“An operating system without an office suite is limited in its mass market appeal, making this a fairly serious issue. When yellowTAB decided to update ZETA’s compiler, much thought was given to this problem in particular, and finally an answer made itself clear.”
Seems we are started to see more and more work happening with Zeta. Its great to see
Absolutely! First couple of years it seemed like there was absolutely nothing going on with Zeta, but now good news just keep coming an coming. Guess they were busy making a foundation.
One of the things that finally induced me to remove BeOS from my list of regularly-used OSes was the lack of a high-end office suite. A native OpenOffice is enough to get me to take a more serious look at Zera.
…to the release of the port (especially the source).
This will be a major leap for the BeOS-decendants as well as for BeOS-inspired OS’es.
Good luck to yT.
Did you guys see the map of dependencies?
:wow:
It’s look like they give a pen to a monkey
Lol I thought it was a joke myself.
Zeta needs a mapping tool.
This is good news. Sounds like a lot of work. Hope they are up to the task!
I’m astonished they put a copyright notice on it, as if someone else would want to steal something that embarrassing. Good luck to the team, though.
I wonder how possible it would be to clean some of that up. Even if it were possible, it seems like it would be quite difficult.
Yeah, I saw it
I’m gonna present it to my classmates tomorrow in System Development.
Redrawing that map could be quite funny
(EDIT: a typo in “saw”)
Edited 2005-11-16 20:21
It seems like Zeta is coming alive.
I think YellowTab had a good sense of working on the right things.
Loved the depencies map!
Very good news. This can benefit both Zeta and Haiku!!
Keep it up YT!
the should have used GraphViz’s neato and a script. I’d be interested in seeing the resulting image. http://www.yellowtab.com/images/news/ooo/dependencies.jpg
http://www.graphviz.org/
Also, if you use SVG obscured text is not lost since it’ll still exist in the XML file
@CaptainPinko:
…which you’ll find here: http://www.bebits.com/app/4238
Hope they will improve their live cd as well. It just wont start up on my notebook
I thought a team at beclan.org was already working on this, but had the project peter out because it was too hard? From what I heard, BeOS’ non-UNIXness prevented the easy porting of a lot of applications (also explaining why the Firefox port took so long).
This is why having a proprietary solution as well as an open one helps BeOS – these sort of projects can be funded. Although I’m definitely not an OOo fan myself, there’s certainly room and a strong market for it on the platform. At the same time though, I can’t help but feel that they would have been better off porting a toolkit like GTK+2 instead.
Actually you don’t need proprietary software to fund projects. For example, Red Hat funds major projects (Glibc, GCC, Linux, Xorg, GNOME, etc) and they’re a free software company.
There’s a difference between commercial and proprietary software. Commercial software can be Free/open source, where proprietary software by definition is not.
What happened to GoBe Productive?
GoBE productive will no longer work after ZETA switches to gcc 4.
It will if what Alan whatever hisname is and Bernd were telling the truth in the interview they did at BeGeisert last but one. They claimed there would be a compatibility layer. This is not hard to do. The Kernel mainly (only?) exports flat C functions, and the BMessage can be flattened to Data, so a GCC4 Appserver could quite happily talk to a GCC2.95 BApplication, so long as there was a version of libbe.so that it could link to.
Two ways of doing that… (1) a dual set of complete libs, (2) a set of stub libs that call the GCC4 code. Niether is ideal, but both _will_ work.
While I like the idea of having an up-to-date office suite on my Zeta installation… I am wondering if OOo is a solution worthy of BeOS. GoBE sure was, but the BeOS version is defunct and out of date.
I realize OOo is their only option, but still. It doesn’t fit BeOS.
This depends how OOo is ported.
If it’s one of the usual braindead ports, then it won’t fit.
However, an office suite written from scratch for BeOS while cannibalizing the source to OOo would fit.
I couldn’t agree more Thom.
This may be obvious but…
BeOS was/is a great OS, but I don’t think it’s realistic to think it can survive the amount of time it would take for somebody to write something as big as a “BeOS-Native” office suite. There are simply not enough developers in it’s small userbase to do this. Even if such a thing appeared tommorrow, without MS Office compatibility it’s useless.
MSOffice compatibility means it must have similar features…features that GoBe Productive fans often refer to as “bloat”. I you personally only use an office suite for simple tasks, it doesn’t make the more advanced features available in MSOffice “bloat”. Business & government *need* these advanced features. Yes, an application should be intuitive and simple and light and fast – but Gobe Productive is frankly limited in it’s features, as wonderful as it is.
The most important consideration is that OO.org is *alive* and is being actively developed. Internally it may be a bowl of spaghetti, but you must admit it has improved in it’s lifetime and it has the momentum to continue to improve. There is just no way the BeOS community could do the same thing – there are too few users & developers. With OO.org, BeOS will continue to inherit the improvements by it’s many developers. OO.org is the frontrunner as an MS Office alternative – it seems to have gained the most traction. It would actually be crazy for Yellow Tab *not* to attempt a port, because BeOS as a platform would be more isolated and limited in appeal, and there would never be enough developers to make the “BeOS Native” applications everyone prefers.
Besides, wouldn’t it be nice to use file formats that are really cross-platform, but have decent features?
I think this shows that Yellow Tab has genuine concern for the future of BeOS, and are not solely trying to make a buck with a “cosmetically improved beta version”.
Actually, I do think they’re trying to make a buck with a cosmetically improved version
BeOS and OOo, a natural fit. OOo is the embodiment of ease of use and speedy interface, it will feel right at home!
No alternatives to suggest though, so better an office suite than none I guess.
OOo isnt extremely fast and use little ram on older systems. hence the reason it ‘doesnt fit’ beos. it just wouldnt feel like a beos app. firefox sure doesnt…
oh, and theres no way i would call openoffice “speedy”.
OOo isnt extremely fast and use little ram on older systems. hence the reason it ‘doesnt fit’ beos. it just wouldnt feel like a beos app. firefox sure doesnt…
oh, and theres no way i would call openoffice “speedy”.
The parent poster was being sarcastic just in case you didn´t noticed it. 🙂
GoBe was pretty nifty back in the day, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time. Also, it’s good that Open Office is being ported, so Zeta/Haiku users will be able to share files with users on different OSs. Open Office is available on just about every OS out there, plus it has fairly decent compatibility with MS Office. This is very important, since so many businesses have standardized on MS Office. The last time I applied for a job, they insisted on resumes bing submitted in .doc format, after my original submission was in .PDF format. I though this strange considering every single computer, regardless of OS has some sort of PDF reader, but they wanted .doc regardless. Hopefully in the future, people will accept Open Document as the new standard for office files, and Be can have a neat little app with support for Open Document that adheres to the spirit of the OS, rather than the big unwieldy mess that is Open Office. Open Office isn’t the elegant solution, but it’s extremely practical in the short term and makes Be/Zeta/Haiku a better contender for increased adoption.
Edited 2005-11-17 01:00
I was scrolling down, saw the article about browsers and OpenDoc, and my first thought was that such a pie in the sky dream would mean I could read my documents in BeOS/Zeta. Then I scroll down and see I actually will be able to. I’m still not quite to the point of being willing to switch back, but damn if it’s not getting really close to that point. Next on my wishlist is a classpath port.
Open Office is slow, fat, and looks like shit. Hardly a poster child for BeOS decendents. When it’s ported, I’d suggest they hold back, take a holiday, then take some time to polish what they’ve got. Why? First and foremost, Yellow Tab shouldn’t confuse being warm and fluffy towards Open Office with their own need to make Zeta fly. If they embrace Open Office with closed eyes and a drippy smile, they’re just going to drag themselves down to its level. Better to force Open Office to smarten up rather than yourself dumb down.
“Open Office is slow, fat, and looks like shit.”
And yet it’s still better than what they’ve got now for a modern office. That comes out worse in all three catagories because there’s nothing there at all to move at any speed. This is one of the reasons I’m glad there’s both an open source and commercial path for BeOS. Yellowtab’s more concerned with pleasing as large a percentage of the customer base as possible, idiology be damned.
This is one of the reasons I’m glad there’s both an open source and commercial path for BeOS.
You mean: An open source and a proprietary path for BeOS.
OpenOffice.org IS commercial – what it isn’t is proprietary
Do not mix the terms “proprietary” with “open source”.
But no doubt there is a room for open source as well as proprietary software on BeOS, ZETA and Haiku. No doubt at all.
As old as the OO source code is, I’d love to see a full analysis of the dependency structure, complete with metrics above and beyond the graph. I have a strong suspicion that like many applications that have code that old with that many different developers through the years, that it has lots of cycles both large and small.
Those cycles in the dependency graph increase the cost of porting/building something at a non-linear rate as it takes more RAM, hard drive space and time to build something. Such dependency graphs naturally lead to monolithic codebases, because when you try to use one thing, you take a lot of the system with it when you want to use it somewhere else.
Of course, since I can’t make out their hand-scrawled dependency chart (I don’t even want to contemplate how long that took to scribble!) I can’t readily see how many of those arrows directly or indirectly go both directions between things
Jonathan Thompson
Doesn’t OpenOffice need Java to build ?
Doesn’t OpenOffice need Java to build ?
AFAIK the newer versions don’t.
gcj4 is part of gcc4 and is used by Ubuntu and others to deal with the Java dependencies of OpenOffice.org 2.
cheers,
dalibor topic
If YT focuses on porting OO I don’t think the issue that BeOS is non-UNIX will be a big one. Porting is always hard for big projects, and the documentation, build-system and code-quality is much bigger issues than that BeOS is special. Another big issue is the man-hours that can be put into the porting, where YT will have a nice edge: full time employees
Also lets hope OO is less of a moving target than Firefox is.
/TQH
Well, that does it. It is official. Operating Systems are now obsolete – mere platforms to run the same old, same old applications on. A few old-fashioned fanatics may still try to re-run last century’s flamefests. But for most people, the OS will be irrelevant. As long as you can run OOo and FF, who cares what they are running on?
Might just as well run windows then, right? Somehow, I don’t think this was how it was supposed to work out. An OOo/FF duopoly is not much of an improvement over an MS monopoly. Competition was supposed to *increase* our choices …
Might just as well run windows then, right? Somehow, I don’t think this was how it was supposed to work out. An OOo/FF duopoly is not much of an improvement over an MS monopoly. Competition was supposed to *increase* our choices ..
It is a huge improvement over MS monopoly because of one thing: open standards. If ODF becomes the de facto standard, competing products will have a far lower treshold to climb when entering the market. An office can choose to use another office suite without having to worry about compatibility with other offices.
OOo is currently the only opensource office suite that can stand up against MS Office, and it runs on Windows which makes transitions way easier. Moving over to KOffice would be a far more difficult task for an office running windows.
OOo/FF might be standard among OSS but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t choices.
Someone will invent a better office suite still adhering to the standards. Not sure what your point is here. The good thing is that documents will become interchangeable no matter what OS or product you use. This is VERY good.
For ages some scientists are arguing that “the end of all os” is near. Can’t hear that nonsense any longer…
Damn, if Zeta gets _native_ OpenOffice before OSX does I’ll have to buy zeta just to show respect. Just wait and see.
Any port of an open source program is ALWAYS welcome.
It can bring more users to both projects (Zeta/OO) and to Haiku too !
Anyway i think that a port of WINE should be more interesting for everyone…
Marco Ravich
Well, it’s that “worthy of BeOS” part that’s the problem. BeOS is lucky to even still exist. The realistic way to look at it is why would someone go through all the trouble of porting Open Office for what’s basically only a hobby OS now and a rather half assed one at that.