Colin Charles Agenda

Been a while since I’ve given the mXX series a shot (developer, QA only releases). These will eventually become OOo 2.0.

Waded thru IssueZilla, submitted #24962 as an enhancement for the default installation directory; confirmed a few other new/unconfirmed bugs. We won’t have to use setup -net any longer, as the installer has become clever enough to ask you what kind of installation you want, and tell you if you don’t have administrator rights.

Excel as a database is a funny read (with the cartoons and all). On a more serious note, a well-structured spreadsheet does form the creation of a simple database (that’s how OOo gets it done, simply, without a back-end).

Well, the FNU#4 went out without too much issues (except one spelling error; sorry Jack) and was the first time I used information from IRC (the one Sopwith posted about FC2 test1 delays). A more concrete status report is online.

Abiword being removed from the build system was huge news. Well tough, Jeremy will include it later, but he has other priorities. Keeping to the Core release, we really should not be having more than one package that gets the job done – thats why we have Extras (and fedora.us is extras).

The problem Linux newbies face is that there’s just way too much choice. Want a HTML editor? Searching on freshmeat will give you at least 20 choices. How does a newbie know if to use Abiword or OpenOffice.org? Bluefish or Mozilla Composer? Mplayer or Totem? They get confused. Thats what Fedora Core aims to remove – the confusion.

That’s where the Extras come into place. Because we know that choice needs to be kept alive. The choice to choose your favourite utility, that’s the beauty of this open source world. Plus, if the Core was trimmed further, we’d have ISOs that are lesser in size. And if you ever wanted something else, you know there’s a wide repository of Extras available.

It’s like the choice to use pine as a mail reader. It’s not included, but there’s an “extras” repository that has it (Dag’s apt repository, for instance). The best utility for the job folks; thats what Core’s about, IMHO.

On other notes, why doesn’t Abiword deal with OpenOffice.org OASIS XML files yet? (besides the plugin?) KOffice has decided that an open standard is the way to go.

Get your feed at http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/week4.shtml.

Covering The Fedora Project getting a new leader, the current on-going Bug Day, some new changes with Fedora Core 2 (no more smbfs, but cifs instead; no more OSS, but ALSA instead) and introducing some applications. LWCE Fedora BOF session is covered too, with some terminology bits and pieces.

Not only posting the update to LWN, but also to Linux Today (first time e-mailing them).

Watched The Matrix Revolutions and Basic today. Both good shows, I understand Matrix Revelations a lot better now :)

OS X 10.3 detected the DVDs like a charm, and also played them automatically for me in full-screen. Excellent, I thought I’d try and replicate this with Fedora. So, I upgraded my kernel to one from Rawhide, followed the instructions from FNU#1, and had a working kernel.

Proceeded to download the Project Utopia stuff, did a rpm -Uvh, and it all installed. D-BUS wouldn’t start, but rml had a solution.

D-BUS started, but my joy didn’t exist. Granted, I wasn’t tracking Rawhide for my packages, and this is probably where things broke. Everytime I typed something into gnome-volume-properties, my console would report manager.c/168: Configuration: changed!. Guess there’s some work to be done with getting all the integration stuff working, and make it truly, more OS X like.

Probably should add that Fedora -> Preferences -> CD Properties actually gets stuff working pretty well, even on 2.4 kernels. No it doesn’t do all the funky “let’s detect new hardware”, but gnome-cd-properties generally gets audio CDs playing automagically.

Following good instructions, sitting on IRC, and then basically trying to get stuff done before going to sleep, I started an OpenOffice.org build on Mac OS X at about 4.45am today. I used cws_fix645_ooo111fix2, which isn’t the latest, but is known to work with OS X.

Might I add, that Apple has a very nasty way of getting things done. I had already installed the 3 CDs they’d provided for OS X, and I still didn’t get my Developer Tools (the build complained that gcc was missing!). It was the iBook software restore CDs that made the difference; even then, I had to manually install the .mpkg files.

About 9pm today (it took the build about 16 hours), OpenOffice.org 1.1.1b was built. And it works, minus the fact that during the installation there’s an error – it looks for ooovirg; this will be fixed soon. So, ignore the error, and go on using OpenOffice.org 1.1.1! Everything basically “just works”, and with regards to quirks, I’ll be sure to be writing more.

So there, OOo builds on a G4 933MHz iBook with 384MB of RAM in just about 16 hours. My builds aren’t QA’ed or anything, and we have a nasty policy of not releasing Mac OS X builds for some reason (aarnet carries 1.1.0 built in October 2003 as the latest); so write me back if you try it and it breaks. Next for FedoraPPC builds!

Firstly, we will be seeing a Planet OOo sometime soon. It’s in the works, its nearly ready, and we’ll be at least grabbing Michael Meeks‘ feed, Dan Williams, and this blog. Sander will set up a blog over the weekend, he promised.

GNOME has a cool Find Files feature (Actions -> Search for Files); now, OOo wants to be part of it too. Searching within OOo files will be mighty cool, but if that’s not enough, we’re also aiming for Nautilus extensions!

If you’re looking for an OOo migration tool, these folk seem to do it well; for a cost. Might come in handy to switch to OOo, as Microsoft is seeking XML patents for their new Office 2003 stuff. They release the schemas, and then start patenting stuff.

Re-installed the Mac OS X box after dinner (we had a party thing at our place for Chinese New Year); 20GB for Panther, and two 8.xGB partitions for Yellow Dog (upgraded to Fedora rawhide) and Debian. Sync’ed my CVS tree for OOo to it (a whole 1.1gigs worth?), and will have to go back to an older build to make it work properly. Hopefully some CVS hackery will limit the use of my bandwidth.