OpenOffice.org on the PowerPC Platform

Duration: 1 hour

Speaker: Colin Charles

Abstract:

OpenOffice.org is a popular office suite, running on many a platform. However, builds that come out officially from www.openoffice.org tend to only be for the x86 line of processors, on operating systems such as Windows, Linux, or even Solaris. However, users of Linux on PowerPC or more commonly Mac OS X on PowerPC are left out; it has become a community task to get OpenOffice.org running on the PowerPC platform.

Last June, at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC 2004), we launched a milestone release, at that time with all other platforms – OpenOffice.org 1.1.2/X11 for Mac OS X; there was also a beta NeoOffice/J release. Since then, we've had varying issues and politics to sift through, but looking ahead, some issues we need to address are:

OpenOffice.org OS X is still X11 based. It isn't a Cocoa application, as we require programmers with great knowledge of the X11 and Cocoa framework, as well as C++ and the OpenOffice.org build environment.

NeoOffice/J is a GPL-fork of OpenOffice.org. It however, changes between 1-3% of the OpenOffice.org code base, to make it look more like a Cocoa application. What is entailed by NeoOffice/J, who owns it, will it ever become mainstream?

Linux PowerPC users have two options: ooo-build, or the stock OpenOffice.org build method. Which do you choose? What about getting a JRE/SDK on the platform – what options are available?

Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu build systems tend to roll out ooo-build't ones automatically

EPM on Mac OS X – for native packaging.

What is our status? Why did it take so long (m72) to get OOo on OS X building?

How you can help!

2005-02-12T19:40:51