OpenBSD Journal

OpenOffice Port (under Emulation) Available for Testing

Contributed by jose on from the strangte-but-true dept.

Michael Schubert has released a test copy of a port of OpenOffice to OpenBSD for testing. You'll need the following things to make it build: PROCFS enabled in your kernel and mounted on /proc (available in GENERIC, run "mount_procfs /proc /proc" to visualize it), and enough space to make Linux emulation ready to go (either 6.2p6 or 8.0 will do). Michael reports that about 1/3 of the people who test it have success, and it requires about 4GB of disk to make the port work (ie 4GB of build space). Be sure to read the entire thread on the subject before you embark on this. Perhaps you can help him make this work right.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Okay, so it sort-of installs on OpenBSD 1/3rd of the time... It's still running under Linux emulation.

    Just install OOo on a Linux box, and copy the installation over. It'll work every time.

    This doesn't exactly add much.

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

      it buys me something big: i dont have to retask a machine to be a linux box. i don't have the system to spare any more. i bet others are in the same boat.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        I'm sure someone could install it on their Linux box and just make a tarball available.

        Then you and others wouldn't need a Linux box of your own.

        Comments
        1. By schubert () on

          Nobody particulary wants to host an 80mb tarball for random strangers to go downloading. The port uses a whopping 21kb and if it works right it takes care of everything for you.

    2. By Anonymous Coward () on

      I think this is a step in the right direction as opposed to building it on a linux box and then transferring it over.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    3. By schubert () on

      Well I'm hoping to narrow down the exact cause of WHY the install fails for some people but not for others. One 2 of my test machines (-current and 3.3-STABLE) the port works _every_ time

      And it has worked for other people without a problem. I'm thinking there is some depedency or some subtle change I'm not seeing thats needed.

  2. By djm () on

    What are the issues with building it natively? Is the the 4Gb disk requirement alluded to in the referenced thread or something else?

    Comments
    1. By schubert () on

      Its 3-4GB for a _native_ build. This is only the emulated installation of the linux binaries. which needs about ~110MB for the install and another 200MB for the installed files.

      Comments
      1. By djm () on

        That is 3-4Gb during the build, not the installed binaries? Does the native build work OK?

        Comments
        1. By schubert () on

          No. :-) If it did nobody would waste their time on an emulated port. FreeBSD had to jump through quite alot of hoops just to get it working and alot of their changes really apply to OpenBSD now.

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward () on

            And to add insult to injury, the native FreeBSD port isn't anywhere near as stable as the Linux version under emulation. :-D

            Comments
            1. By David Gerard () on http://velvet.net/~fun/

              Yep. The FreeBSD version is notoriously not ready for prime time. As we discovered last week when we spent four days installing it from ports, on the foolish assumption that being in ports meant that it would at least sort of work. I will be trying the Linux binaries on said box some time soon.

  3. By schubert () on

    I've also already started looking at doing a native build. Currently the showstopper is the expat module (this is the same code that is causing the mozilla port not to have proper anti-aliased font support)

    Comments
    1. By Meme () on

      Why bother at all? Who'd run OpenBSD as a desktop OS?

      Comments
      1. By James () quel AT quelrod DOT net on http://www.quelrod.net

        it's running on my dell inspiron 8500 laptop as well as all my production servers.

        Posts like this are not helpful. Extolling that people should just use freebsd or linux does not help the community. There are lots of features that openbsd has such as PF, buffer overflow protections, etc. that make it attractive for use. Features like this can't be touched by other open source os'es. (Not without tons of patches and other fun.)

        If you make statements like this then why not just say "it's stupid for anyone to use anything other than windows." I fail to see what you wish to achieve by such a blatently ignorant statement.

        I once had the same school of thought that you did until I tried it myself, perhaps you should too.

      2. By Anonymous Coward () on

        Me.

      3. By Peter Hessler () spambox@theapt.org on http://www.theapt.org

        I do. on i386 and macppc hardware. Runs quite well, thank you.

        Hmm, looks like I forgot to not feed the trolls. ;-)

      4. By Anonymous Coward () on

        I do. It's small, fast, secure and just what I need to monitor my other systems. I also get a significant amount of work done on the OpenBSD machine. For example, my dev environments are hosted on dev machines, i.e. developers login and do their work 'remotely'. Who needs a windows box to do that? X with a decent window manager is all that is needed.

      5. By Anonymous Coward () on

        What idiots run Linux, FreeBSD as a desktop OS? They should freakin use Windows. Even better, MacOS x.

        (pause)

        Did *I* say that?

        (pretends to look around embarrassed)

        I don't tell you what to do. You don't tell me what to do. If everyone thought like this troll did 20 years ago, we'd still be using CP/M or DOS, and ex as our sole editors.

        *I* use OBSD as a desktop OS because I like it. Because, for me, despite having nearly 2 dozen machines to mess with, I like having 1 platform which I depend on and am used to for my more critical applications (iow, I'm not running AutoCAD on OBSD and don't pretend to).

        If you don't use OBSD as a desktop OS, good for you. At least I hope you tried to before dismissing it.

        Comments
        1. By Scott Fraser () sfraser@deckersinc.com on mailto:sfraser@deckersinc.com

          As I descend into the troll depths, please bear with me.

          I have used OBSD for servers for a few years now. I have been running Linux since late '92. I love my Mac OS X, but the hardware is SO damn expensive compared to PC stuff.

          So I am about to migrate my ever faithful Debian/Linux Desktop box, over to a OBSD box...

          I don't like Open Office, but will need something under OBSD...Is there ANYTHING else out there that will open and work with MS Office files?

          From past experience, I loved my Corel Office for Linux, but there has not been any news about a port to *BSD. What about something like WINE running Office 2000 or Office 97?

          Sorry if these sound like dumb questions, and if I am psting in the wrong spot, please re-direct me.

          Personally, I love the security of OBSD, and that's enough for me.

          Cheers folks,
          Scooter

      6. By cc () maxentropic at hotmail dot com on mailto:maxentropic at hotmail dot com

        Not me, but not because I don't want to. It is probably the easiest to install OS I've ever used, and the security is great and easier to use (and get right) than with Linux, IMHO. But I can't get some apps to run, and don't have the time or knowledge to do so. I also have to use Windoze enough that VMware is more than a luxury these days, and the current version doesn't run on anything but Linux and Windoze.

        I still use it for my firewall, though. And I applaud these efforts, because they offer the user a _choice_ of OS, which to me is the greatest benefit of open source. It's too bad that some of the larger OSS packages (like Mozilla and OpenOffice) aren't ported to/tested on more platforms, but I understand that there are only so many hours in a day.

        cc

      7. By RC () on

        Me. On the rather new notebook I'm typing on right now.

  4. By Jim Michael () on

    This is just my 'vote' of appreciation if they can get OpenOffice to work properly under emulation. I would like very much to use OpenBSD for all of my desktop needs but I have to work a lot with M$ documents and I need a stable graphic web browser. OpenBSD makes an exceptional desktop OS and being able to run OpenOffice under emulation would be exceptional! Thanks for the work that is being done.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      The best thing to do is to compile koffice (part of KDE). It runs on QT and has to load KDE base, but that really doesn't take up much extra memory. It has rather good Microsoft Office filters as well, and is far more stable than OpenOffice.

      Comments
      1. By jim () on

        Thanks for the tip! I'll try it out tonight.

      2. By Dan Jones () dan.jones@colorado.edu on mailto:dan.jones@colorado.edu

        My experience has been that koffice works fine for simple documents but the filters in OpenOffice are superior for more complex documents. Of course OpenOffice is not perfect either (embedded Visio object cause it to crash).

  5. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Anyone made a package for easy installation?

    Would be very useful :)

    Comments
    1. By schubert () on

      If you can find me a place to host the ~72MB package I'll upload it.

      Comments
      1. By Darren () darren@nospam.dazdaz.nospammers.org on mailto:darren@nospam.dazdaz.nospammers.org


        Cool! Great job.

        I don't personally have space at the moment, but
        why not email Open Office themselves, i'm sure they'd be more than happy to host the package.

        announce@openoffice.org
        webmaster@openoffice.org

        Regards

  6. By Anonymous Coward () on

    It's worth making the point that Open Office is'nt 100% compatible/perfect with Microsoft Word documents yet. I've loaded up a couple of documents that it did'nt format correctly.

    Comments
    1. By schubert () on

      Well thats no fault of OpenBSD obviously :-) Luckily abiword and koffice both exist in ports. You may have better luck with those.

      I would also wonder what version of openoffice was this? They've made 3 minor releases since the first one.

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