Posted on 28/7/2004, 11:12 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Some OOo 2.0 improvements (which you’ll see in the latest milestone releases that crop up):
- MS Office (Word) has a Format Painter that people love, and the Stylist really does have a workaround. But the birth of the Format Paintbrush will make OOo 2.0 more MSOffice like.
- A new OASIS Open Office XML file format will also be out. This will make OOo 100% compatible with the OASIS XML file format. Its still under review, though the recommendation is to change the file format name currently (I don’t quite like this – think of MIME type changes elsewhere). Option 1 seems sane, but backward compatibility is an issue.
Now all we need is the DocBook XSLT filter to just work so that we have a useful editor for things like Fedora Docs.
Might as well add that there’s now an OpenOffice.org 1.1 Competitive Guide SMB targetted at the SMB market. There’s some COSPA OpenOffice.org Training Materials available for download; and Anthony Long (longtime OOo contributor) has got a support program ready.
Posted on 13/7/2004, 11:33 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Really, never ever. Especially when you’re running Fedora PPC. Unbootable system, very quickly gotten. Rescue without another system handy is a pain. My evening involved an Apache 2 installation on Windows, and making it serve me /Fedora/base/images so I could get into mac rescue mode. And yes, FC3 test1 is out, and I think nasrat should have some PPC ISOs ready for testing (soon).
Otherwise, some troubles getting the Conexant HCF (controlerless) driver for the iBook G3’s modem working on FC2. Stock Fedora kernel’s don’t work (4k stacks vs. these requiring an 8k stack). And when they do compile on a standard kernel.org one, hfcusbserial tends to not load on a 2.6.7 kernel – anyone else have success?
Posted on 11/7/2004, 6:26 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Billg thinks so. Especially, since that’s what he seems to be fanning on his little world tour.
“If you don’t want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source. It is not something you do as a day job. If you want to give it away, you work on it at night.” So I guess all the hackers at Red Hat, Novell, Sun, and the numerous other OSS companies, are working only at night :)
Seems to think there’s no “guarantee” or “someone who stands behind your software” in the open source world – err, of course he discounts this and this and the numerous other firms that do it, in a local market.
Target message to the governments where piracy is rampant: a big loss in tax revenue. Let’s hope governments aren’t silly enough to infer that OSS also provides a possible loss in tax revenue…
Posted on 1/7/2004, 7:15 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Gosling’s keynote started the morning off at JavaOne. Managed to even catch the Open Source panel, and they didn’t cover opening the JVM, and just danced around the issue. Patched some annoying bugs in X-Chat and adns; my dhclient issue has been fixed, too. Running IBM’s Java SDK on PPC now as well; looks like an Eclipse rebuild is in my future. Going to get some Mono PPC FC2 packages sorted soon, as well.
Apple’s Campus in Cupertino is truly beautiful. Campus beer bash was excellent (these folk get it once every two weeks, how lucky). Picked up some goodies at the Apple Company Store, one of which included the D-Link DBT-120 Bluetooth adapter. Chit-chatted with Stuart Cheshire, and team about Rendezvous, why it’s cool, and why I think Fedora Core should probably include it – new, upcoming, useful technology.
Posted on 30/6/2004, 10:25 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
OpenOffice.org booth manning was relatively fun at WWDC. Louis, Ed, Patrick, Flip, meh, all good fun. Met Terry too, who popped by. Gave away plenty of OOo CDs, got a bunch of contacts to spam later (possible developers!), overall fun. Open Source BOF also, have some interest in OpenDarwin. Who knew it ran on x86 too? Apple promises (well, tries to) more developer documentation for their hardware…
Posted on 29/6/2004, 8:29 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Good news for the day – I got tired of dhclient, and ifup not working for me on FC2 PPC, so I went out there and decided to fix it. dhclient requires an entry in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-interface where interface can be eth0/eth1 or so on. Added one for the airport, and all’s good. Now, to work on waking up from sleep, and pmud breakage (which I’ve successfully managed to reproduce that if I’m logged out of X, it won’t hang on wakeup – if X is running, it dies).
