Colin Charles Agenda

Went to the Red Hat Meetup day today at Gloria Jeans. Nice, Russell Coker, Anshul Gupta, and two other Korean folk joined us (sorry, forgotten the names!). Mike was supposed to show, but it was a no go. Had coffee, chatted about usual things, mainly SE Linux and how we can secure Linux a wee bit more. Whined about Malaysia’s RH scene, found out RH Korea makes most of its money from training, and might want to do this regularly. (photos)

Before that, it was an Apple talk. Pure marketing stuff, I wish it was more technical oriented when he talked about HPC. Some nibbles and a Coke I had. Trains were delayed today, driver shortage.

• FC2 test2 on the Digital Celebris (dobby) installed fine in text mode – 64MB RAM, Pentium Pro 180, Matrox Millenium VGA, NIC all working. SELinux is in enforcing mode (Active), only noticed hang is that after installation, when I get to the reboot screen, it just hung. #118992 is where this lives.
• If the FC2 test2 CDs don’t boot for you, Smart Boot Manager is what you want. Running it will write itself to a nice floppy, and your boot choices will be aplenty. Seems to be a problem on the lists I’ve noticed.

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

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.

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?).

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?

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.