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Posts Tagged ‘office’

KOffice on OpenSolaris

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

KWord on OpenSolaris screenshotInge Wallin recently blogged about the portability of KOffice — spurred on, no doubt, by the success of the port to the Nokia n900 and to Haiku. So he listed GNU/Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, FreeBSD (thanks, Inge, for checking), Haiku. That list is missing (Open)Solaris though, which as a UNIX flavor. ought to be a pretty simple target.

Of course, Solaris has been a primary target for OpenOffice for ages, so KOffice is a little late to the game on this particular platform. But I guess that’s my fault, since I’m one of the packagers for KDE4 on Solaris, and I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. So this weekend I spent a little under two hours hammering together a specfile (RPM-style) for koffice and getting the whole darn thing to build. Screenshot of KWord in action as proof. I tried KPresenter as well, but that crashed on changing the list style, so I didn’t think that was a good demonstration.

Of course, no port is without its patches, so here they are:

  • constness — this patch matches the constness of parameters in definitions with those in declarations, so that int foo(const int) is defined with int foo(const int i) and not as int foo(int i). Now, since the last time constness-matching blew up, I’ve learned that this is really a bug in Sun’s compiler, because constness is not supposed to be mangled into the name. However, I’ll claim that code neatness demands that they match, anyway.
  • double — some math functions like sqrt() can take both float or double, and Sun’s compiler doesn’t just pick one when you pass it integer parameters, so we need some explicit disambiguation. This is common all across the KDE codebase.
  • NaN — the KOffice code uses val != NAN which uses the gcc-specific NAN #define; probably !isnan() is better.
  • math — the header file math.h in Solaris uses the identifier “exception”, which becomes ambiguous in the context of the STL, so it needs to be included earlier, rather than later. This patch bungs in math.h as the first include in a number of C++ files — not necessarily something to merge upstream, because it’s mostly working around a bug elsewhere.
  • stupid — yes, this is a stupid patch. I can’t convince Sun Studio that 8.5 * 1440 is an secretly an integer constant and that it shouldn’t complain about a bunch of initializers in the MS Word import filters. I’m not really sure what’s going on here, it’s something special about static const initializers of class variables, since doing the same in a non-class context works just fine.

So there you have it. Five tiny patches for a codebase of a little over 600000 lines of code. Nice. Tip of the hat (I have lots of hats, but all of them are baseball caps and I don’t have a decent Stetson) to Inge and the KOffice folks for a nice portable office suite. You may be troubled, but your code is good.

All I want for Christmas is an Office Suite?

Friday, December 25th, 2009

My friend Armijn pointed me to a thing called Orange Office (no link). I get a Dutch site, which is full of d/t errors (a fundament of Dutch grammar) which tries to sell me .. OpenOffice.org. It comes down to a long spiel about Microsoft Office compatibility and how OOo works exactly the same as Microsoft Office and yet it’s so cheap! Buy now! Word! Powerpoint! Operators are standing by! Yes, they’re charging 15 EUR for an OpenOffice.org download. Going through the terms and conditions is hilarious (well, ok, I should take my medicines now) for disclaiming responsibility, disallowing resale (hello, LGPL!), disclaiming the applicability of refund law which applies to tele-sales. You know the drill. It gets better as the “buy now” page has a “limited quantity offer!” for Calc and Draw as well. The payment processing, somewhat to my surprise, seems to be legitimate — it’s still a heck of a way to rake in 15 bucks for an otherwise gratis download of OpenOffice.org 3.1.

FSFE microblogging ; office

Friday, September 4th, 2009

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has got an infestation of interns. Under Matthias Kirschner’s lead, they should be blogging and denting away — as well as getting actual work done instead of exchanging witty banter on IM networks. Welcome to Hugo and Lena. If you look closely you can see the current chaotic status of the new FSFE office in Berlin with, as Lena puts it, wires all over the place and no comfy chairs. Maybe you need to be staff to have a comfy chair, eh.