X11 in Leopard is broken (does not do full screen)
I thought I’d try to get OpenOffice.org going, and see if my presentations run well, on my new MacBook. It turns out, its just plagued with issues.
First up, OpenOffice.org 2.3.1, available on the porting site, will not allow you to run Base, or anything that requires Java. At least the message in red, tells all:
Please note that the Java features of OpenOffice.org are only available from OpenOffice.org 2.4 (more specifically milestone m237) and later. This means that the Wizards, Base and some other things are unavailable in 2.3.1 or earlier. All other functionality of OpenOffice.org remains on Leopard.
Now, after its downloaded, the install is easy. Drag to the Applications folder, and just double-click (it never was always this easy!). You at this stage will think that toggling Command+Option+a will allow you to go into full screen mode. You are very wrong.
X11 Preferences, allowing you to be in full screen mode
A little searching on the Apple X11 mailing lists, and I came across some gems from Ben Byer, an engineer in Apple’s CoreOS group. It seems that X11 is now based on Xorg as opposed to XFree86’s codebase. And during the rebasing, Ben realised that full screen support was broken and couldn’t fix it. The suggested fix? Find X11 from Tiger (not even on Apple’s site), or you don’t have full screen support.
I guess I’ll file a radar bug against it, but knowing my luck, it’ll be closed in no time, with a reference to a bug that I myself won’t be able to access. I can only hope that this is fixed soon. In the meantime, maybe I need to give OpenOffice.org Aqua a twirl, or even NeoOffice/J. If you’re interested in the history of X11 in OS X, don’t hesitate to read X11.app “pedigree”.
Bottom-line: If you’re reliant on OpenOffice.org on your Mac, you’ll find that making presentations using Leopard, is going to be problematic. And its not OpenOffice.org’s fault, its on Apple’s head.
Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, openoffice.org aqua, macosx, X11, full screen X11
What about NeoOffice?
Or you could just do what everyone else does and use NeoOffice which has all the java features, and does not use X11 so doesn’t have the above mentioned problem
I came here just to say the same as the other ones above, use NeoOffice.
It works for everything that I used to make in OpenOffice.org in my Linux Box, not a problem till know.
Oh, and I almost forget… X11 could be updated with XQuartz
Yes, I’ll play with NeoOffice/J soon. But do realise that NeoOffice/J is actually a fork, of OpenOffice.org. Not necessarily a bad fork, but a fork nonetheless. I’d rather focus my energies on the upstream Aqua-fication (something I participated in, about 4 years ago)…
Once the upstream OpenOffice.org Aqua is ready, I don’t see much use/need for NeoOffice/J.
NeoOffice (the /J was dropped) is based off ooo-build, which is now a feature fork so you get things like VBA and a solver which aren’t upstream (and won’t be until Sun figures out how to run a community).
OpenOffice.org Aqua stable should be ready in September or October this year. Until then we will be needing people to test the aqua development builds. In the next week there will be milestone DEV300_m2 made available, which will include some major improvements to the aqua port.
OpenOffice.org 2.4 X11, should be out by the end of the month, if it isn’t caught up with any more showstoppers.
I used NeoOffice just because OpenOffice.org in X wasn’t good enough.
But now, OpenOffice.org Aqua is runnning great here, and I already stoped using NeoOffice ;)
I have to say, that I can not agree with you in 100%, but it’s just my IMHO, which could be very wrong.
p.s. You have an awesome template . Where have you got it from?