OpenOffice.org: KDE Integration project launched today

The
OpenOffice.org KDE Integration project
has been launched today.
Maybe you remember
Cuckooo,
a KPart allowing OOo to be embedded in the Konqueror window (as a viewer).
In the meantime this has evolved into an
OpenOffice.org Qt port and the development does not stop there.
KDE Integration is now an official
"Incubator" project at
OpenOffice.org, which means that it has been accepted by the OpenOffice.org community and if it continues well, it will become an official "accepted" project.

You can help with the development and speed it up. You can subscribe to
its
mailing lists
, download the sources and code!

As many people have been asking for a KDE compatible look for OpenOffice.org
a KDE Native Widget Framework subproject has been added to the main page
as well.
It has not started yet but if there are volunteers that want to
work on it they are very welcome! I will try my best to help you.
More information about OOo's Native Widget Framework can be found
here
and
here.

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Comments

by Thomas (not verified)

I've to admit... Yesterday I mailed a list of addresses over to a company for them to sent little christmas presents to selected customers of my business. The preferred format was OO.o sxc...
I was a little bit surprised as it was a very well-doing company. If they choose OO.o they won't choose it for the reason of saving a bit of money... (It was Niederegger Marchpane, located at Lübeck, northern Germany http://www.niederegger.de/. They are aparently using OO.o/SO)

by Alex (not verified)

I meant for businesses that USE Linux.

by Jadrian (not verified)

I also think this is a very smart move.

Qt port seems a huge job though. Right now there are many simple things that could improve OO.org experience in KDE, like better drag and drop support from konqueror.
In OODraw for instance it seems to work but just stores the pic url! If you move the documents or the pics, you lose the pics from the doc!!
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=23526
In OOWriter sometimes it works, it works, sometimes it doesn't accept the pic so you have to do copy/paste...

Anyway! Thanks and Good Luck!!

by ac (not verified)

Rant:

I don't care how many office solutions are created.
I don't care how many different styles, icons, widgets, api's gui's come with each.
I don't care who creates what, where why and for whom.
I don't care by who each is created.

As long as any office suit follows at least some STANDARDS as not to explicitly RULE OUT one office suite above others.

End rant.

by ybouan (not verified)

Koffice looks great but they still have ways to go. I can only use it for text files.

The begining of KDE/OOo cooperation is upcoming use of OOo's file format and filters for Koffice. With this good idea I might be able to use it more.

For NOW I can do with OOo's toolkit (I installed the icon patch from kde-look.org) because OOo does the job.

What really gives me trouble every day and needs to be fixed is:
1- Cut and paste of text doesn't work from OOo to Kmail (or is it Mandrake?)
2- The file and print dialogs need to use the KDE equivalent.

by Carsten (not verified)

To 1: Neither nor :-)
I use Mandrake 9.2 and OO 1.1. I can copy&paste from
KMail to OO and also from OO to KMail.

To 2: Would be nice, but the printing works perfectly
here with cups and a HP LaserJet 1300.

Carsten

by aleXXX (not verified)

Hi,

I'm currently working on some code to use the kde file manager and the kde ioslaves via a simple C api. This should be easy to integrate into OOo, maybe even via LD_PRELOADING.

Probably I'll put it into kdenonbeta within the net week.

Another thought: MS has two office suites, MS Office and MS Works... we have OOo and koffice... maybe not so bad after all ? Two office suites at different levels... maybe...

Bye
Alex

by Gerd (not verified)

I haerd there already was a script to replace OO.org Icons by Crystal.

by ArmsDealer (not verified)

Standards are important but I like Kwrite and all the other things that come as standard already. Love the K news ticker thats how I found out about this project I hope to see more sources of news as well. (good not junk) Practicly anything that is about important developments.

http://linux-enduser.tripod.com modzilla browsers will see jiberish.

Getting the clipboard working really WELL, I recommend come before anything else

I and a few others are getting somewhere at least by implementing Linux/KDE in a big company. There are only a few really issues, but those _are_ really annoying as they are perceived as "simple"

Keep up the good work. Hope you'll consider them

by Daniel (not verified)

The project will die a slow withering death. And it will drag the KOffice down as well for a while.

1. Office is primarily a business tool. Without the business support things like that wither away. UserLinux had a point when it chose GNOME. Sun will not be able to sell the commercial QT-OOo without paying to TrollTech. <- QTOOo not a reality in any usefull form.

2. Ppl droping interest in KOffice and jumping on a OOo wagon says much about their interest in KOffice developement.

The future of KDE-native office is very sad. It's even more sad-er cause i use KDE and would like to stick with it.

by James O (not verified)

I'm sure Sun can afford the one-off payment for a developers licence to QT.

by anon coward (not verified)

That won't work for open source projects, since sun would've to pay for every developer in this project.

I wonder why trolltech doesn't implement an additional license policy similar to bitkeeper (www.bitkeeper.com). Take a one time fee (some multiple of the per-developer-fee) who want to use QT for open sourced software and require them to publish their code - eliminating the internal GPL'ed software loophole.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

KOffice is not losing developers to OOo as far as I know. If you want to do something about it, sponsor a KOffice developer today.

And another note, Sun could probably save itself a lot of pain time and money by switching OOo to Qt instead of the horrid own-toolkit they use right now. Yes, they'd have to negotiate a deal with Trolltech but chances are it would be hugely worthwhile.

by Anon12 (not verified)

Does this mean I won't need a Quad-Opteron with 2GB of memory to start OOo in less than a half hour?

And a bug. I tried submitting the bug, but lost interest because it's so complicated in submitting it:

When saving web pages in konqueror, it appears that konqueror saves a web page by downloading it again during the save process. This creates a problem since I run konqueror on linux, and I don't shut down my computer at night, it runs for weeks or months without a reboot. So I sometimes have web pages on konqueror sessions that are out of date. When I try saving it, the page has changed, or is no longer available (very common for news sites that only give access to news stories for a few days before archiving them, or move the web page after a few hours or days). Internet explorer does it differently. Instead of downloading the page (again), it saves from the temporary file it created to originally display the page. This allows you to save the page that is staring you in the face, instead of the browser telling you that the page that you were staring at no longer exists (and the page disappears, which brings up another bug: when attempting to view document source, it downloads the document source from the site, instead of pulling it from the existing temporarty html file you already downloaded, so again, if the page has changed, or is no longer available, the source code can't be obtained, even though you were just looking at the page).

A good method would be to 1. check the temporary file originally downloaded to display the page and save from there first, and if unavailable, then 2. try downloading again.

Another important bug or feature request: With Mozilla and Internet Explorer, I can save as: web page including images ("web page complete" instead of "web page html only"). Why can't I do this with Konqueror? I'm not talking about "archiving" the page (useless because of not being able to set it up the same way as "save as"), I'm talking about using the "save as" and also being able to save the images. In Mozilla, it works by saving the html page, and then saving images in a directory that is linked to the page, so that when you open the page from your hard drive, the image links are not broken. Is it really necessary to save a web page and then be forced to go back and save individual images manually, one at a time, and then have to go back and edit the html page so that you don't get broken image links?

btw, kde is great. And thanks. If you could just get rid of some of the bloat...

by Anonymous (not verified)

> I tried submitting the bug, but lost interest because it's so complicated in submitting it

You're doing really bad at interesting developers to fix your complicated bug. If you don't even bother to report the bug, why should a developer bother to fix it?

by Not a programmer (not verified)

I would submit it.

I'm not a programmer. Ask your mom to submit a bug, and see how far she gets.

And that's not meant as sarcasm at your expense. Maybe that's what's missing. Some usability tests. Put non-technical users in front of your projects, see how far they get, and see how you can make it easier for them.

I'm posting the "bug" or feature request here because after a half hour, or hour (actually more), I gave up trying to post it using the programmer's interface for submitting bugs.

Now you're telling me you don't want to here it. Fine. I'll keep my mouth shut, and you can go on grousing about a product with inferior features. Some features are great. But if you don't want to hear about problems from non-technical users, then I identify you as one of the poeple that regularly posts about how linux is ready for the desktop and the masses, but if you have a problem, go rtfm!

Kind of like military intelligence, no?

sorry. stupid logic. there are thousands of other bugs
out there and you somehow think that your bug is so important
that we should search public forums for it?

sorry. that'll waste more time than it could *possibly* save.
though your report was written well and would probably be
fairly easy to fix, you failed to use the extremely easy
to use bug reporting interface to get it into the correct
forum, and yet you are a linux user.

i'm not sure i understand.
bugzilla is slow i agree. but difficult? pleaaasseee....

Alex

by Just some guy (not verified)

I believe your attitude is broken.

If some random user fails to use the bug reporting interface after making an honest attempt at it, the interface is *not* easy to use, no matter what you might think.

Consider it a good thing that they're pointing this out, and maybe get them to explain to you, in their own terms, what the problem was, so it can be fixed.

by Big Easy (not verified)

If it were so easy to file a bug report why didn't you file his report? The explanation is easy enough to understand and is easy to check later on if it's been fixed. File->save as, does it save from web server or from temp file?

You aren't interested? Then why slam him? Move on.

> If it were so easy to file a bug report why didn't you file his report?

I for one didn't because it's already there.

Besides he said (below) that he was actually trying to report
a bug against Mozilla and found *that* too hard. He mixed it up.

by Anonymous (not verified)

> I'm posting the "bug" or feature request here because after a half hour, or hour (actually more), I gave up trying to post it

Over an hour? Thats make me consider you a liar and troll.

Who's trolling who?

You should report your bug to bugs.kde.org since it's the only central place for managing such kinds of reports. When you post it anywhere else like here you already wasted your time since no developer will see your report ever again later on.

And reporting bugs to bugs.kde.org is very easy once you are registered. Every KDE app has following menu entry:
Help -> Report Bug...
Use it and fill out the few remaining questions, I doubt you'll need to be a programmer for doing that. If you think there's still something needing improvements let me know.

by Anon12 (not verified)

I was incorrect about the bug submission problems. My memory was off. Apparently I confused Konqueror and Mozilla bug submissions. As I remember it now, Mozilla is the one I gave up on submitting bugs or feature requests. Because of that, I have never submitted a bug (really a feature request) to Mozilla. And I gave up trying. Their bug submission screens are really hard for a non-technical person. I had trouble figuring out if I was submitting to the correct application, version, and several other fields, because of the large number of choices present, and the non-intuitive (in my opinion) interface for submitting those bugs. And my last attempt resulted in leaving a half dozen screens open on one of my desktops until the computer had to be rebooted, which ended tht attempt.

I have, in fact, submitted several bugs to the konqueror project, but that was quite a while ago. And as I remember it now (thanks to someone mentioning registration), it was, as reported, a fairly simple procedure. And the response was in a day or two. The bug (actually a few iirc) were not accepted because there were similar features or capabilities, just not the way I envisioned them.

Why did I post my bugs (feature requests) here? It wasn't done as a random message board post as someone suggested. I have been to this message board a couple of times in the past (different areas) and have seen that many posters ARE developers. So, in my confusion with Mozilla and Konqueror bug submissions, I knew I had given up on formal bug submissions, so I figured I'd give a shot to putting my suggested feature request in front of the eyes of possibly one or more developers, one of whom might be interested enough, and kind enough to submit the feature requests to make it better for everyone, not just me.

Did I imagine that it would inflame one or two people? No. And that was not the intent. The intent was simply an attempt at making my favorite browser better. That's it.

I apologize for my mistake.

by cm (not verified)

> When saving web pages in konqueror, it appears that konqueror saves a web
> page by downloading it again during the save process.

This bug has already been reported and (at least partially) fixed
(not sure about the current state of affairs):
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59965

> With Mozilla and Internet Explorer, I can save as: web page including images
>("web page complete" instead of "web page html only"). Why can't I do this
> with Konqueror? I'm not talking about "archiving" the page (useless because
> of not being able to set it up the same way as "save as"),

I don't see why the web site archiver plugin would be useless.
It works exactly the way you described. It just puts those images
and the HTML into a tarred gz archive, the default file extension is .war.
There are no broken links when you click on it in konqueror's file manager
mode. Browsing into it is transparent. You don't have to unpack it
to be able to view it. Very convenient, I use it quite often.

What do you mean by 'not being able to set it up the same way as "save as"'?

by Anonymous Gerbil (not verified)

Will I continue getting blue screens of death with OOo?

Error saving the document. xx.sxw:
Wrong parameter
The operation was started under an invalid parameter.

I've been having nightmares over that dialogue box, and the lost data thanks to it. I thought I left all that behind with windows.