SGI recently completed its port of OpenOffice.org 1.0.3.1 to IRIX. It’s available in tarball format here or with IRIX desktop integration and in inst format here.
OpenOffice.org Ported to SGI IRIX
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Is it SGI alone or involving those OO.org?
SGI plus a third party contractor it seems.
Details of the porting effort are posted at the http://porting.openoffice.org/irix web site. SGI had 2+ contractors working on the port for roughly 18 months. As with any open source effort we were working with the OpenOffice.org group. Just to put the effort in perspective, when we started the port a scratch build took almost 1 full week of compiling to complete one pass. We worked on making the build more parallel and eventually got that down to well under
8 hours on a 32P system. The UNO bridges work was the most difficult part of the porting effort but once that work was completed the rest came together much faster. The final packaging for SGI’s inst images, desktop integration, and integration with Netscape and Mozilla’s mailcap/mime.type systems was completed after the core functionality was working.
Victor
That good since it let me know that the OO.org team might be concentrating on improving the OO itself. Porting to other platform is good but improving the OO itself is the most required job.
I said this as a full time user of OO at work. I found a lot of weakness in OO that was eliminated long ago in other office apps especially MSOffice. Some of the issues I’ve already reported to OO.org since I didn’t have time (maybe knowledge too – I’ve never tried) to do it myself.
Maybe after this the SGI team can help resolving the remaining problems inside OO. OO will be a real competitor to MSO if it can be made faster and easier to use.
How many people use an SGI box as their desktop machine? An SGI box to run a word processor?
>How many people use an SGI box as their desktop machine?
There are still quite a number of hollywood 3D people who use only SGIs, plus the SGI engineers and the IRIX third party developers. It seems that there was a small need for an office suite, and SGI made sure they filled up that need.
That’s very cool for OO, but as far as SGI is concerned it’s a tad too late. After the raping they gave us on Varsity program licensing we hardly have an installation of IRIX to install the port on. We had a single O2k cost more in licensing overnight than the whole organization (hundreds of licenses) did just a year before. IRIX was inovative in it’s day, but we surely didn’t miss the bill. Tack that on to the worst support record we’d ever seen in a commercial UNIX vendor and poof… so long.. happy trails.. etc etc.
-B
“How many people use an SGI box as their desktop machine? An SGI box to run a word processor?”
This makes SGI a better choice for me than Linux as there is so much better support for video and 3d modelling on SGI workstations and now I can write on them too.
Now I can finally compare the performance of an O2 to a 300 Mhz G3.
an off topic war of Linux Vs IRIX.
But with all the work SGI has done to Linux it almost is IRIX.
Though Red Hat severely munged chkconfig. The IRIX implementation is so much more elegant.
And I hope I never have to see another /etc/config/netif.options or /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file again.
but an example to other programmers what can be achieved when the software is written from the ground up to be operating system and archictecture independent.
Just jumped over to http://www.openoffice.org and have a look at the SAL documentation regarding the multi platform API set.
This is really great news, finally the Irixpeople get a decent Office Suite, AbiWord on Irix is not very good and not all the export filters work, If Eugenia still has access to an SGI box, I for one would love to see how this thing performs.
What’s wrong with this?
– And I hope I never have to see another /etc/config/netif.options or /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file again. –
Works great here…
I gave my father a O2 for his “daily” work. And my father now NOTHING about computers, now with OO he can do lot of more stuff with the SGI
You ***GAVE*** away an O2? Damn I’d love to have one, let alone be able to just casually give one away! Sigh…
SGI’s always made me drool…the untouchable (that is, affordable) computer(s) of my dreams since jr high…
Just jumped over to http://www.openoffice.org and have a look at the SAL documentation regarding the multi platform API set.
Yeah, I’d love to. Where is it exactly? The only references to “SAL” I can find on the website are in the class reference documentation.
sal = System Abstraction Layer. Low level API for the integration of all supported platforms. Defines a platform independent C language API to be used in a generic way in higher layers.
http://udk.openoffice.org/
for more information. SAL can be seen as a name for the whole API set.
Thanks. Looks like an interesting couple of days reading.
Man I could have used that a aloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooog time ago. But I don’t have the O2 anymore.
To bad I cannot run it on IRIX 6.2 on this old indy here
LOL, and still no BeOS port …
And you’re surprised? this is the reality of the no-legacy movement. No legacy, so software. Sorry, BeOS had its chance, it is dead now. Stopping flogging the dead horse and move on.
[Deleted by the admin – get a clue Todu]
Are you fucking stupid??? You got that same comment modded down twice already, and you go and put it up AGAIN?! For gods sake, respect the admins. And you’re giving Linux users (me being one of them) a bad name with an attitude like that. There ARE better unices than linux, you’re clearly showing everyone how ignorant you really are, posting deadbeat comments like that on virtually every article’s comments. Go back to slashdot.
Eugenia: Add ability to log on and never have to see dumb fuck’s comments like those to your subscription thing, and i’m in. That feature would be worth more to me than not seeing ads.
Just ignore Todu…he’s a total f*cking dink. Maybe if we’re lucky he’ll just go away.
Anyway…to post something ON topic…
This story reminds me just how much I want an IRIX box to play around with…even if it’s just ssh-able shell access.
Anyone know of a free IRIX shell account out there? Just for people like me who love to play?
Well i had a account on a Origin 3800 (40 processors, 40GB RAM) for my final year project in university, nice system, i like the way that Irix tar will accept wildcard and untar all the .tar files in directory. Try this with Gnu tar and u’ll get an error.
Most of the people on it were using bash as their standard shell from what i could gather.
that’s why some of us learn UNIX
for x in *.tar
do
tar -xf $x
done
guess I was just annoyed.
I like GNU tar cuz it handles both gz and bz2 compression. Forget if IRIX does or not, but I know Sun’s tar really annoys me at times. I really wish all these commands worked the same across platforms. It sucks when you get used to some options that don’t exist on the other systems you have to work on.
First of all I’m happy to finally see something written about SGI and Irix. but also I’d like to congratulate them on their new Office kit.
Hopefully we’ll see more of SGI soon, especially on my desk ;P
“Hopefully we’ll see more of SGI soon..”
I believe they are about to launch a new quad R16K workstation soon, whether or not that machine will end up on our deskd is highly questionable