cuckooo: OpenOffice.org nested in KDE

Have you ever dreamt of OpenOffice.org integration in KDE? Perhaps you should try cuckooo, a KDE Part which allows OpenOffice.org to be run in a Konqueror window. It is currently limited to just viewer capabilities, but as you can see from the screenshots, the technology is promising. You can of course download and try it, but please be patient with it. Cuckooo is at a very early stage of development, so you might encounter debug info on the standard error output, misbehavior or even crashes. But if you are willing to test it, I am looking forward to feedback!

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Comments

by Debian User (not verified)

Just ask those as you call them "mad developers" your money back because they don't do what you want.

Or sue them. Or whatever.

And please identify the "lacks of OSS/FS community" or something and tell us. It is certain the community doesn't already know without you.

I am surprised people don't ask you want you need in order to know what they need. But people are so mad anyway.

Yours,
Kay

by SuperPET Troll (not verified)

***Just ask those as you call them "mad developers" your money back because they don't do what you want.

Or sue them. Or whatever. ***
HAHAHAHAAH uhm ok kiddo. Maybe you need to go back home, have a glass of milk and some cookies and watch Sponge Bob.

First of all, Oh Glorius Debian User, I never said one thing about compenstation. I did, however make comments to its overall appearance and usability, which I think needs some big improvements if it is to replace MS Office. Your attitude, and yes you do have a "punk kid screw you" attitude, is what a number of developers and especially those in the OSS/FS community have. This "if you don't like it fuck off" just doesn't fly with anyone else. I understand it comes from the almost complete lack of social interaction that some, like you have or I guess don't have?. However, I've found that a good portion of KDE developers do not have this. Perhaps it's an American/Canadian problem? Any rate, if you are going to distribute OO and tote it as a replacement for MS Office, then I think you must get it through your thick skulls that your product now must meet the requirements of the users. If you are not concerned about the users, then DONT RELEASE THE DAMN SOFTWARE TO THE PUBLIC. Keep it in your own clique-ish circle so you ego-wackoff each other on irc.

*** And please identify the "lacks of OSS/FS community" or something and tell us. It is certain the community doesn't already know without you.***
I guess I don't know which statement you are referring to because I used the OSS/FS statement twice.
The first time in which I stated that a number of OSS/FS applications suffer from the same problem -- a complete and "professional" UI/GUI. In my opinion KDE has the best out of ANY application and that's why I've used it on and off since KDE1, and completely since the KDE 2.0 betas. If you'll notice, the KDE developers have taken the critiques and suggestions of Eugenia Loli-Queru who seems to be the OSS/FS only real "guru" on UI and GUI design and is actually quite good at it. Getting back to what I was saying before, the UI and GUIs of most OSS/FS applications is functional but that only means that the funcionality that is required for usage is present and not that it is easy to use. Hell, take the KDE clock applet. It has really been simplified and is quite good now. Because see, the problem is that most developers are not users. Its like the difference between a carpenter and an architect. A carpenter and build a solid good house, but it might not look good. Whereas an architect can plan it out so it does look good. Some developers are blessed with both talents, which is good, but not common.
The second time I used the "OSS/FS community" statement was when I was saying that the OSS/FS community needs a really good office suite to pull users in from MS. Again, that nasty "users" word that I guess you cant stand.
What that It is certain the community doesn't already know without you means, I have no clue. However, I've submitted bug reports a number of times for KDE and I've helped people out on IRC channels and such. While I've never actively participated in development of any OSS/FS project, I think I've been at least a decent user. I'm guessing that you only use the software and have never even submitted bug reports and I'm guessing you are also one of those assholes on IRC that yell at people if they don't know how to solve the problem they are on IRC for.

***I am surprised people don't ask you want you need in order to know what they need.***
Uhm.... what?? Well I'd guess you are making the claim that I feel the entire OSS/FS community should ask me what I want in the software because I think I'm that important. Well, you know what, I'm not suprised that they don't but in a way they should. Again, what I was saying before, is that if you don't want users to use the software then don't release it. Or just keep a simple crappy web page stating where you can get the software and thats it. The point of all of this, I thought, was to make software for USERS so they can do what they need to do without being bogged down by high purchase prices, high software maintainence costs, and proprietary software. I thought this was suppose to be a community, not a High School Clique where we outcast anyone who isn't "one of us". This community suffers from a real lack of community-ism and more like a bunch of rowdy wrestlers like my state's ex-governor Jessie Ventura.

See I, and other users, can't even voice complaints without being yelled at by people like you -- who probably don't even develop the software. People like you are what hurt this community as a whole. I can guarantee that if regular people had a choice of dealing with MS software in its current state, or dealing with people like you for support. They would gladly take the MS software.

I appologise for this long reply, but I think it needed to be said. I realise there are developers and users who are not like this, and I've talked with a number who aren't. So if you are not like this, then do not take offense. If you are like this, then just calm down and don't take an immediate hostility to this. Think about it for a bit. Would you really want someone yelling at you because you can't figure out how to use something they wrote whatever?

by Debian User (not verified)

>> This "if you don't like it fuck off" just doesn't fly with anyone else.

Thank you. Do you think GNU/Linux needed you to come this far? Certainly not. To come any further? People who only have wishes and aggression to accompany it are only to keep it back.

Accepting competent critic is something else but accepting being called mad by incompetent critics. The ability of expression is certainly higher with Eugenia (than you and me) who deserves adminiration for it.

And to come back to the issue. You are in no position to speak for the community. You believe you understand what is needed. You believe you need to tell us. But the community never had a unifying will and never had attempted anything else but to serve its own needs.

Examples exist many. If only that you talk of FS/OSS as one thing. It is not. KDE was initially a baby of the OSS movement. The FS movement would never have touched QT as long as it had no free licence. Or that people work on Gnome and KDE with many different

What you don't understand is that the community you are trying to represent with your statements is taking all directions at the same time. GNU/Linux is improving on embeddded, desktop, servers and big iron. The base utilities are improved, everything in every way every day.

And then you come and tell people what to do. I guess you also wonder why they don't do it. And when they do you believe it is because you said.

So well, I cannot stop you. You are part of the community as well. But community is only another word for everybody sooner or later.

Yours, Kay

by Robocop (not verified)

My wife and I have used it a lot for the last three years. My previous employer had several people inthe small company using it (our choice...we wanted to use it). OO is a great piece of s/w. Just wish it was ready for my iBook also.

by marko (not verified)

Try 1.1rc3, it is a *lot* faster than 1.0.3, and more stable. It takes a lot of time before they can clean things up and get to know the code. Kudos to the guy who pulled this off.

by AC (not verified)

This is very very nice. Does anyone know what the current KOffice developers think of it? It would mean dumping years of work for them, right?

by Jan (not verified)

Don't think so. OOO.org is so sluggish and is toting so much code
around. That won't change for quite a while because OOO.org must
do a lot of things by itself which are already integrated in KDE and
are therefore already loaded into memory. KOffice will need a much smaller
footprint to achieve the same results. Furthermore KOffice has the
same open dialogues like KDE, generally the same UI experience which
is quite important IMO. We're all in competition to M$ Windows.
And you can say about M$ what you want (I don't like them either) BUT
M$ Word XP seems far more polished and integrated into the OS than
OOO.org. KOffice has a lot to do in terms of stability and functions but if
you just _start_ OOO.org and KOffice and i.e. open 1 document you will
get a much more "intergrated" UI feel than with OOO.org.

by AC (not verified)

But then what is the point of this 'hack' at all?

by AC (not verified)

>>And you can say about M$ what you want (I don't like them either) BUT M$ Word XP seems far more polished and integrated into the OS than OOO.org. <<

I agree that MS Word is more polished, but the last time I tried Word XP the integration into Windows XP was quite bad. The worst offense was that Word used the DotNet style, while Windows had the usual XP widget style.

by AC (not verified)

I consider OOo a short term solution, the long-term solution (when KDE rulez the world ;) is KOffice.

by Anonymous (not verified)

This is maybe a good time to revive/update the kmozillapart too.

by Chakie (not verified)

Why? Konqueror is already very nice and KHTML is actively developed and bugfixed? Why add something bloated as Mozilla as a part? That's bound to be lightning fast. Hm, or maybe not. :)

by anon (not verified)

agreed.. most OSX users I know prefer Safari to Mozilla-based browsers.. once KDE 3.2 rolls around, I think most KDE users will prefer Konqueror rather than many who have switched to Mozilla/Firebird.. I know I did, cvs-Konqi is very nice.

GNOME and other desktop users will of course other browsers, because there is no native khtml-browser for them. Hmm.. somebody needs to make a khtml-based gtk browser that isn't nerfed like gtkhtml..

by cbcbcb (not verified)

perhaps because mozilla is less buggy than khtml?
http://overrc.tripod.com/ works in mozilla, but not in khtml.

Anyone want to write a konqueror developer-compatible test case? (apparently, presenting a web page which doesn't work isn't adequate)

by kosh (not verified)

The page is buggy. I tried to validate it and it has no doctype so I tried it as both xhtml 1.0 transitional and html 4.01 transitional and neither validate by a fair bit. I also validated the CSS and there are a lot of errors and even more warnings whch should be cleaned up. When you give bad code you can't expect to get correct results. It will sometimes work but not always.

Also just because mozilla renders it how you want does not mean that it is correct. Mozilla still has a fair number of rendering bugs in it along with khtml.

by Sean Russell (not verified)

I appreciate the sentiment, but the fact is that there are a large number of pages that do work in Mozilla or Internet Explorer, that don't render properly (if at all) or completely hang or crash Konqueror.

I vastly prefer Konqueror to Mozilla, but I've not had to kill any Mozilla processes in a long time; I have to do it fairly regularly to Konqueror when it freezes up while trying to render some page.

The correct solution is to have people write bug-free web pages, bug-free Javascript, and bug-free CSS... but that isn't going to happen, and is therefore not an option. Konqueror should, at the very least, not crash when it hits one of these bad pages.

That said, I'm not complaining that Konqueror is bad; I'm merely saying that the argument that the parent uses is invalid.

by rb (not verified)

I agree!
For different reasons:
1) choice
2) I develop, under linux, web apps/interfaces for browsers running on windows. Konqueror is not easily available on windows.We standardised on Phoenix. I run konqueror a lot, but need to use phoenix/MFirebird to test my developments.....
3) XUL

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

there's code in kdenonbeta that takes XUL files and renders them into KDE interfaces. should be interesting when/if it moves out of kdenonbeta. but that said, what does XUL have to do with embedding the gecko engine in konqueror?

as for Konqi not being easily available on Windows, IE isn't easily available on Linux/UNIX either. ;-)

i agree that testing across browsers is an important aspect of things, but that's for a small segment of the population. i've also noticed that KHTML in CVS is a lot closer to Mozilla's rendering of things (as in, gets more things right) that viewing in Konqi gives a pretty good image of what it will look like in Moz.

by Dan (not verified)

I think would be better spend time with Konqueror importing OO MsOffice filters to KOffie or fixing the problems as Tables or the management of big files (KOffice usually crashes when you are working with big files). I think this is the practical way. Regards.

by kde-user (not verified)

that's great! The next step I hope for is the integration of Kaddressbook into OpenOffice for mail-merge...

by AC (not verified)

..do not forget the kitchen sink!

by a.c. (not verified)

Actually, I am working on doing a print with envelopes on kaddressbook.
That way you can select a number of address's, do print, send to printer, and then pick the envelope print.

by Wurzelgeist (not verified)

A integration of the GUI is more important for me. There is a script to use your own icon set in OO.org. So where is the controlcenter integration, when I select crystal icons I also want them to get used in OO.org.

also the menu shall be according to KDe standards. I don't care about gui toolkits, i care about look and feel.

If Ximian integrates OO to Gnome, nic. I want the same to be done for KDe.

by André Somers (not verified)

So... dust of your coding skills and get to work, or, alternatively, draw out your wallet and pay someone else to do it for you.

by Pierre Souchay (not verified)

A first integration in the filemanager:
http://souchay.net/news,20030504.html

The next step would be to create thumbnails as well :)

by schnitzelkopf@d... (not verified)

Perhaps a bit offtopic, but why is every newline removed from the messages on this page?

Testing.. 1, 2, 3.. this line was written on a new line.
This one as well.
And this one too.

by CE (not verified)

Yes, it's pretty bad to read.
Reactivating some simple html tags would be good, too.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Oops, bug...

by schnitzelkopf@d... (not verified)

Thanks..

by standsolid (not verified)

This is quite cool... quite cool indeed. It would be really nifty to have a KPART that could act like a WM to whatever program. for instance.... zsnes that way you could embed (insert non-kde app) as a kpart -- cool.

I'm not sure why so many peoples here feel that porting OpenOffice.org to the qt toolkit is so easy because "Ximian did it with gnome". i'm prety sure that Ximian's openoffice isn't gtk2 (although i could easily be mistaken correct me if i'm wrong).

I feel that koffice is a worthwhile pursuit and shouldn't be "dumped". It's essential for KDE's success (and eventually KGX). While this is a good devleopment, I feel that improving KOffice is really the way to go. KOffice is a REALLY good office suite for what it is (free [beer, speech], and little commercial support).

thanks koffice -- keep it up (hopefully you can benefit from code in openoffice, hm?)

thanks to cuckoo -- excelent work. look forward to further updates

by Thomas (not verified)

afaik openoffice has its own gui classes and its own way of objective mechanisms... this was once done to make it platform independant... maybe a bit like mozilla.
The integration into the gnome-desktop was done mainly by replacing the default OO icons with gnome-like icons.
It would be great to replace the file and print-dialogs of OO with the native kde or gnome dialogs (that of course adds another lib to the dependencies..but that would be far more like real 'integration')

by Schugy (not verified)

I'm waiting for the day when we just have a few libs like libgecko.so or libOO.so and can use the design we want to. QT is already loaded with klipper/Konqueror (takes a while to load the 1st qt-app in other WMs) and it should decrease the start time.

But be careful because integration often leads to vulnerabilities.