Open Office upgrade??

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 13 February 2010, Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
>On Saturday 13 February 2010, Ric Moore wrote:
>> On Sat, 2010-02-13 at 18:44 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:
>> > On 13 Feb 2010, at 5:56pm, Ric Moore wrote:
>> > > I'm having a couple of problems with OpenOffice. I install
>> > > just what is available from the repos. I had my share of
>> > > grief, when I used Fedora, with too new beta software so I'm
>> > > a tad gun shy to install packages not "official". Yet, when I
>> > > try to enter a bug report, the site advises me to upgrade
>> > > before it'll accept my bug report. <sighs> I have Open Office
>> > > 3.01 installed (1:3.01-9) and am running Jaunty.
>> >
>> > OO 3.01 is quite far behind the current release, 3.2,
>>
>> Ergo the problem. Should this be updated in the repo??
>>
>> > so I'm not that surprised that the first response is to upgrade
>> > to 3.2 and try again ... Of course jaunty won't get an update
>>
>> Why is that?? Karmic destroys my sound system, which works just
>> fine, for now.
>
>The point is that wildly adding new software versions to the repo
>will result in bit rot and eventually render a system unusable. This
>way, it will always stay at least close to the quality it was when it
>was shipped - be that high or low.

I'll argue that point.  The initial release might have its warts, I think 
going from 10 folks running it last week, to 10,000+ a week after a new one 
is released _is_ gonna find new bugs those 10 guys didn't.

But its seem to me that 90 days or so on, those bugs ought to be fixed by the 
simple expedient of doing regular updates, and the process should continue 
getting better as the release ages.

Sadly, in the case of sound, 90 days on for many distro's now, no distro yet 
has working sound.  And when you fuss about it, you get 25 fingers all 
pointed in different directions although the huge majority of them are 
pointed in the general direction of pulseaudio.

I have 3 distros installed on 3 different terrabyte drives here, and I have 
great sound running 32 bit Fedora 10, no sound on the latest 64 bit Mint, and 
only one channel makes noise on a 64 bit mdv 20-10 install, and that channel 
is not controllable by any volume slider in kmix with them all enabled.  As 
that is loud enough to both endanger my speakers in addition to disturbing 
the neighbors, I'll pass, so good old F10 runs nicely now that its obsolete, 
and I have _no_ reason whatsoever to switch distro's just because  F10 is 
getting long in the tooth.

So when do we get a distro where the sound actually works right from the 
gitgo?  If one distro finally gets it right, 10 million people will be 
running it a month later.

So please tell me again, why it is that everyone had to jump on the PA 
bandwagon?  Were you fixing a problem most of us didn't have?

In which case, please advise the rest of us what the problem was, so we can 
fix it so we all have the exactly the same no sound problem everyone else 
seems to have with PA.  If we all had the same problem, maybe (but I doubt 
it) that would be clue enough to actually get it fixed.

Or, if that's too much trouble, how to remove the dependencies on PA that try 
to rip 99% of X and KDE out with it when we try to clean PA out with the 
various distro's package managers?

Surely, to use just 2 ridiculous examples that I have witnessed in the list 
of things that must be removed with PA, both samba and vim cannot be 
dependent on a piece of PA?  Neither, AFAIK, are supposed to be able to make 
_any_ noise.

>> > so if you do wish to upgrade you will need to do this yourself.
>>
>> That was what I was hoping to avoid.. :) Ric
>
>You can upgrade OOo using the PPA repo:
>deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu jaunty main

Or, as I did yesterday, just go get it from OOo.org, install it and run it, 
what I've run it it so far works great. And AFAIK, it doesn't need PA to run.  
Whats not to like about that?

>As I remember, that upgrade is quite safe.

Oh?  Then why do we not have working sound?  An _upgrade_ should be an 
upgrade, unless that's how _you_ spell downgrade.  Have you all been to an 
MBA mill/school that teaches how to lie with a straight face?

In case there seems to be a miss-understanding on that spelling vs meaning 
point, I'll be glad to donate a dictionary if it would help.

>Oh, and: assuming you're trying to report whatever bugs you run
>across to the OOo bugtracker, you really shouldn't. That's what
>launchpad is for...
>
>  --Reinhold

That was my rant, now back to your regularly scheduled bitch & moan session.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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