| Friday August 15, 2003 |
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Lelong, lelong ... OpenOffice CDs going cheap By CHARLES F. MOREIRA PETALING JAYA: Mimos Bhd will be selling CDs containing the upcoming OpenOffice 1.1 Open Source office suite for RM2 each at its Free and Open Source Software Conference 2003 (Fosscon 2003), to be held at the Sheraton Subang Hotel and Towers on Aug 26-27. "The CDs will be available to anyone visiting the exhibition area, along with a range of other Open Source Software -- mainly Linux distributions and some BSD -- for the same price, which is just to cover our costs," said Imran William Smith, Mimos project manager for Open Source development. The conference fees is RM379, but the exhibition is open to the public. "Those who pay to attend the conference will also get a CD with all the conference materials (programme, papers, etc), and we are also likely to include a copy of OpenOffice 1.1 on that CD," Smith told In.Tech. "The benefits of OpenOffice 1.1 over 1.0 include native export to Adobe's PDF, native export of presentations to Macromedia Flash, faster load time, improved language support for Hindi, Arabic, Chinese and Bahasa Melayu, improved Microsoft Office compatibility, accessibility features via Java's help and third-party free WordPerfect and LaTeX support," Colin Charles, developer community contact with OpenOffice.org's marketing team, said in an e-mail from Australia. OpenOffice 1.1 RC3 for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Sun Solaris can also be downloaded free-of-charge from www.openoffice.org. Bahasa Melayu localisation work on OpenOffice 1.1 is still in progress and contributors are welcome to contact Charles at byte@aeon.com.my. An FAQ on OpenOffice is available at www.bytebot.net/openoffice/faq.html, while information on local OpenOffice resources including on localisation efforts can be found at www.bytebot.net/openoffice/malaysian.html. For more information on Fosscon, check out http://opensource.mimos.my. |