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OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released

Posted by Zonk on Thu Oct 20, 2005 09:42 AM
from the i-like-toys dept.
Software Linux
Da Massive writes "The official release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been pushed to the download servers, as of Thursday the 20th." From the article: "OpenDocument is an XML file format for saving office documents such as spreadsheets, memos, charts, and presentations. It was approved as an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard at the beginning of this year. OpenDocument, set as a default in OpenOffice, is cited by proponents as a way of fighting vendor lock-in associated with proprietary formats. Already, it is the required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts." You can download, or read past coverage including a preview or a comparison with MS Office. Update: 10/20 17:22 GMT by Z : Made date reference more topical.
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  • It's on time! (Score:5, Funny)

    by bcat24 (914105) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:43AM (#13835804) Homepage Journal
    My milk hasn't expired yet.

  • They promised... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jferris (908786) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:44AM (#13835812) Homepage
    ...it would be before my milk expired. Well, they are a day late. This is just udderly devastating.

  • 10th? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Scrameustache (459504) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:44AM (#13835816) Homepage Journal
    That's l33t speak for 20th? : )

  • why is this under Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aurelian (551052) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:45AM (#13835821)
    Surely cross-platform nature of OO.o is the whole point?

    • Re:why is this under Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Iriel (810009) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:00AM (#13835981) Homepage
      I see your point, but keep in mind that when OO.o has been a major factor in companies switching from Windows systems to Linux ones.

      "What will happen to all our Word documents, and spreadsheets, oh! oh! and what about PowerPoint?"
      Say it with me together now: OpenOffice!

      Yes, MSOffice compatibility has become a nearly ubiquitous feature by now, but not too many offices switch from Windows to use Joe. So the strength it has given to the Linux community as an alternative to 'get everyday tasks done' can't be stated enough. Hence, this appears in the Linux section of Slashdot.

      This public service annoucement was brought to you by penguins, and a OSS/Linux advocate.

  • Speaking of milk... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:45AM (#13835829)
    Directly after the release this morning, Mad Penguin published a lengthy interview with OOo's Lois Suarez-Potts which represents part 3 of their OpenOffice.org interview series [madpenguin.org] (part 1 [slashdot.org] and 2 [slashdot.org] were covered previously on Slashdot). The article is 3 pages long but an excellent read all the same.

  • Bittorrent / P2P download links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:45AM (#13835830)
    http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.ht ml [openoffice.org]

  • MS Office will catch up (Score:5, Funny)

    by krygny (473134) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:46AM (#13835842)
    Soon, MS Office will have native support for PDF (like OOo has always had). Now, all they have to do is add support for ODF, give it away free along with the source code, and it will be almost as good as OOo.

  • OSX (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fatwreckfan (322865) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:47AM (#13835856)
    It'd be nice if they released a build for OSX. The only 2.0 build they've had for as long as I've been checking is a development build in french.

    • Re:OSX (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:03AM (#13836020)
      I think that is a bug in their website. if you go to one of the mirrors http://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/openoffice/contrib /MacOSX/ [psu.edu] you will see that this is an english version 1.9.130. Note that OO.o is not yet stable in OS 10, this is still a development version. Personally, I have not had any problems using it, but I do find it to be slower compared to other platforms. The lack of integrated Carbon/Cocoa/etc steers me away. OSX is supposed to be pretty IMAO! Nonetheless, kudos to the OO.o team on a significant accomplishment.

  • Torrent Links (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lawpoop (604919) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:47AM (#13835857) Homepage Journal
    This page [openoffice.org] has bittorrent links.

  • Mac OS X (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:48AM (#13835865)
    No support for the Mac OS X is a show stopper for me. :(

  • Real work just got easier today. (Score:4, Funny)

    by rheotaxis (528103) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:51AM (#13835894) Homepage
    I feel a productivity surge bubbling up inside me.

  • Grrrr (Score:5, Funny)

    by squoozer (730327) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:52AM (#13835908) Homepage

    I don't believe it! I only downloaded and installed RC3 4 hours ago. Grrrr.

    • Re:Grrrr (Score:5, Informative)

      by sucker_muts (776572) <sucker_pvnNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:09AM (#13836072) Homepage Journal
      No problem, apart from it's name, RC3 is 100% identical as 2.0.

      They just updated the version number thoughout and made sure beta was mentioned nowhere anymore. Once they were sure no (major) bugs were found in the latest beta they could push it as a final version.

      Just keep your RC3, it's the same as 2.0 final.

  • Must not be for real (Score:5, Funny)

    by Odocoileus (802272) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:53AM (#13835917)
    It is not in portage yet, therefore it must not exist.

  • Office Key... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Buddy_DoQ (922706) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:54AM (#13835934) Homepage
    I just recently restored my laptop, and rather than go fishing for my MS Office 2001 disk with the faded product key, I opted to give OpenOffice.org a shot. For me, a casual .doc reader who just needs something light and quick to open and read with, OO.org is a great solution. It does just about everything a cheap guy like me could want. Plus I didn't have to dig in that dreaded closet of PC past and type in a cd key I can barely make out anymore. I had no idea a new version was coming out so soon, so this is great news to me! I even began spreading whispers about it at work, it may not be the juicy Lost roundtable, but a free alternative to something Microsoft for our Macs always perks some ears.

  • Fantastic (Score:5, Funny)

    by damm0 (14229) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:04AM (#13836031) Homepage Journal
    This is great! Congratulations to the OpenOffice folks. Now all OpenOffice needs is a good vi keymap.

  • Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem (Score:5, Informative)

    by raitchison (734047) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:11AM (#13836091) Homepage Journal

    I have the distinct feeling I'll be losing some Karma for saying this but I'm REALLY disappointed that they didn't solve the Java issue.

    According to the System Requirements [openoffice.org] page it still requires the Sun JVM.

    Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.

    I've said it before but I really don't see the advantage of having an OSS product if you are still dependent on a definitively non-open product. Ofr course I know it's completely different sice Sun isn't evil like Microsoft is.

    • Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem (Score:4, Informative)

      by k98sven (324383) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:23AM (#13836216) Journal
      Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.

      Red Hat is getting OOo to play with the GNU compiler for java (gcj). They shipped OOo using gcj with Fedora Core 4, and according to the blog [linux.ie] of the guy working on it, it seems OOo 2.0 will follow as well.

    • Re:Java problem? Not. (Score:5, Informative)

      by rdieter (112462) <rdieter@NospaM.math.unl.edu> on Thursday October 20 2005, @11:24AM (#13836908) Homepage Journal

      According to the System Requirements page it still requires the Sun JVM.


      Note: System Requirements say:

      The minimum JDK/JRE version required to use OpenOffice.org features that require java(emphasis mine) ...

      So, java is *not* required to use ooo. You get extra features if you happen to have it installed, that's all.

  • I'm hoping to be able to run v2 on my AMD64 box sometime - but reports of it even compiling are pretty sketchy, and it runs like a dog, unless you disable java in the build. (Why are the words java and slow always appearing in the same sentence...)
    Anyone know of any AMD64 v2 binary packages until that time? (Binary - I feel dirty saying that word.)

  • Detailed Comparison of OO Writer and MS Word (Score:5, Informative)

    by L. VeGas (580015) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:44AM (#13836475) Homepage Journal
    Not to totally plug my own article, but I have a detailed comparison between the two here [nedwolf.com] that some might be interested in.

  • Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Danathar (267989) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:46AM (#13836486) Journal
    If you are downloading via Azureus...PLEASE do the following

    Post the Azureus Magnet URI to Slashdot by doing the following

    Go to "My Torrents"

    Right click on your torrent and choose "Copy Magnet URI to clipboard"

    Please paste this in your post.

    This will allow people to join the swarm without having to get the tracker file which is TOTALLY swamped at the moment.

    thanks!

    • Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument (Score:5, Informative)

      by maxwell demon (590494) on Thursday October 20 2005, @09:49AM (#13835874) Journal
      I guess the printed version would lack all logical markup. No problem if all you want to do is to view or print it, but a big problem if you want to work with it.

    • Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument (Score:5, Informative)

      by DrXym (126579) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:02AM (#13836016)
      When you print from an application you essentially open a device context and send it a bunch of instructions to draw text here, a line there and so on. This can be captured PDF but is totally unsuitable to printing out an .odt file for instance. In the process of conversion you'd lose all meta info, any revision history, digital signatures, styles, hidden text, rulers, margins, links to other documents / graphics and basically anything else which goes to producing a document but doesn't appear in the end result. In short, a "Print to OpenDocument" would be worse than useless.

      On the other hand, an import / export filter for MS Word to Open Document would be very useful. I assume that such a thing is quite possible, but how far along anyone is with producing such a thing (as open source), I have no idea.

    • Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument (Score:5, Informative)

      by julesh (229690) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:07AM (#13836052)
      Can someone explain to me why the gang at OpenOffice can't create a printer for windows ala Adobe Acrobat in order to "Print to OpenDocument"?

      Simply put, the reason is this:

      Printers take layout-oriented information (e.g. 'this character goes at this precise position, a line is drawn from here to here, start a new page for everything from this point on', etc.) and print it to a page.

      PDF takes similar layout-oriented information and displays it on screen, and gives you an option to print.

      OpenDocument, like most other word processor formats, uses structural information (e.g. 'these words are grouped into a paragraph, this paragraph has a box around it, these paragraphs should be on the same page as each other'), not layout information.

    • Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MojoRilla (591502) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:28AM (#13836276)
      Either someone could do the impossible (converting from layout data back into semantic information is very difficult if not impossible), or Microsoft could get off their lazy, arrogant asses and implement an import and export filter, like they did with five versions of Word Perfect, two versions of Works, three html versions, or eight older versions of Word. At least those are the options in Word 2003.

      But clearly, supporting an extra set of filters is far too difficult. Clearly Microsoft customers don't want this. Clearly the unencumbered Open Document format is anti-competitive and unconstitutional. And clearly the only people that care are freaks and hippies.

      The bottom line is that Microsoft can't compete with better products, so it is trying to bully the market with file format control.

      • PDF is actually less dynamic (Score:5, Informative)

        by jonabbey (2498) * <jonabbey@ganymeta.org> on Thursday October 20 2005, @01:02PM (#13837765) Homepage

        PDF is actually less dynamic. A PostScript file is actually a computer program that, when executed in a PostScript interpreter, winds up executing instructions to draw marks on a rendering surface. You can't, in principle, know what a PostScript file will end up looking like, until you run the program to its per-page completion. If the PostScript winds up looping forever or takes up too much memory, either a user or the printer has to be smart enough to cancel the job and report an error.

        People have done crazy things with PostScript in this way, actually. I've seen PostScript print files that print out digits of Pi, using the printer's CPU engine to calculate the digits!

        PDF, on the other hand, is basically a flash-frozen listing of those rendering instructions. That's why a PDF file can be edited with the appropriate Adobe software.. it just goes in and changes the rendering instructions.

        Back in the day, when Adobe introduced PDF, the big excitement was that PDF's font support was fancy enough so that if your printer didn't have a font that the PDF specified, the PDF reader could just tweak the size and shape of a standard font in order to make the spacing and visual quality come out looking right, anyway, without having to stuff a bunch of full spline definitions for fonts into the PDF file. This fit into the goal of allowing PDF files to be efficiently compressed.

        So, PDF is good stuff! PostScript is the dynamic one, though.

    • Re:Ehh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mjlner (609829) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:13AM (#13836108) Journal
      "Did some one read the date wrong? 20/10/2005 is the 20th, not the 10th."

      Argh... All these problems stemming from different systems. We non-US people always forget that the American year has 30 months (sometimes 31) and 12 days in a month.
      In other news:
      Rest of world still waiting for America to adopt the metric system

      Sure, mod me a trolling flamebait, you humourless twat.

    • Re:Excellent!!!! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Wornstrom (920197) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:17AM (#13836145)
      I push openoffice on anyone who asks me if I have a "copy" of office they can "install" on their new computer. Now with the more advanced Access style database stuff and general improvements, I couldn't imagine the "need" for MS Office anywhere. Except maybe in schools where the classes they teach on basic computer skills require that students have a copy of the latest version of Office. That is one thing that needs to be changed. Users are getting their basic education in productivity applications without any alternatives. Amazon is preselling the openoffice 2.x resource kit for $32.99, which comes with the cd with several versions (MS, Linux, Solaris, Apple) of OOo, plus macros and such. Might make a good gift for someone with the in-depth manual that explains how to do everything.

        • Re:Excellent!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Doctor O (549663) on Thursday October 20 2005, @04:26PM (#13839635) Homepage Journal
          Actually I found the opposite to be true - if Access is the answer, somebody has asked the wrong questions. We have lots of clients for whom we replaced existing Access processes because they find it performs poorly when you put it under real load - and most of those came to us because they found that they had to hunt down heisenbugs with every update of Access and MSSQL.

          Please note that I blame the latter on the 'developers' who built the processes, not the software. I haven't been using Access much, but from what I have seen, it seems to be a good tool in the hands of someone who knows what he's doing. So the clients are rather switching from a 'have the secretary click together the logic' approach to an 'hire real developers for real-world stuff' approach.

          (I've seen many *really* mindboggingly slow things, however, but this might as well result from bad practices, stupid code or any combination of the two.)

          The bottom line is, among our clients are many global players and none of those would touch any solution with a ten foot pole if they include Access anywhere. Most have well-engineered in-house software, we are just helping them in adding web accessible interfaces. It always strikes me as funny that they have great in-house developers but need external help with web applications.

          So, now we're as OT as we could be, but I wanted to add another perspective. And yes, I am aware that my experience probably isn't very representative.

    • Re:Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fyngyrz (762201) on Thursday October 20 2005, @10:49AM (#13836534) Homepage Journal
      OO.org runs on linux, BSD, Windows, OSX...

      No, it does't run under OSX. It runs, poorly (meaning, without access to system fonts because it's an xwindows app, not an OSX app) on PPC Macs but not as released (you have to dig up the right copy) and it's not integrated with the OS in terms of style which annoys a lot of OSX users (which is one of the claims for OO 2.) It doesn't annoy me, I can deal with whatever interface, but the fact that it can't access the system's fonts is a stone killer problem.

      I'm a little worried about the decision to use Java for the DB, too, but I may be buying trouble that doesn't exist. I'm just going by the various interplatform/interapplication incompatibilities that I see on web pages because the wrong Java is installed (eg, flickr works on firefox but not on omniweb, etc.)

      Too bad they didn't write it in python. Make java look like the c-descended nightmare it is. ;-)

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