Archive for March 2004

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 for OS X 10.3.x (Panther) Technology Preview Release

The primary purpose of this release is to get OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 for Mac OS X into the hands of users and testers who can hopefully help find and report any final nits that may still exist.

System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), Apple’s X11 1.0 installed.

A future release will soon be made that will extend support to include Mac OS X 10.2.X (Jaguar) users running XFree86 XDarwin and with support for multiple localizations.

Download Site
Grab the file: OOo_Tech_Preview.pkg.tar.gz from http://macosxrc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/MacOSXrc/.

Installation
Double-Click OOo_Tech_Preview.pkg.tar.gz to unpack it. Then double-click OOo_Tech_Preview.pkg to perform the install.

The OpenOffice.org1.1.1 software will be installed into /Applications/OpenOffice.org1.1.1 on the boot volume. You can start-up OpenOffice.org1.1.1 by simply double-clicking on the Begin_OOorg application that can be found there (you can drag it to the Dock for easy access.)

Bug Reporting
Please join and then report all bugs to Issuezilla on theOpenOffice.org website: http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html.

Thanks,
Your Mac OS X Porting Team for OpenOffice.org

1.1.1 is officially released

Well, guess its been everywhere now, people saw it at mirrors and what not, but its finally been released. It has a code name too: Prague.

More PPC fun; FC2 test2

Yay, follow these instructions and you’ll be up and running with FC2 test2 on your ex-Yellow Dog Linux install (so, this applies for PPC heads only). Firstly, download glibc-* from your favourite mirror (I used glibc-2.3.3-18), as well as tzdata-2003d-2, and gd-*. Then: rpm -Uvh glibc-*.rpm --oldpackage tzdata*.rpm gd*.rpm so that glibc gets updated.

Edit the yum.conf file to exclude glibc (otherwise it’ll try for an update), then to save you from dependency hell, remove pine, hfsutils, apt, and Xautoconfig. All that via yum, and finally using rpm, erase the yellowdog-artwork package (passing –nodeps helps), and perform an upgrade via yum.

FC2 test2 is out, and needs extra testing, with lots of SE Linux love! No, I’ve not tried it on PPC yet, but Paul seems to have (or is?).

1.1.1 is NOT officially released

Dang, we used to have Utomo pre-releasing OOo releases, now we have Eugenia of OSNews.com doing it. It has not been released yet; it should be tomorrow, provided the mirrors are sync’ed.

Yes, it will still have “boring” icons (these are Sun builds) – pretty icons come with Ximian builds, or even Fedora builds. And yes, we do have OOo 1.1.1 for OS X actually; we’re just not releasing it as we lack a support structure with the possible amount of questions that will arise. CraHan wants an updated webpage? Easy to talk, why not join the porting team :) And to those wanting Aqua-ified OOo for OS X, Neoffice or something will work (mostly).

For once, can we have an official release announcement from Louis for instance, without someone else blowing their horn?

AOSG; Novell in the news

Presented a talk on “Open Source Productivity Suites” at the APIIT Open Source Group seminar today – it was mainly an OOo talk, with touches of KOffice and more GNOME Office. Featured some useful debugging screenshot(s), to which I didn’t get answers that I would’ve liked to hear!

OK, I’m Fedora biased in general, but Novell and SuSe are in the news, like crazy nowadays! With Novell buying SuSe (with a good KDE backing) and also Ximian (with a good GNOME backing), it seems that the natural thing to do is to combine the best of both worlds (from my understanding, this is like the BlueCurve theme of sorts?). Stand-alone Netware is being dropped in favour of the Open Enterprise Server offerings. IBM and Novell finalise a deal so that IBM servers will run SuSe out of the box; IBM used to be a thorough Red Hat shop.

Monash Malaysia is also apparently getting labs installed with SuSe – these were ex-Red Hat based machines. With all this, I can only but watch Planet SuSe more regularly, and of course look into opportunities in this field of knowledge.

Linux the new-fangled word

So Linux is the new-fangled word in Malaysia. Or would that be “affordable PC”, now with several companies getting into this, right after the PC Gemilang campaign/project was launched. We now have a “PC Mesti Beli” with an AMD XP 2200+, and a 60GB disk, and to cream it all off HP might want to join the bandwagon.

That’s 3 competing projects, all with Linux. The PC Mesti Beli one is coming with RH9 – which runs out of support this coming April – but its administered by the same company that did the Thai Linux roll-out, and there’s TimeDotCom helping with connectivity. HP wants to use TurboLinux (why?).

Chandra Devi thinks this is a piracy boost (in her article “Prospects of ‘Affordable PC’). I see Nan Phin comment that training is “crucial” and must be “affordable”.

Hardly affordable, when you see the MNCC offering an OSS101 Train the Trainer programmer for 5.5 days, at RM1,800. Bloody hell, some of those notes are mine. And in a couple of weeks, you don’t even need to spend RM1,800, as all this will be free.


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