Linux Format forums

[davecs]

If you download the "official" OpenOffice 2.0 beta, you will get version 1.1.79. If you go to www.OpenOffice.org and click on the development tab, you can locate a later release, 1.9.91.

Compared to 1.1.79 there is one disadvantage and a couple of advantages. The bad thing is that the Gnome compatibility is broken, so Gnome users and KDE users using gtk-qt-engine will see bad old ugly OpenOffice. Hopefully this will be put right before final release.

The good things are that, in addition to RedHat and SuSE, Mandrake and Freedesktop setups have been added so that you don't have to create your own menus. The Mandy one also works with PCLOS and the Freedesktop one works with an unmodified KDE setup like Gentoo.

Also loads of bugs have been fixed, including the one that made you print via a blocky print engine called "Generic Printer". Now your cups printers work properly (sigh of relief).

It's still a tar.gz that expands to a load of RPM files, so if you have a non-rpm distro, you will need to install RPM or apt-get for rpm. Once installed, you can control the installation through KDE's kpackage if you don't fancy the command line.

Alternatively you can use rpm2targz.

Anyways, it's well worth a look. It loads quicker, seems stable, and certainly now it's working seems a step up from version 1.1.4. And once the Gnome-integration has been fixed (it was great in the earlier pre-releases), in Gnome, or in KDE in conjuction with gtk-qt-engine, you can really get it looking good. Why? Not just the widgets, but now it uses PNG icons so you can change all your icons to Gnome or KDE ones, giving a more integrated look and feel.

After the success of Firefox, OpenOffice is Open Sources second big hitter. Microsoft eat your heart out.

[nelz]

[davecs]