OpenBSD Journal

OpenOffice on OpenBSD

Contributed by jose on from the compatability-required dept.

David Lebel has succeeded in generating a recipe for getting Open Office working on OpenBSD. It requires Linux emulation installed and as your build environment. However, once you do that, you can install and run Open Office.

David's recipe is available from his message to the ports list . A native version just requires too many changes, many of which have not been identified.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By fdsfa () on

    when we have vi and emacs

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      pfft...emacs is more bloated than Open Office.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        lol.. ugh oh... let's not start a war now... ;-)

        PS: emacs is more bloated than MS Office!

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward () on

          Honestly, I don't see anything that you can do with office that you can't do with free software.

          Word -> Emacs/Vim + LaTeX
          Excel -> Xess
          Powerpoint -> Magicpoint
          Outlook -> Procmail + Pine

          I'm really honest, you'll get way much better results with free software, moreover, it's free.

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward () on

            You cannot write word/excel/powerpoint documents with free software :-)

            Comments
            1. By Anonymous Coward () on

              I'm not sure about that, and what's the point of writting documents into a proprietary format? I don't get it.

            2. By Anonymous Coward () on

              but you can read them (well, for example: you can do with Word) and that's awesome & enought already imo.

            3. By Justin () on

              But the real question is, can you write emacs/vi documents in word? :-P

            4. By Anonymous Coward () on

              Did you come to that conclusion all alone?

              Last time I used word/wperfect/others the 'esc' + 'j', 'h', etc.. were broken and wouldn't move up, down, ... would print characters I didn't mean to type
              Many other nice features were broken too and that forced me to use the goddamned mouse.. pfff!

          2. By kremlyn () on

            Since when has pine assumed the role of a calendar?

            I'm all for alternatives, but please.. if we're intelligent enough to use OpenBSD, lets be intelligent enough to use the right tool for the job.

            Comments
            1. By Anonymous Coward () on

              "if we're intelligent enough to use OpenBSD, lets be intelligent enough to use the right tool for the job"

              so let's remove linux_emul, since you're using it for applis you can't recompile, and therefore you don't have the source they may be backdoored.

              sorry, but between security and features, I choose security.

            2. By Anonymous Coward () on

              If the 'the right tool for the job' forces my company to buy Microsoft W2K Server licenses, Exchange Server licenses, W2K CALS, Microsoft Office licenses, MCSEs, upgrade treadmill, and the threat of a BSA audit, I have to find alternatives.
              We post a calendar on the internal company website.

          3. By Anonymous Coward () on

            > Word -> Emacs/Vim + LaTeX
            > Outlook -> Procmail + Pine

            You've got to be freaking kidding me...

            Get a brain. Grow up. Come down to Earth. Get a life.

    2. By Anonymous Coward () on

      people who like doing more than plain text in their documents.... (compared to vi).

      i'm not going to start on emacs as i feel it is the primary tool the devil will use to ascend to earth upon the apocalypse.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        If only you knew the power of LaTeX... I'm not kidding here.

    3. By RC () on

      Last time I checked, VI and EMACS don't do spreadsheets or slideshows very well. What about color highlighting, text formatting, etc.?

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        HAHAHA, looser...

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward () on

          i agree he is loser!

        2. By Anonymous Coward () on

          HAHAHA, tighter... Your a real loser, alot!

          Learn how to spell please.

      2. By Anonymous Coward () on

        Please check to see if you have a brain in your head.

    4. By Anonymous Coward () on

      Amen, brother!

  2. By RC () on

    So, is there anything else that OpenBSD doesn't have for the desktop?

    We have MPlayer, Mozilla, and now OpenOffice. Is there anything else that anyone is missing?

    I know that covers everything I need (well, it will as soon as I spend a little more time getting gs6.51 to work with gimp-print).

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      Are you smoking crack?

      Comments
      1. By Jeroen () on

        Choice is good. It's something special in the opensource community. I love it. Especially on OpenBSD and Debian GNU/Linux, you have the choice over thousands of free software utils. Heck, OpenBSD even kicks the non-free/too-strictly licensed programs out of the ports collection. Debian GNU/Linux has a seperate collection of non-free software in apt ready for those who are interested. And i love these OSes for that. I won't use OpenOffice on OpenBSD, but i do like the fact that it runs on it, because it gives other OpenBSD uses more choice.

        One thing that irritates me on MS Windows is that they provide us the tools we must use. If we want alternatives, we have to download those 3rd party tools from the internet. Sometimes, those are commercial programs. NFS, for example (and those NFS programs even don't run nice in my experience).

        It's also good for OpenBSD competition @ desktops. For example OpenBSD as X server. If OpenBSD can compete with other *BSD's/Linuces, even that i'm not needing that competition myself, i see it as a good thing. Also, it stops the whining "it runs on Linux/FreeBSD" which is good for the health of OpenBSD users ;-)

        The fact that *YOU* don't need it, doesn't mean it's obselete for the OpenBSD community.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward () on

          Excuse me, this was a reaction on "who needs office apps"

    2. By Anonymous Coward () on

      "We have MPlayer, Mozilla, and now OpenOffice. Is there anything else that anyone is missing?"

      Yeah, I guess you're missing a brain.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        I'll second that one.

    3. By Anonymous Coward () on

      Cups, if you dont have a leet postscript printer. There has been a lot of done on it and a lot of noise on ports@ about it recently tho. The install is pretty nasty, but not any nastier than that of mozilla or openoffice...:)

      Comments
      1. By RC () on

        OpenOffice may be a bit complex to install, but Mozilla is no problem at all.

        As for CUPS, I'll stick with lpd... It works just fine, doesn't have the problems that CUPS does (what? your USB printer needs to be on every time CUPS starts!), and really doesn't have the security problems that CUPS has had.

        And you don't need to have a postscript printer... you just use ghostscript or any other print-filter, along with lpd, and you're set.

    4. By dazdaz () on

      So where is the Mozilla package for 3.2-stable . This makes it limited.

      Comments
      1. By RC () on

        Feel free to make one. It's quite easy to compile Mozilla.

        Besides, it was around 3.2's release that Mozilla started working well... I'd bet you'll see it in 3.3.

    5. By Anonymous Coward () on

      Phoenix?

      Moz is a Big Fat Pig!

      Comments
      1. By RC () on

        Last time I checked, Phoenix used up MORE memory than Mozilla (while having significantly less features), and I saw little difference in start-up times.

        If you've got some REAL benchmarks that prove my expirence was unique, I'd be glad to look at them. However, it seems everyone has convinced themselves that Phoneix is better just because the author says so.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward () on

          In my experience, all the big browsers (mozilla, netscape, konqueror, opera) have enormous startup times (sometimes over 15 seconds on a pIII 850, that's just way too much).
          So I'll stick with small, minimalist and fast browsers like links and dillo :)
          I heard that Apple's new browser (Safari, based on khtml) is very fast. Hopefully Apple will donate back its improvements to the opensource community, so that we might have a fast, portable, khtml-based browser in the near future :)
          Actually I don't have a clue on _what_ these browsers are wasting their time when starting up anyway. Oh well, probably they're all just way too bloated...
          I wonder how IE keeps startup time low... but probably it's almost completely loaded into memory all the time, since it's part of the os. That would kinda explain way windows eats so much ram when it's idle.

          Comments
          1. By kojiro () masst181@pitt.edu on mailto:masst181@pitt.edu

            Well, in Windows you can give mozilla permission to load itself into memory, too. If you do that, it's lightning fast.

            'nuff about windows.

            In my limited experience, Safari is unstable.

            On my PIII OpenBSD box, though, mozilla is unstable too. Mozilla won't run, but firebird will. Go figure.

  3. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Though to install OpenOffice, you need to have a linux box around, if I understand correctly.
    Is there a reason for this? (eg. broken install script?)
    Are there any plans to create a port for OpenOffice (not a native build, but a linux-emulation port, like eg. opera)?

    Comments
    1. By RC () on

      > Is there a reason for this? (eg. broken install script?)
      You mostly nailed it... The scripts are okay, it's the binary installer that craps-out on OpenBSD. I did quite a bit to get the Linux OpenOffice binary to install on OpenBSD, without success... I guess the solution was not to try.

  4. By Anonymous Coward () on

    A increasing number of software packages (particularly the large ones) are becoming virtually 'unportable' applications (primarily) for Linux. What ever happened to good old, highly portible, Unix software? If the software is well-written software for Unix-type OS's, porting it *should* be trivial. Clearly, for say OpenOffice and Mozilla, porting hasn't been trivial. Is it just that these applications are huge, or is it something else? A shortcoming of OpenBSD, or system-specific programming on the part of the above developers?

    Comments
    1. By jose () on http://monkey.org/~jose/

      its a host of things: compiler bugs (see what freebsd had to do to make this work) plus bugs in the code and all sorts of crazy assumptions, and yes, bugs in openbsd. in the dynamic loader, for example, which hurt mozilla.

      i'd be curious to hear detailed output from someone who has been trying openoffice on openbsd native. i haven't allocated the time or space to it.

    2. By AC () on

      You say Mozilla... I have used Mozilla on Solaris, Tru64, NetBSD, and Linux. From what I know, OpenBSD's shared libraries C++ compiler don't fit nicely together. Cannot say anything about
      OpenOffice, LaTeX enough for me...

      Comments
      1. By RC () on

        You can use it on all the major platforms because it was essentially ported to each one, and the code and fixes made their way back into the core distro. When it started, the ``Unix" version of Mozilla was almost solely for Linux...

        You really can't call Mozilla portable... It just happens to have been hacked to work on every platform you've used, by the time you used it.

  5. By Rob Lessard () on

    I don't care about office apps that much. I just want to invade the server room and kick msft out.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      i concur.

  6. By BSDgeek () on

    OpenBSD will never be useful on desktop untils it supports digital cameras, MP3 players, Palm, scanners and a host of other cutting-edge hardware....

    Comments
    1. By RC () on

      Well, I am now using OpenBSD as my Desktop OS, so not only is ``never" incorrect, I'd say it can give FreeBSD a run for it's money... FreeBSD is a little better in some areas, and far far worse in a few others.

      OpenBSD supports my Digital Camera just fine, and I'm sure that there are many models of scanners, MP3 players, and more. Sure, unlike Windows, you can't just buy anything and expect that you can get it working (even in Windows it's not that simple). All systems have their trade-offs, and OpenBSD's tradeoffs aren't nearly as bad as any of the other OSes, in my opinion (although I have yet to try Mac OS X).

      Comments
      1. By Not Really Anonymous () on

        I can agree with you. I was running OBSD on my laptop for a couple years with very few trade offs from the other OS's. The only problem I ran into was getting KDevelop to work on OBSD, but I'm sure that could be taken care of.

  7. By RC () on

    Well, I dusted off an old P-200, and installed Slackware to try this out.

    It's not the best you could hope for, but it's working.

    My first attempt was to do a multi-user install, but that didn't work so well... When you first run it, the setup program starts as usual, but it seems to exit prematurely... After that, OpenOffice will start, but seems a bit useless. It was unable to open an OpenOffice spreadsheet I had saved, and crashed when I tried to save one I made from scratch. It might be made to work, but not without some effort, and it doesn't matter that much to me...

    Next, I made a single-user installation, and it worked fairly well. Unlike the net install, it seems to be working almost perfectly. So far, I haven't had any problems with it , but I haven't been using it very long.

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