After two years of work, OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (X11) is ready for download by all Mac OS X users. With anti-aliased fonts, to name but one feature, this Golden Master satisfies the needs of professionals and individuals wanting a free, complete, and open-source office suite able to operate in an office environment alongside Windows, Linux, and Solaris machines. Elsewhere, AbiWord 2.0 Beta 1 was released.
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Anyways, hopefully there can be a native or at least native-looking-and-acting port at some point in the future.
getting that awesome new G5.
no point in polluting it with MS software 😉 (don’t flip out ppl… i run xp at home)
and no point in spending another $300-$500.
Tried the beta recently for deployment at work (editing StarOffice documents, not as a general office suite). The first problem I ran into was that I installed as an admin user, and then it wouldn’t run as the normal user. Tracking this bug^H^H^Hissue in IssueZilla, it hasn’t been fixed yet. The have a simple manual fix which didn’t work for me.
Also, last I heard printing wasn’t supported on OS X. I assume it has been added. I can’t imagine them going GM without it.
Other than that there is one regression from StarOffice to OO.o which is allowing Sun to sell us StarOffice (but not many copies, as there aren’t many PCs where I work): presenter can only print one slide per page in OO.o.
OpenOffice is a great app. I’m excited to see it coming to the Mac, and I wish them luck, but I still have catfood issues with it which I am watching closely for activity. Still, at this stage I might install it on my home machine (under OS X since it is already installed under Debian).
One question I have about this. Has anyone found a changelog?
Does it integrate well enough with OS X to use OS X’s fonts?
Abiword is great! I am running 1.99.1 at home and its fast and stable and has great Hebrew support. OpenOffice is fat , slow and not that stable. Abiword it my choice!
Is anyone willing to provide some screenshots?
This is still the X version. It’s nice that it’s here, but a native Aqua version will be a lot better.
Can be found at http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/ They’re pretty old, but I doubt that OO.o has been Aquafied at this stage in the game, to do so would be enormously complex.
Ximian’s Linux version is looking a bit better at the moment (got better icons and a colour scheme anyway). If I could get it for free I’d use it
That isn’t a bug, that is how the setup works. If you want a multi-user install you need to start the setup with the -net flag and then run setup normally with each user so that the user files can be setup in each home directory.
Well, they can’t simply create a whole new front end, however, what they could do, with Apples help, is replace the current icons with Mac icons and use the theme from the Mac on the applicatin. Ximian has shown that it is possible to do it.
A Quartz-ified port to Aqua has been going for for some time. IF/when completed, you won’t need to install X.
I’m using it now with Apple’s X11. Seems like a good release, is pretty much just the Linux version; but with OS X fonts. I hope we do actually see an Aqua port some day though, it isn’t quite as easy on the eyes.