM (#7106789) Homepage
    Aaaargh!! Even the list of mirrors is slashdotted! How unspeakably evil...

  • w00t!!!! (Score:3, Informative)

    by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:39PM (#7106790) Homepage
    I've been playing with the earlier release candidates, and so far it's been sweet. Much faster than 1.0, better conversion from Office formats, the whole .pdf exporter.

    In other wondrous news, KOffice plans on switching [kde.org] to the StarOffice file formats. That should save the filter writers a whole bunch of work on both sides.

    I would say, "I'm going to install this on the machines of all my friends and relatives," but rampant piracy has led them to think of Microsoft Office as "free," and the power of brand naming has led them to think of any replacement as inferior. So I'll be installing it on the machines of all friends and neighbors who aren't computer savvy enough to notice the difference. :)

  • "release candidate" != "feature freeze", sadly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:39PM (#7106800)
    OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet)

    Don't read too much into the word "release candidate", which is a Sun marketing tool rather than anything like a feature freeze. As someone working on OpenOffice translation, it has been somewhat difficult when "release candidates" come out containing whole new modules like crashrep and officecfg. Also, there is nothing like a timeline or a release plan like the mozilla project uses - as a contributor, the first you hear about an OpenOffice release is when it appears on the website. This makes it very difficult when you're trying to convince organisations in your country to switch - you're working in the dark and have no timescale to plan against.


    Don't get me wrong - I think OpenOffice is a brilliant product and will be pushing it very hard in my country. But if they'd open up the development process half as much as they've opened up the licence, it'd make advocacy a lot easier.

  • Cool! (Score:5, Funny)

    by the bluebrain ( 443451 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:40PM (#7106811)
    ... only 1998.9 versions to go (plus a couple of arbitrary letters), and we'll have caught up with Microsoft!

    (hey - there are "industry analysts" out there that count this way)
  • The most irritating thing open OO is when you open new documents, it opens up a new taskbar slot. Is there are a way to open documents in one app as opposed to a gazillion of them?

  • For those who run into trouble looking for mirrors (Score:5, Informative)

    by ErrorBase ( 692520 ) <errorbase@hotmail.com> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:42PM (#7106837)
    Now at a station near you !
    Windows : Linorg [linorg.usp.br] Projeto Brasil [rs.gov.br] ISC [isc.org] | IndianaU [iu.edu] | BinaryCode [binarycode.org] | ibiblio.org [ibiblio.org] | PAIR [pair.com] | SecsUp [secsup.org] | Telentente [telentente.com] | Umbc [umbc.edu] Vienna UT [tuwien.ac.at]

    Linux : IndianaU [iu.edu] | ISC [isc.org] | BehrSolutions [behrsolutions.com] | BinaryCode [binarycode.org] | ibiblio.org [ibiblio.org] | pair [pair.com] | SecsUp [secsup.org] | Telentente [telentente.com] | Umbc [umbc.edu] Vienna UT [tuwien.ac.at] Belnet [belnet.be] | KULeuvenNet [kuleuven.ac.be] CVUT [sh.cvut.cz] Sunsite [sunsite.dk] FUNET [funet.fi]
  • Server's slashdotted.

    Anyone got a torrent file?

    Thanks.

  • My impressions.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by adeyadey ( 678765 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:44PM (#7106861) Journal
    Have been running OpenOffice 1.1 under Windows a little while - only just scratching the surface. Looks like a great prog, but a bit slow to start up. But heck, so is Word..

    Also doesnt seem to load old .WRI (windows write) files, a bit of an odd ommision, considering how much else it does..

    PDF export is extremely useful, worth it for that feature alone.

    If all goes well I think I will be trashing Word soon..
  • Someone give me the nod when it's in Portage :)

  • Great program but missing MUST HAVE feature (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jbs0902 ( 566885 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:54PM (#7107027)
    I think OpenOffice (OO) and StarOffice are great programs, but until they allow me to use different line numbering schemes for each section/style, I can't use them.

    I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majority of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.

    While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.

    I need OO bug #5131 [openoffice.org] fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.

  • Neat! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JediTrainer ( 314273 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @02:58PM (#7107077)
    Now I'm curious... I've always been looking for a 'better' way to convert Word or Excel files to PDF.

    Is there a way that OO can be scripted to convert a file from the command line on a headless box? (assume we're NOT running X)

    Such a thing would be a lifesaver. I've been using Doc2PDF [sourceforge.net] (and I've contributed to the source a bit too), but I find it annoying to need a dedicated box to run the conversion. I'd much prefer having my Linux server do this (along with everything else).

    • Re:Neat! (Score:3, Informative)

      by ReelOddeeo ( 115880 )
      There are two issues here.

      The headless box. Run soffice -help to get a list of command line options. Or go here [openoffice.org] to see a list of command line options. On Windows running soffice -help brings up a window showing command line options.

      OOo can be programmed from Basic, Java, and Python. I have done all three. On Windows, you can use any Windows Automatation language, such as Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual FoxPro, Delphi. I personally have used Visual FoxPro to script OOo. Someone on OOoForum has

    • Re:Neat! (Score:3, Informative)

      by ReelOddeeo ( 115880 )
      The headless box question has come up several times on OOoForum.org and I've answered it there. (Macros and API section.) In short, you can either try launching OOo with a -headless option. Or use an X server that draws to a bitmap in memory. VNC server is such an X server. It has the additional property that you can connect to it using a remote VNC viewer to see what the pixels currently look like. This type of X server requires no particular physical display hardware.

  • Personal Star/OpenOffice timeline (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @03:02PM (#7107119) Journal
    Ah, how far we've come.

    I got one of the very first copies of StarOffice 5.0b when Sun bought and released it for free. It very quickly got renamed 5.1, and I tentatively recommended it to a client as a means to solving their office-suite-on-xterm problem. Ended up having to support the evil bastard package as a result. Horrible, horrible thing it was. 5.2 was identical, except with slightly fewer bugs.

    OpenOffice.org was born, and I ran screaming. Occasionally I'd drop in and check out the current release (around the 0.300 to 0.500 mark), and find that they had gone light years beyond SO5.2, but still had at least that far to go.

    When Sun announced that SO6.0 was coming out, I started to check out the OO releases again, and found a passable package. Slow slow slow (still), but actually usable and convenient.

    SO-6.0/OO-1.0.1 was a decent product. I used it regularly, learned to deal with its quirks (no anti-aliased fonts on Solaris--ugh!), and was relatively happy.

    Then came the StarOffice 6.1 beta program, which I was a part of. That's when I fell in love, or at least like. StarOffice 7.0 (formerly 6.1) or OpenOffice 1.1.0 are GREAT packages, at long last! Slow to start up, but fast to use once they're running, and really well designed. It's professional quality software, available for multiple platforms, for free. My sole Windows machine is now no more than a games console.

    This is a happy day folks! We finally have a complete non-MS desktop!

  • Enough with the startup time complaints! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BuddhaDude ( 650004 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @03:04PM (#7107160)
    This seems to be the single most commonly voiced criticism of Open/Star Office. How often do you really need to open your wp or ss during the day? I've been using OpenOffice every day at work this year, and here's how I get around this "problem":
    1. Fire it up at the beginning of the day.
    2. Work.
    3. Shut it down at the end of the day.
    And if you're the type who leaves the computer on overnight, you don't even have to re-open it the next day. Let's get real, folks.

  • Fix The Installer.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @03:32PM (#7107499)
    Why a .zip file that contains compressed installer files? Couldn't there be one big executable that's the installer and contains the compressed files? Or even an installer that looks around whether the compressed installation files are on the disk itself, or whether it should download them (if the user chooses to install components which are not available)...

    If you use MSIE, it will first download the .zip in a temporary directory, then COPY the .zip to your download directory (not an atomic MOVE!), then you have to unzip, then the installer has to decompress files.. Quite a lot of disk activity and space being wasted there..

  • Question (mainly for Gentoo users) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dotgod ( 567913 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @05:16PM (#7108522)
    Is it worth the time for me to emerge openoffice from source, or will openoffice-bin run just as quickly?
    • First of all, openoffice-bin is only version 1.0.2 while source openoffice is 1.0.3. I have tried both, and personall, I think running openoffice optimized for my AthlonXP is worth having to wait a couple hours for it to compile. Linux is multi-tasking, it is no problem minimizing a kterm that is compiling. Alternatively, you can just start the compile before you go to bed. But OO 1.1 is not in portage yet :(

  • Dont forget to checkout the OpenOffice themes! (Score:4, Informative)

    by -unta ( 712537 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @05:44PM (#7108752)

    I really like OpenOffice but gawd it's ugly! If your running it under *nix make sure you check out the Toolbar themes addon.

    http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=713 1

    You can replace the normal toolbar icons with ones to match your desktop environment, but pretty-much any of the included ones are FAR better than the OOo ones. Please, someone at OO merge this into the main tree!!!

  • Quick Note on speed (Score:3, Informative)

    by JayBlalock ( 635935 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @05:47PM (#7108782)
    I'm on an old 1ghz Windows box. I don't know about everyone else, but the speed (without the Autoloader enabled) on startup is a *vast* improvement over 1.0 and\or whatever RC I had been using. About 2-3 seconds versus the 15ish it used to take. Enough speedup that it's finally become my default application for reading document files.

    But, of course, YMMV.

    Now to go see how well the new features work.

  • Really fast startup times with preliink (Score:4, Informative)

    by AstroDrabb ( 534369 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @06:39PM (#7109198)
    I just used prelink on OpenOffice 1.1 and get a 4 second startup time the first time I start it and 2 second startup times after that. I don't think you can get much better then that. This is on a P4 1.7GHz, 512MB laptop, so it is not the fastest box around. To prelink OOo-1.1 try this:

    #cd to where you installed OOo
    prelink -vm --ld-library-path=/opt/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/program soffice.bin


    Replace the --ld-library-path= part with the directory where soffice.bin is installed. You need to do this as root unless you installed OOo as a normal user.

  • Make OOo look pretty and match your desktop... (Score:4, Informative)

    by dotgod ( 567913 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @08:13PM (#7109795)
    Download this [kde-look.org] to make OpenOffice match your icon theme. Then use this guide [theregus.com] to get your fonts looking good. In Gentoo you can get Microsoft's fonts by emerging corefonts

  • Feature: One-click Export to PDF (Score:5, Funny)

    by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @10:18PM (#7110572) Homepage
    Watch out! I think Amazon has already patented that one.

Slashdot Top Deals

Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax.

Close