OpenBSD Journal

Developer blog: robert: Porting OpenOffice.org to OpenBSD

Contributed by robert on from the need-more-slackers dept.

Many people want a native port of OpenOffice.org. The problem with porting OpenOffice is that it is just too big for one man. Peter Valchev started to work on OpenOffice back at the portathon in Venice. Then he passed it to me because I need it at school and I was really interested in it. Currently I've managed to sync it to the current OpenOffice milestone (m166) and I am keeping it in sync every time a new milestone comes out. The build process itself goes fine but there is a lot of stuff to fix in this huge codebase. First we have to port the bridges to OpenBSD which is the bridge between languages used by OpenOffice. Then we also have problems with threads. So this is going to be an interesting debug session. I have created a CVS repository where people can access the current port and help to improove it. I am just in the middle of my graduation exams and I cannot spend all of my time working on OpenOffice. That's why I am sharing the port now. If anyone wants to work on OpenOffice with me please feel free to get the port and try to fix issues.
You can get it easily:

cvs -d anoncvs@anoncvs.silihost.hu:/oo co -P openoffice

I am commiting all changes to this repository so if anyone wants to get an e-mail about the changes I make, drop me an e-mail so I can add the people to the changes list.

You may also want to check http://porting.openoffice.org/.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Archite (17.107.143.93) adam@akarsoft.com on http://akarsoft.com

    Hey man, great work! It excites me very much to hear that OpenOffice is being ported! Keep up the good work.

  2. By SH (82.182.103.172) on

    The master site for Open Office seems to be down. Is there another you may put into the ports Makefile as an alternative?

    The ports is yet only for i386, but is something like amd64 to far away to try?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (195.56.94.52) on

      I've added another MASTER_SITE but m167 is out so I am updating.

    2. By phessler (69.12.168.114) on

      > The master site for Open Office seems to be down. Is there another you may put into the ports Makefile as an alternative?
      >
      > The ports is yet only for i386, but is something like amd64 to far away to try?
      >

      I'm trying to build it on both my amd64 and i386 machines, I'll let you know if they fail in the same way, or in different places. tune in in ~40 hours :/.

      Comments

      1. By phessler (69.12.168.114) on

        > > The master site for Open Office seems to be down. Is there another you may put into the ports Makefile as an alternative?
        > >
        > > The ports is yet only for i386, but is something like amd64 to far away to try?
        > >
        >
        > I'm trying to build it on both my amd64 and i386 machines, I'll let you know if they fail in the same way, or in different places. tune in in ~40 hours :/.

        ugh, it requires assembly.

        also, amd64 fails far before i386. good luck.

        Comments

        1. By wilfried (194.71.160.182) on

          > ugh, it requires assembly.

          they must have looked at mozilla ;-)

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (134.58.253.130) on

            > > ugh, it requires assembly.
            >
            > they must have looked at mozilla ;-)

            Can anyone explain what the advantage is of having pieces of assembly code in an office suite or a browser? It may gain you a tiny bit in performance, but seriously hurts portability.

            If I'm not mistaking, the amount of assembly code in the entire OpenBSD source tree is very small. Assembly is only used for certain architecture dependant stuff that's hard or impossible to do in C. For an OS, it's logical to have some assembly parts. But for application software???

            Comments

            1. By wilfried (194.71.160.182) on

              > Can anyone explain what the advantage is of having pieces of assembly code in an office suite or a browser? It may gain you a tiny bit in performance, but seriously hurts portability.

              http://www.mozilla.org/scriptable/xptcall-faq.html

              Comments

              1. By Anonymous Coward (128.151.93.185) on

                > > Can anyone explain what the advantage is of having pieces of assembly code in an office suite or a browser? It may gain you a tiny bit in performance, but seriously hurts portability.
                >
                > http://www.mozilla.org/scriptable/xptcall-faq.html
                >

                Why don't they use already established libraries for this purpose, such as libffcall?

        2. By Anonymous Coward (64.231.142.154) on


          >
          > ugh, it requires assembly.
          >
          > also, amd64 fails far before i386. good luck.

          Well, OpenOffice is available and works fine on Linux/PPC so that shouldn't be a problem.

        3. By Anonymous Coward (68.43.94.80) on

          > > > The master site for Open Office seems to be down. Is there another you may put into the ports Makefile as an alternative?
          > > >
          > > > The ports is yet only for i386, but is something like amd64 to far away to try?
          > > >
          > >
          > > I'm trying to build it on both my amd64 and i386 machines, I'll let you know if they fail in the same way, or in different places. tune in in ~40 hours :/.
          >
          > ugh, it requires assembly.
          >
          > also, amd64 fails far before i386. good luck.

          Yes, on my -current i386 machine, the build fails after many hours in make_installer.pl, due to files not found: sdk_oo.zip, odkexamples.zip, odkidl.zip, and odkcommon.zip.

          Comments

          1. By cruel (195.68.219.2) on

            > Yes, on my -current i386 machine, the build fails after many hours in make_installer.pl, due to files not found: sdk_oo.zip, odkexamples.zip, odkidl.zip, and odkcommon.zip.

            See here

            http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-ports&m=114742502315288&w=2

            Comments

            1. By Anonymous Coward (68.43.94.80) on

              Yes, I saw that this morning; thanks!

              Comments

              1. By cruel (195.68.219.2) on

                > Yes, I saw that this morning; thanks!

                can you post your build result to ports@?

                Comments

                1. By Anonymous Coward (68.43.94.80) on

                  As soon as I've tested this new "methodology" yes.

  3. By Excellent! (203.58.120.11) djm@ on

    Great news! We really need a working office suite, you can only get so far with antiword...

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.208.173) on

      > Great news! We really need a working office suite, you can only get so far with antiword...

      I'm curious. Does KOffice have problems? Abiword? (I'm a Latex person .. I've opened these programs, but never tried to use them for anything).

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (68.167.146.78) on

        > > Great news! We really need a working office suite, you can only get so far with antiword...
        >
        > I'm curious. Does KOffice have problems? Abiword? (I'm a Latex person .. I've opened these programs, but never tried to use them for anything).

        KOffice has one major issue, if you want to use it in most offices, and that would be not-so-refined compatibility with the proprietary MS Office file formats which are in so widespread use today. OpenOffice.org's compatibility with these EVIL formats (chiefly because they're proprietary), on the other hand, is stellar.

        Other than that, there's nothing really "wrong" with KOffice, or Abiword/Gnumeric, for that matter. You just have to stay with Rich Text Format or CSV if you want to exchange documents with most folks out there...today. OpenDocument, of course, can change that, and we need to do whatever we can, no matter how small, to ensure that this comes to pass. That's why Microsoft is so damned scared silly of it.

        And as for LaTeX, it's a terrific typesetting tool. I know of several mathematics professors who switched from MS Word's "Equation Editor" to LaTeX to make their student handouts and haven't looked back since. Having grown up on BookMaster on the IBM System/390 (yes, the dinosaur^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmainframe), I can appreciate what LaTeX is capable of doing and how it works. Unfortunately, most people grow up these days on MS Office and nothing else. Ugh....

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (134.58.253.130) on

          Unfortunately, most people grow up these days on MS Office and nothing else. Ugh....

          In academic circles, LaTeX is very popular and widely used. Almost all students in engineering, mathematics, science, ... use LaTeX for their master thesis. The vast majority of scientific papers I read during the past years were made in LaTeX as well.

          And the learning curve isn't that steep. Many students here only start learning LaTeX in their final year and manage to write their thesis in it without major problems.

          Actually, I even use LaTeX for all kinds of documents now, not just scientific documents. Never looked back after switching from office suits 5 years ago, really.

          But still, OpenOffice can be nice, for those times when people send me Microsoft Office documents that I absolutely have to read.

          Comments

          1. By frantisek holop (165.72.200.11) on

            > In academic circles, LaTeX is very popular and widely used.

            give ConTeXt a try, much better than latex.
            http://wiki.contextgarden.net/OpenBSD_installation

            to use the linux vs BSD analogy:
            \latex is like linux, \context is like BSD

            Comments

            1. By Anonymous Coward (128.151.93.185) on

              > give ConTeXt a try, much better than latex.
              >
              > to use the linux vs BSD analogy:
              > \latex is like linux, \context is like BSD

              Do you want to tell us why? If not, I think I'll stick with LaTeX.

              Comments

              1. By frantisek holop (165.72.200.11) on

                easy:

                to do bit more complicated stuff in latex one needs a mish mash of
                ctan packages. my thesis had a friendly number of 8 packages to
                accomplish certain stuff. while the semantics are similar (we talking
                tex here), different package authors had different "styles" for param
                passing, etc, and of course there were clashes: packages
                fighting for tex internals.

                i was more than happy when i have found _memoir_ which was the most
                advanced tex package i have ever seen. could do all the stuff those
                little packages did. but memoir is not developed anymore and had its
                own share of problems.

                so one day i said i need a coherent environment for my documents and
                context is precisely that. i was reluctant at first, but have never
                looked back. context is the future, latex is the past.

                sounds just like my path from linux the openbsd :-)

          2. By cruel (62.221.44.170) on

            > But still, OpenOffice can be nice, for those times when people send me Microsoft Office documents that I absolutely have to read.

            agreed. OOo guys develop office suite plus do some PR. we can ignore things and call OOo "a monster" (personally I call it OpenmOnster.org), but market is changing fast and today OOo has more power than 2 years ago.

            OOo is slow and full of bugs, but it is more or less free and more or less compatible with Microsoft document formats. Koffice is fast and less buggy, but compatibility is very low.

            OOo should be used as a gate to OpenDocument world for OpenBSD desktop users. so let's help robert@ with port, use OOo until OpenDocument become de-facto standard, than throw it away and switch to Koffice ;) he-he ;)

          3. By steven (134.58.253.114) on

            > And the learning curve isn't that steep.
            > Many students here only start learning LaTeX in their final year and manage to write their thesis in it without major problems.
            >
            > Actually, I even use LaTeX for all kinds of documents now, not just scientific documents.
            > Never looked back after switching from office suits 5 years ago, really.

            FWIW, an OpenBSD port of Kile is coming up; this is a KDE-based integrated LaTeX environment which may ease switching from office suites.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (68.167.146.78) on

      > Great news! We really need a working office suite, you can only get so far with antiword...

      Well, we actually *do* have a working office suite for OpenBSD--KOffice--and it's actually fairly decent. I find AbiWord and Gnumeric quite capable as well. However, the Big Deal (TM) is near-perfect compatibility with the MS Office proprietary file formats, at which OpenOffice.org shines. It is because of OO.o and Evolution (MS Exchange Server at work, sadly) that I've been "Windows Free Since 2003", even at work, a total "Microsoft shop". It is wonderful. I am, unfortunately, the only one at work to do this.

      It's my understanding that Evolution has now been ported to OpenBSD. If this does happen with OpenOffice.org as well, then, hoo-boy, we'll have the most secure "Microsoft-compatible" work PC's in the known universe!

      Robert, thank you for being willing to take this on.

      Of course, now that we know that there's an imminent MS Office plug-in for the OpenDocument formats, OpenOffice.org itself should eventually become less critical. That would be a Very Good Thing, since that's the whole point of OpenDocument in the first place. Then, we can just use KOffice on OpenBSD, since it, too, supports OpenDocument today.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.208.173) on

        > [SNIP] .. OpenBSD--KOffice--and it's actually fairly decent. ..[SNIP]

        This thread inspired me to poke around a bit. I have to say KOffice certainly looks good (all of KDE in fact -- it is much snappier than I expected) -- but my cynicism for office applications remains forever tainted by a Wordperfect5.x/thesis chapter incident I won't get into (yes, I hold a grudge for a long time). With OpenOffice rumoured to be an ungainly pig with quality issues, it strikes me that KOffice may actually have a brighter future ( at least on Unix platforms) in the long term. Even if OO has the momentum right now.

        As an aside, I did note that Kivio doesn't seem to be working .. a temporary OpenBSD thing I assume (?).

        Comments

        1. By Lars Hansson (203.65.245.7) lars@unet.net.ph on

          > As an aside, I did note that Kivio doesn't seem to be working .. a temporary OpenBSD thing I assume (?).

          How do you mean not working? It works just fine for me.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.208.173) on

            > > As an aside, I did note that Kivio doesn't seem to be working .. a temporary OpenBSD thing I assume (?).
            >
            > How do you mean not working? It works just fine for me.
            >
            >

            It dies with the following error on load (and never opens a window):

            koffice (lib kofficecore): WARNING: Cannot load specified object

            Are you using OpenBSD 3.9?

        2. By Anonymous Coward (68.167.146.78) on

          > > [SNIP] .. OpenBSD--KOffice--and it's actually fairly decent. ..[SNIP]
          >
          > This thread inspired me to poke around a bit. I have to say KOffice certainly looks good (all of KDE in fact -- it is much snappier than I expected) -- but my cynicism for office applications remains forever tainted by a Wordperfect5.x/thesis chapter incident I won't get into (yes, I hold a grudge for a long time).

          [snipped]

          Your WordPerfect 5.x issue is exactly why every one of us needs to get strongly behind the OpenDocument formats. Having multiple implementations of a file format specification can save your backside. Here's just one example. OpenOffice.org, while justly known for being a resource pig, is equally justly known for the ability to repair MS Office files that MS Office itself has corrupted and cannot read! :-D However, that ability was gained only after a ton of very difficult reverse-engineering to make a kick-ass set of MS Office-compatible filters. OpenDocument, being open, makes the ridiculous need for such reverse-engineering unnecessary.

          Remember that the WordPerfect formats, like the MS Office formats, are proprietary and controlled by a single vendor. Proprietary formats and procotols are *BAD* for Free Software and for freedom in general.

        3. By Anonymous Coward (203.113.233.17) on

          > > [SNIP] .. OpenBSD--KOffice--and it's actually fairly decent. ..[SNIP]
          >
          > This thread inspired me to poke around a bit. I have to say KOffice certainly looks good (all of KDE in fact -- it is much snappier than I expected) -- but my cynicism for office applications remains forever tainted by a Wordperfect5.x/thesis chapter incident I won't get into (yes, I hold a grudge for a long time). With OpenOffice rumoured to be an ungainly pig with quality issues, it strikes me that KOffice may actually have a brighter future ( at least on Unix platforms) in the long term. Even if OO has the momentum right now.
          >
          > As an aside, I did note that Kivio doesn't seem to be working .. a temporary OpenBSD thing I assume (?).
          >
          >


          Ever heard of backups.

  4. By Åke Nordin (194.237.142.11) moose@enting.se on

    Are there any (archived) channels to discuss this little toy project on, like a mailing list/web page/blog/wiki? I spent two minutes at the OOo porting page and acquired a slight headache just trying to figure if there even is a suitable compiler available (does it have to be bug-compatible with older GCC [libstd]c++ to do the job?) I assume there is quite some learning ahead if one should try to scale this little hill, sharing experiences seems vital...

    Comments

    1. By Brad (216.138.195.228) brad at comstyle dot com on

      The answers to your questions are pretty straightforward. The porting effort can be discussed on the ports@ mailing list. The compiler being used is the compiler that ships with OpenBSD. The current releases, 3.8, 3.9 and -current come with gcc 3.3.5.

  5. By Frank Denis (212.129.63.1) on http://forum.manucure.info

    Openoffice is neat, but the sad reality is that it is dog slow.

    MS Office runs with Wine, and it's actually faster and lighter. Sure, it's not free, though.

    But having Wine (not a 10-years old version) on OpenBSD would really be cute. Internet Explorer is shitty software, but it's required for web site development. And it runs with Wine. But not on OpenBSD yet.

    Has anyone looked at why current Wine versions are always dumping core on OpenBSD?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (134.58.253.131) on

      But having Wine (not a 10-years old version) on OpenBSD would really be cute. Internet Explorer is shitty software, but it's required for web site development. And it runs with Wine. But not on OpenBSD yet.

      I found rdesktop to be a good alternative to using Wine. I use an second hand computer running Windows XP to test webpages in Internet Explorer, to convert Microsoft Office documents to PDF's, ...

      This machine doesn't take up much space, it doesn't need a screen, keyboard or mouse, and I can effortlessly "use" Windows on my OpenBSD laptop when sitting in the sun. :-)

      Of course there's an OpenBSD firewall in front of this machine, only allowing access through a VPN.

    2. By cruel (62.221.44.170) on

      > Has anyone looked at why current Wine versions are always dumping core on OpenBSD?

      maybe because wine requires kernel threads for now?

  6. By squeege (192.139.71.69) on

    Thank you! This would make being Windows-free a lot more feasible. Keep up the great work.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (82.43.92.127) on

      > Thank you! This would make being Windows-free a lot more feasible. Keep up the great work.

      Even if you are Windows encumbered, as some of us are at work, OpenOffice.org gives us a way to interact with the MSO drones without the extortionate price tag. This work is extremely important to promote OpenDocument as widely as possible to slowly erode the prevalence of MSO closed formats.

      Thanks to everyone who makes efforts to bring OpenOffice.org to as wide an audience as possible.

  7. By Stefan (213.145.114.120) on http://www.rommelwood.de/~guebbbi

    Thank you for porting OOo. Perhaps rewriting would be the easier task:) I once had a look at the monster but quickly realized it is no job for me. I am really looking forward someone subduing it. Linux emulation works for me, but I don't like it that much. K* is also not an option so many people like me are waiting for the OOo port to make the desktop complete. (I don't expect my wife will ever learn how to use emacs and LaTeX.)

  8. By Robroy Gregg (63.249.88.156) robroy@armory.com on

    Robert, thank you so much for looking in to a native OOo port! It is probably one of the most wanted applications on OpenBSD these days.

    Several of my friends and I have been using OpenBSD 3.8 with the Linux OOo, which, other than being very slow, works fine until it freezes! It freezes up, sometimes remaining on the processor and sometimes going to sleep, after a seemingly random amount of moderate to heavy use. I've seen this problem on four (very) different physical computers now so I know others must be running in to this as well.

    This unpredictable freezing problem keeps it from being very useful, since you can't really trust important data to it, and it could keep people who need MS Office interop. from using OpenBSD altogether. Even if the freezing is due to OOo bugs that would be "ported" to the native port, it would be much easier to debug from that point on!

    Thank you again Robert!
    Robroy Gregg
    Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Comments

    1. By White Boy! (198.107.28.202) on

      > Robert, thank you so much for looking in to a native OOo port! It is probably one of the most wanted applications on OpenBSD these days.
      >
      > Several of my friends and I have been using OpenBSD 3.8 with the Linux OOo, which, other than being very slow, works fine until it freezes! It freezes up, sometimes remaining on the processor and sometimes going to sleep, after a seemingly random amount of moderate to heavy use. I've seen this problem on four (very) different physical computers now so I know others must be running in to this as well.
      >
      > This unpredictable freezing problem keeps it from being very useful, since you can't really trust important data to it, and it could keep people who need MS Office interop. from using OpenBSD altogether. Even if the freezing is due to OOo bugs that would be "ported" to the native port, it would be much easier to debug from that point on!
      >
      > Thank you again Robert!
      > Robroy Gregg
      > Santa Cruz, CA, USA

      I love this stuff.

  9. By TimH (66.39.160.90) on

    Peter made a lot of code changes and fixes to the OOo code he was working on. Did any of those patches find their way back into the OOo code? I guess I'm wondering about their process and if contributions are handled well.

  10. By Anonymous Coward (203.113.233.17) on

    bah humbug what a waste of time. Who needs OpenOffice. Real men use vi or emacs +- Tex/Latex. You are all a bunch of weenies.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (68.43.94.80) on

      > bah humbug what a waste of time. Who needs OpenOffice. Real men use vi or emacs +- Tex/Latex. You are all a bunch of weenies.

      Absolutely true! You got that right. We are weenies!

      We're especially weenie when we need to be able to collaborate with people who use and rely upon MSOffice products.

      What we weenies really need is a LaTeX input filter for PowerPoint 2003. Have you got one handy? :)

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