OpenOffice.org 2.0

OpenOffice.org is quite the talk of the town so far, so that I can't stand not to write about it. After I did try it on the Windows platform, it was very impressive about many additional features including Thai language support, spellcheck and much more. So I decided to try it on Linux.

I use Yoper Linux 2.1 which comes with OO.o 1.1.2. Before upgrade, I decided to remove the older version and downloaded the new one which comes in .tar.gz format. After untarred, it was exploded to many rpm packages that were confusing me about which file I should install first. I looked everywhere in the readme and there's no installation method at all. Okay, it should reside somewhere on the internet or OO.o website. I used some times to found that rpm allows you to use wildcard (*) and it will manage the dependencies for you. So, for installation, just type

# rpm -Uvh *.rpm

in the directory that you have untarred it. And OO.o will be installed into /opt directory; actually, you can change the directory in which it will be installed by using --prefix=/directory/you/want option.

After the rpm did its work, I tried to use it via K menu but there's no menu entries for OO.o (I think that because it does not come with KDE desktop integration). That's alright, I can run it via command line i.e. soffice as in previous version. The first time did not success because of unset path. So, I created symbolic link in /usr/bin to /opt/OpenOffice2.0/program/soffice and this time the program ran well. To run specific modules using command line, just type in the module name as an option after soffice such as soffice -writer will run the OO.o Writer and so on. After working around with Thai language support options, as this article, it's time for test drive. The Linux edition works well as in Windows including Thai word breaking and spellcheck, thanks to Sun team, although there are some weird word breaking. In addition, I tried to open the PowerPoint slide (with minimal animation and all texts are in English) in Impress and it impressed me that the slide is exactly displayed in Impress as in PowerPoint but a little bit slower.

For now, it is a very impressive free Office Suite software for people that want an alternative to M$ Suite. It works as great on Linux as on Windows and I haven't got the error message regarding save problem yet. Hope that OO.o team will improve usability and flexibility in some aspects, especially in graph creating (I don't like some of these features and have to use excel to do this). Again, thanks to OO.o, Sun team, Sipa and everybody that create this alternative masterpiece software to the world.

PS. Where is the I cursor tool?