Author Topic: Whatever happened to...  (Read 20961 times)

David McKenna

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Whatever happened to...
« on: February 20, 2013, 05:17:24 am »
 Open Office 3.4 for eCS? A couple of months ago there were some developers test releases, but nothing since. Anyone have any news?

melf

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #1 on: February 20, 2013, 09:16:32 am »
I have wondered the same thing. With all (other) respect to Mensys, reliable release dates and official information is not one of their strong sides.

Pete

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2013, 02:02:16 pm »
Hi All

I'm sure I've seen a post somewhere stating that OO3.4.0 will be included in eCS2.2

I have also had an email response from Mensys stating that the problems I've seen with previous OO3 releases have not been resolved so that ends my interest in that "office" package -  OO3 to date has been totally unreliable and crashes whenever I try to do anything useful with it.

If/When OO3 becomes useable I may reconsider my decision to not bother renewing my eCS Subscription.

For most of my simple needs OO115 running using ar5os2.exe still works well enough - and if I do need to open a later format document I have to boot WindowsXP in VirtualPC  where OO3.4.1 runs fine.

So frustrating having to boot a virtual machine simply to use a current "office" package...


Regards

Pete



melf

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #3 on: February 20, 2013, 02:57:47 pm »
Too bad to hear Pete. I have followed your long term problems with OO on news.ecomstation.com, but have never experienced them myself. On the contrary OO has proven to be quite reliable here at my end. However, one of the bad things with OO is that i sometimes feels a lilttle clumsy and slow and I wish it could be as light and fast as Lotus Smart Suite. If Smartsuite had updated import/export modules for the current document formats I would doubtless use it, in spite of the absent antialias.

Roderick Klein

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #4 on: February 20, 2013, 03:01:01 pm »
We have an internal release ready.

We are working on trying to load the DLL's from Open office into the high memory area of OS/2. We are already having some success with Firefox.
By doing this the lower shared memory issue's with OS/2 and the associates hangs of the desktop should going away.

This is a a feature we have been trying to get in previous open office versions as the loading of these large DLL's into lower shared memory reduces the uptime of an OS/2 system.

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.


Ben

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #5 on: February 20, 2013, 07:47:12 pm »
Too bad to hear Pete. I have followed your long term problems with OO on news.ecomstation.com, but have never experienced them myself. On the contrary OO has proven to be quite reliable here at my end. However, one of the bad things with OO is that i sometimes feels a lilttle clumsy and slow and I wish it could be as light and fast as Lotus Smart Suite.

Well stated, Melf, for that has been my experience as well. However, unlike you I continue to use Lotus Smartsuite, (Word Pro), the speed and lightness of it working well with 600+ page projects... and I have a means to get around the export/import filters that LSS lacks... read on!

If Smartsuite had updated import/export modules for the current document formats I would doubtless use it, in spite of the absent antialias.

I simply export my Word Pro document into the last form of MS Word that Word Pro supports. Then I import it into Open Office 3.* and presto! Magicko! I can then use whatever filters that OO has... of course to import into Word Pro... just reverse the procedure. :o

I hope that helps you.

Pete

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #6 on: February 20, 2013, 08:25:10 pm »
Hi

Too bad to hear Pete. I have followed your long term problems with OO on news.ecomstation.com, but have never experienced them myself. On the contrary OO has proven to be quite reliable here at my end.


Thanks for your sympathies Melf.

What makes my (and others) problems with OO3 so frustrating is simply that so many other people have no problems with OO3 reliability/crashing. Even more annoying is that at the moment the Mrs is sitting at her pc - next to me - and running OO3 with no problems. She is actually designing some business cards which is 1 of those things that causes OO3 to simply disappear (as in exit) without any warning, error message or error log when I try it on my system!

Rodericks post leaves me wondering if loading DLLs into high memory will overcome those problems. I can only hope it does and offer my services as a tester - if a build of OO3 works properly on my system it will probably work on anything  ;-)

However, I seem to recall that I supplied details of memory use (obtained using Thesus) which showed plenty of free shared memory space so I'm not over hopeful this will cure the problems. OTOH: I'm not that familiar with Thesus so may have misunderstood the ouput.

I do agree that Wordpro was a good package and have no doubt that it can still work well - Ben seems to have the answer to making current format docs available for use in Wordpro. It would certainly be a lot more convenient if Wordpro had the necessary filters though.

As regards font antialias: I suspect the Innotek Font Engine may have a use there. You would need to add Wordpro to the applications supported by the Font Engine in the Registry - see the Font Engine readme file for details.


Regards

Pete

melf

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #7 on: February 20, 2013, 08:35:54 pm »
Hi Ben, unfortunately this doesn't work very well for me. 1) Can't always open documents from OO even if I save them as rtf. Yesterday I could open a document I had currently used "trackhanges" on and proceeded in WordPro. This worked great, but then when importing to OO again, the document was quite corrupted (from an OO-perspective ...) 2) Pictures are dealt with in another way and tables use to be strange also. I also often exchange documents with people using some of the later MSOffice and then it just become too much! So, that's why I stick to OO anyway - it complies well with MS - which most other people seem to use.

Pete: You ought to be the given test person for that new build of OO ..!  And I have tried to use Innotek Font engine on WordPro before, it hangs the application quite hard.

Sigurd Fastenrath

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #8 on: February 21, 2013, 10:23:54 am »
We have an internal release ready.

We are working on trying to load the DLL's from Open office into the high memory area of OS/2. We are already having some success with Firefox.
By doing this the lower shared memory issue's with OS/2 and the associates hangs of the desktop should going away.

This is a a feature we have been trying to get in previous open office versions as the loading of these large DLL's into lower shared memory reduces the uptime of an OS/2 system.

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.

What should I expect with this answer?

- is there an already running Open Office 3.4 or not?
- when will it be public? (next month/year...?)
- loading the dlls in high memory - has open office to be changed for this or eCS?

That is what it makes hard to understand and follow or stay tuned: the (allways) avesive answers and non concrete informations and timetables - why can't there be an answer that is not a mystery/riddle or that is just simple?

 :-\

Roderick Klein

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #9 on: February 21, 2013, 02:46:56 pm »
We have an internal release ready.

We are working on trying to load the DLL's from Open office into the high memory area of OS/2. We are already having some success with Firefox.
By doing this the lower shared memory issue's with OS/2 and the associates hangs of the desktop should going away.

This is a a feature we have been trying to get in previous open office versions as the loading of these large DLL's into lower shared memory reduces the uptime of an OS/2 system.

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.

What should I expect with this answer?

- is there an already running Open Office 3.4 or not?
- when will it be public? (next month/year...?)
- loading the dlls in high memory - has open office to be changed for this or eCS?

That is what it makes hard to understand and follow or stay tuned: the (allways) avesive answers and non concrete informations and timetables - why can't there be an answer that is not a mystery/riddle or that is just simple?

 :-\

There is a 3.4 version that is receiving final internal testing. It does not yet work with loading DLL into high memory.


The source code for open office does not have be modified for this feature. When you open a word document it already uses API calls to store the dats of that document into high kernel memory (effected by the virtualaddresslimit).  However with several different tools  you can modify the DLL headers to tell the kernel what portion to also load high of the DLL's into high memory itself.
Scott Garfunkel from IBM (before he stopped working on the OS/2 kernel) put that feature in very far.

Now you can use a tool such as highmem.exe and do *.dll. Once you do that on firefox/thunderbird/openoffice DLL. It works fine, until you exit the application. Then some memory clean up code in the kernel blows up and you get a system TRAP.
(As a warning don't start experimenting these on your system unless you know what your doing and keep track of which DLL's you modify!)

We are looking at the applications to find out if we can only use a subset of DLL's to load high memory. This is already working with Firefox partly. Instead of having 150 of lower shared memory we now end up in the lab with 260 MB or more. (These figures can change). This research is being done with memory dumps, theseus and the kernel debugger. This takes time and is not realy something you can translate into a time frame.

Can this highmem stuff be fixed in the long term, yes it can and we might get a sollution for eCS 2.2. We fixed plenty of other stuff in eCS without kernel sources. Sometimes a fix is easy sometimes its down right hard. For example look at the TCPIP32DLL.DLL that would crash on SMP systems. That new DLL version (gets installed with eCS 2.2 by default and all latest ACPI versions) reduces Firefox crashes on SMP systems. But it did take time to get it done.

If we don't make it then Open Office 3.4 will  be released with eCS 2.2 without the high load option with eCS 2.2 in the second week of april.
Thats also why you don't hear much about Open Office because more focus has been on eCS with all the new drivers. Currently I'm also working with David and Lars on the USB drivers.

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.

Ben

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #10 on: February 21, 2013, 04:40:24 pm »
Hi
Greetings, Pete.

I do agree that Wordpro was a good package and have no doubt that it can still work well - Ben seems to have the answer to making current format docs available for use in Wordpro. It would certainly be a lot more convenient if Wordpro had the necessary filters though.
Melf has a problem with the filters... though I found by trial and error, that I could eliminate those problems simply by trying different filters... of course, there is nothing to say that it will work for every format, but I have always found a solution... by using an intermediary filter, that, (in most cases), has nothing to do with the final format required... simply have OO do that when all else is done. Of course if the OO filters are lame in the final stage, then...  :(

As regards font antialias: I suspect the Innotek Font Engine may have a use there. You would need to add Wordpro to the applications supported by the Font Engine in the Registry - see the Font Engine readme file for details.
I did that a long time ago, Pete. It was interesting, but caused so many new problems that I had to abandon the whole thing. However, things have changed now with respect to OS/2 and fonts. Maybe it is time for me to give it another go...

Doug Bissett

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #11 on: February 21, 2013, 07:35:51 pm »

As regards font antialias: I suspect the Innotek Font Engine may have a use there. You would need to add Wordpro to the applications supported by the Font Engine in the Registry - see the Font Engine readme file for details.

I don't know about antialias, but some time ago, I tried to remove the Innotek Font Engine completely. Almost everything worked okay, except OpenOffice 3.2. Apparently, OO uses the code, and the Font Engine should NOT be enabled for OO (same as for the newer Mozilla derivatives). I have every application turned off, and would never dream of using it for anything, since it is so flaky, but it seems that it is necessary for some things to run. In fact, that reminds me that I did a new eCS 2.1 install, and forgot that the old 2.4 version of the font engine is still what eCS 2.1 installs. The 2.6 version always worked better for me, but i find that it makes so little difference, that it is just not worth enabling it for other things,

Pete

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #12 on: February 21, 2013, 11:03:47 pm »
Hi Doug

OO3 does not work with IFE260 at all here - never gets onscreen. Checking the readme.1st file I found this:-

- Innotek Font Engine is required to run OpenOffice.org 3.2 for
  eComStation and OS/2. (Available by default in eComStation)
  You can download it from the following location:
  http://download.innotek.de/ft2lib/InnoTek_FT2LIB_240_Release1.exe


That seems to indicate OO3 is built to use IFE 2.40

As you say IFE2.60 is better but can cause more hangs/crashes in my experience - which may be different to yours.

I use iFE 2.40 and have added pmshell.exe to the Applications - as well as deleting all mention of Mozilla apps - and find that the Desktops on 3 systems here all look much better with regard to font display. The only real moan I have is that long folder/application names do not fit on the dropdown menus eg click eCS button (on eComCentre) and here "File and Print Client Resource Browser" has the 's' overwritten by the right arrow head and half the 'e' is missing - as is the final 'r'.

I have also added ar5os2.exe to the IFE 2.40 applications and use ar5os2.exe as the "windows runtime" for OO1.1.5 for Windows. Font display in both OO1.1.5 applications and Acrobat Reader V5.1 is much improved and so far - touch wood (touches head ;-)  - no hangs/crashes.

Using IFE 2.60 with the above applications my system did suffer the odd hang/crash from time to time. I guess that is because 2.60 is a beta version... Would have been nice if it had got past beta before development stopped  :-(


Regards

Pete







Doug Bissett

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #13 on: February 22, 2013, 05:35:54 am »
Hi Doug

OO3 does not work with IFE260 at all here - never gets onscreen. Checking the readme.1st file I found this:-

- Innotek Font Engine is required to run OpenOffice.org 3.2 for
  eComStation and OS/2. (Available by default in eComStation)
  You can download it from the following location:
  http://download.innotek.de/ft2lib/InnoTek_FT2LIB_240_Release1.exe


That seems to indicate OO3 is built to use IFE 2.40

As you say IFE2.60 is better but can cause more hangs/crashes in my experience - which may be different to yours.

I use iFE 2.40 and have added pmshell.exe to the Applications - as well as deleting all mention of Mozilla apps - and find that the Desktops on 3 systems here all look much better with regard to font display. The only real moan I have is that long folder/application names do not fit on the dropdown menus eg click eCS button (on eComCentre) and here "File and Print Client Resource Browser" has the 's' overwritten by the right arrow head and half the 'e' is missing - as is the final 'r'.

I have also added ar5os2.exe to the IFE 2.40 applications and use ar5os2.exe as the "windows runtime" for OO1.1.5 for Windows. Font display in both OO1.1.5 applications and Acrobat Reader V5.1 is much improved and so far - touch wood (touches head ;-)  - no hangs/crashes.

Using IFE 2.60 with the above applications my system did suffer the odd hang/crash from time to time. I guess that is because 2.60 is a beta version... Would have been nice if it had got past beta before development stopped  :-(

Regards

Pete

IFE 2.60beta seems to work fine with OO 3.2, but all I have done, so far, is open a file to see if it rendered properly. It did. I don't use it with anything else, and would actually like to remove it completely, but I do use OO 3.2, and it seems to need it. I would like to see OO abandon IFE (any version), and start to use the same font support that the Mozilla derivatives are using. At least the source is available, so problems should be fixable (I don't know if that would actually work either).

Anyway, I will see what happens with OO 3.2, for a while. I don't plan on using it with anything else, since it seems to be unnecessary (at least on my system).

Dave Yeo

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Re: Whatever happened to...
« Reply #14 on: February 22, 2013, 07:24:21 am »
Quote
and start to use the same font support that the Mozilla derivatives are using. At least the source is available, so problems should be fixable (I don't know if that would actually work either).

Easier said then done as it would probably take a lot of rewriting. Mozilla uses Cairo http://cairographics.org. Actually following the examples link does show that work has been done on adding Cairo to OO. Nothing recent though, see https://www.google.com/search?domains=www.openoffice.org&sitesearch=www.openoffice.org&resultsPerPage=40&q=cairo&Button=search.

Doodles Screen Saver has some Cairo based modules and WPS-Wizard ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/wps-wizard/ adds some classes to the WPS that adds Cairo support. Unluckily it is not the most stable and source is unavailable. Screen shots at http://svn.netlabs.org/wps-wizard