Good news re: OpenOffice!

[davecs]

I just found a copy of OpenOffice-1.9.118, it is supposed to hit the mirrors tomorrow but I found it at the Malta LUG, on their mirrors! It was quite a slow download, though, so I won't share the address, get it tomorrow!

The news is that the Gnome graphics system is working again, and this also works under KDE with GTK-QT-engine. Shame about the icons, but as it just requires any 16x16 *.png graphics, they can be changed, shame it has to be done one at a time!

All we need is for someone to write a script to install nice KDE or GNOME icons, and OpenOffice will look nice on our screens, as well as being great functionally.

[M-Saunders]

Yay. Any progress on the startup speed? Apparently it's improved slightly through the pre-2.0 releases, but I didn't notice much in the releases I tried. It's a shade quicker when starting cached in RAM -- still alarmingly slow though.

M

[nelz]

Turning off Java in the preferences gives a significant boost in startup speed, from sluggish to slow.

[davecs]

I found it started from cold in about 5 seconds, I am running PCLinuxOS, KDE3.4 512Mb RAM Athlon XP3200+.

Still it's great once up!

[M-Saunders]

Aha. I just tested m118 -- about 15 seconds cold start on a 1.5 GHz Celeron M with 256 MB RAM (must upgrade the memory!). That's still pretty poor considering MS Word pops up in two seconds, without any pre-loading. Still, as you say, once OOo is up and running it's fairly swift. Just hope they can trim it down a bit more to impress newcomers...

M

[Erin]

Can see the benefits of OOo2 but had to go back to current simply as I needed it for work. Can't do without spell checking etc and v2.0ish doesn't have them yet. Was very slow starting, dual PIII 550s and 768Mb RAM running Ubuntu 5.04.

Erin

[nelz]

I'm using m109 here and it has spell checking.

[linuxgirlie]

Does he mean grammar checking? As I know 109 doesn't have it does 118?

One reason why my school/work doesn't like OOo the groans of too slow!!

[Erin]

Must have been due to the necessity of the need for GB English. Formal document, need the right (read correct) version of our language.

Erin

[nelz]

m109 has and en_GB language pack, m118 still didn't when I looked this morning.

[davecs]

Language pack or not, can you not select the right spelling dictionary through the Options? It seems to work for me (though not yet tested on 118).

Anyway, the main point of my original post is that we get nice "buttons" instead of the Windows95 design, coz at its worst it's one ugly brute!