Although OpenOffice.org had planned to release the final 2.0 version of its open-source office suite on Oct. 13 – the fifth anniversary of the founding of the organization – the company has decided to hold off due to a “show-stopping” problem with the software, community members said Wednesday.
If staroffice 8 is base on openoffice 2, why it’s out before openoffice.
“Redhat enterprise 4” is base on Fedora core 3 out many mounth before to be sure the product stable enough.
If staroffice 8 is base on openoffice 2, why it’s out before openoffice.
You’ve already said it: because it is “based”. It’s not the same product.
it looks like the milk in my fridge will expire before its out…
Yea mine too. Hrm, I guess I won’t live to see it cause I can’t buy more milk!
“… has been pushed back to allow time for key bug fixes.”
What a refreshing concept: quality control!
“We have to support a lot of levels of use—corporations, languages, regional groups,” Suarez-Potts said. “It is our responsibility to make sure everything is right before it’s released. A lot of things can happen at the last minute. That’s the way of open source—you don’t release it until it’s ready.”
That sure isn’t Steve Ballmer talking.
‘What a refreshing concept: quality control!’
Well it’s nice but they could start to work on speeding the monster up. The file operations (open/save) are pretty often painfully slow, especially when working with bigger files. Makes it unusable on older machines.
great to see such a passion for quality, but delaying a product for third or forth time already shows nothing but bad management.
i remember early plans for releasing ooo2.0 in late 2004. then there was spring 2005, now autumn 2005 is postponed…
(and i still see no trolling as i see in vista’s case)
Well, it could be bad management, or it could be technical issues (sometimes stuff “just happens”, and cannot be fixed by “managing” it).
Same basic issues in Open Source as in Propriatary Software. We can just live with it and accept it, or we can help out the project (OO.o is looking for non-technical help, too. Not just technical/programming.)
You’ll have to admit, though, that postponing for a while when you get to RC2 is a little different than changing an arbitrary date when you still have a year or two of development time to go. Kicher bichin, just wait another few weeks.
The development branch of OO.o has been very stable for quite a while.
If this had been a proprietary product it would have been out as 2.0 a year ago.
Proprietary software is released when it cannot be postponed any further, and unfixed bugs stays unfixed for quite a while, sometimes even in years (look at the windows desktop – some bugs haven’t been fixed despite the fact they’ve been there since Windows95 and can be fixed in a couple of minutes – recompiling not counted).
FLOSS is released when it has reached the target (eg. when it’s ready).
That’s the difference. Of course there are alwasy the unknown bugs or the unsolvable bugs, but they are a part of development, and will be fixed or worked around in due time, no matter if it’s proprietary or FLOSS.
great to see such a passion for quality, but delaying a product for third or forth time already shows nothing but bad management.
Bzzz. Try again. The OO codebase is sphagettified crapola. It has nothing to do with “management”.
Anybody that thinks OO is a Office killer is delusional.
Wow nice to see the same old FUD….
The OO codebase is sphagettified crapola
Since you are so well versed in the OOo codebase paerhaps you would care to post some examples
> > The OO codebase is sphagettified crapola
>
> Since you are so well versed in the OOo codebase
> paerhaps you would care to post some examples
Actually, since he used it to show that MS Office is better, he must “know” the MS Office code base. So a better question is, if the MS Office codebase is so pristine, why can’t it’s file format be perfectly forward compatible?
This is not true.
Openoffice source code is very nice.
Programming with uno is very refreshing.
Did you look at the code ?
“Anybody that thinks OO is a Office killer is delusional.”
No one said that, but for some of us, OO is (almost) the only viable solution.
However with the Open Document Format hopefully getting pushed into Office, I see that as a quite useful addition for everyone. Working in a 2000+ employees organization where one suddenly grab the latest XP edition spreads kaos when the “official version” is Office 97 or 2000.
Anybody that thinks OO is a Office killer is delusional.
From what I hear the Office code is pretty hairy too. this just means that OSS has taken another leap forward in terms of feature parity with the proprietary world.
copy and pasting in the windows version seems to slow/block the machine for a about 1-2 seconds .. in the early betas this would crash the code, now it just blocks it … an improvement i guess…
They have been developing this version 2.0 of OO.org, since like Office XP (2001) and they can’t get it out the door. It shows how inefficient OpenSource development and software is. Microsoft has surpassed this already with Office 2003 and are onto their next major version of Office, 12. Do your self favour people, uninstall OO.org and purchase a copy of MS Office today, you can purchase through either retail, full, upgrade or OEM very cheap with qualifying hardware. Anyway, Office 95 and 97 are much better than OO.org, so if you have that you can simply reinstall it. Office 95 runs on XP, no need to worry.
OK, now where to get MS Office for Linux/x86?
MS Office for Linux/PPC?
MS Office for NetBSD/x86
…
?
Also, will you pay for my copy? If not, then please keep your “advices” to yourself.
“Also, will you pay for my copy? If not, then please keep your “advices” to yourself.”
A-d-v-e-r-t-i-s-e-m-e-n-t. Here, that’s how you spell it.
Your advice is flawed. When MS creates a native version of Office for:
1) FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD.
2) Linux (x86, ppc)
3) Solaris
Perhaps you might be wondering why Microsoft will not create a version for other OS (except Apple). Its called “vendor lock in”, it would detract from their Windows user base. Now you may be saying: “hey, there is a version for OS X”. Well, Apple and MS don’t compete for the same customer base. MS doesn’t make PC’s, when they do, then I will consider them a direct threat to Apple.
Now on a side note: have you ever tried to open a Word 3 doc in Office 2000/XP/2003? Do you know what happens? Have you ever tried to migrate thousands of documents between versions of Word? Probably not, so your .02 cents is worthless; why, because trolls don’t have money.
I’ve tried the last two versions of Base, and each time it’s crashed with data-loss. The last time was when I was trying to save a form I’d created to represent a query on two tables (the only two tables in the database as it turned out).
Add to this the fact that some apps look radically different (my bug here: ) and it seems like OpenOffice still has a way to go before it’ll make in-roads into large institutions.
I suppose I’ll just wait for 2.1.4, like I did last time
Sorry, forgot to add the link to the bug report on docked panel appearance: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=53984
Not to mention give Sun’s StarOffice a chance to get a foothold in some corporate arenas before releasing the free version.
I’ve been using the dev.branch since october last year, and I haven’t had problems.
The speed issue has been solved (in my mind). A year ago it was really sloooooooooooooooow. But it’s quite snappy now. Could be faster, but it’s not slower than Office2003.
Depends how you define fast. If you talk about working with it in general, it’s good. However, have you tried working with a ½ MB document in Writer? It takes a looong time to open/save!
Svae/open is oen area I’d wish they’d improve.
The use of XML instead of a direct representation of the document in memory slows down the proces. It is a small price to pay for a future proof document format. Maybe you have noticed the subtle incompatiblity between the various incarnations of MS Office. Disappearing or moved images. Complete paragraphs in bold. deleted passages that reappear. Even the dollars of Microsoft can’t buy flawless import capabilities of their own binary format.
I am not saying that the opening and saving of ODF shouldn’t be improved. I just don’t want anyone argueing they should axe the whole XML format.
As for Open / Save, Have you looked at the difference in size between an MS saved file and the exact same file saved in OO? OO is much smaller, therefore the compression / decompression work will take more time. Id like to see it open / save faster too, but in truth I rarely if ever ‘ninja’ open/save multiple doc’s. So it really does not bother me very much.
I really cannot understand why people seem to think Open Office is some kind of third rate amature, part time office suit only usable to a handful of users.
It does most of what MS Office will do and it’s free, so I think it’s a no brainer to download OO.o rather then spend £200 on MS Office. Yer again Open source breching the old stuck Microsoft OWN use all world, but you’ll find that people have illegal copies of MSOffice. What a sad world you Windows people live in, owned by Microsoft and use there products like sheep.
If you think OOo is faster than Office 2003 you are dreaming. Damn dude OOo takes so long to start up and I have a powerful comp! With quickstart enabled, the first start is slow but the second start onwards things are zippy. But 2k3 is just darn fast no matter what you are opening…thats the truth! I dig OOo cause it is free has pdf export built in, autocomplete, the open docu format and a great forum. I like Office 2k3 cause it seems a bit more polished, slightly easier to use at least in terms of using the spreadsheets and creating charts and it just does not feel as heavy as OOo does. I am sorry but MS Office is the benchmark to compare OOo to and so far MS is ahead!
So, your running Office 2003 on Windows 2003? Why are you paying for a license for the server edition to run an office suite? Sounds a tad bit odd. Just curious.
I hope they release the official new version not only as rpm’s. The old installer was perfect for people not using rpm-distros (Slackware for instance), I will keep my fingers crossed.
I hope they release the official new version not only as rpm’s. The old installer was perfect for people not using rpm-distros (Slackware for instance), I will keep my fingers crossed.
I find the best way to install it on non-RPM distros is this. Put all of the RPMs you want in a folder with nothing else (delete RPMs you don’t want to install). Make sure you have alien installed on your system. Then run this command.
su –
[password]
alien –to-tgz *.rpm
Don’t convert to DEBs if you are running Debian…it doesn’t work. TGZ is the best to use on non-RPM distros, whether it is Gentoo, Debian or Slackware. After this, enter this command:
mv *.tgz /
So they are at the root of the filesystem.
cd /
Then, one by one, for each tgz file, extract it
tar -zxvf OpenOffice-blahblahblah.tgz
You can’t use a * for a wild card, it has to be done one by one.
I did this on Ubuntu for OpenOffice Beta 2, and then again for StarOffice 8. Using alien to convert to DEBs didn’t work for either, but using alien to convert to TGZ files worked for both.
After this, you may need to make a symlink that is in /etc/ that points to the main openoffice folder in /opt. Try running the program (soffice binary in the openoffice folder) and it will tell you if there is a problem and where the symlink needs to be.
Hope that helps you out. Not quite as elegant as the original installed though.
I work for the state of MA. There have been plans and memos going around getting people prepared to switch to Open Office 2.0. I have been using open office 2.0 lately and for most office work such as writing reports, creating a spreadsheet I haven’t run into any major problems that prevented me from doing my daily work. I would say that a whole state switching to an open source application is pretty significant. It might not be exactly the same as MS Office but does it really matter? The state wants to have a patent free file format that can be used anywhere.
The “Showstopper” bug for me (which will probably never be fixed) is that OOo takes about 90 seconds to open up on a computer that can load Office 2000 in about 3 seconds.