The Open Sourcerer

OpenOffice.org: 10 Million Downloads in 4 weeks

WOW!

Early on Sunday morning, the OpenOffice.org Community passed the ten million downloads mark for the latest version of its software, just four weeks after the launch on October 13th. The week also marked the first time the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference has been held outside Europe.

And this is only from the OOo servers. This doesn’t include mirrors and installs from distribution packages.

John McCreesh, Marketing Project Lead, explained the importance of the two events. “Since the launch of OpenOffice.org 3.0, we have had a verifiable record of downloads from central website. We were delighted to hit a million downloads in the first two days. Four weeks later, we have hit ten million, and we are still seeing an amazing 250,000 – 350,000 downloads a day. For a community with no advertising budget, this is an astonishing level of product awareness around the world. Add to this the success of our Beijing Conference, and there can be no doubt that OpenOffice.org is now genuinely a global phenomenon.”

That is just so brilliant.

Aren’t the UK Government are looking to save some cash… I wonder how much goes to M$ just on MS Office^TM Licenses each year???

Russia teaches the world about FOSS

Glyn Moody (See blogroll) has an absolutely cracking post on his Open Enterprise blog regarding a recent announcement from Russia. The really interesting bit for me is not the article itself so much, although it is indeed great news and very inspirational, but the comments that follow.

Firstly, the main story. It is that Russia has had such a successful time using Open Source software in some School pilots that the government have decided to roll it out across ALL schools in Russia.

It began with a few pilot projects, and apparently these have been so successful that the Russian government has now decided to make it the standard for *all* schools:

До конца 2009 г. на всех школьных компьютерах будет установлен пакет свободного программного обеспечения (ПСПО). Об этом, как передает «Прайм ТАСС», сегодня сообщил министр связи и массовых коммуникаций РФ Игорь Щеголев на пленарном заседании «Информационное общество и современные технологии доставки информации» в рамках международной выставки «ИнфоКом-2008».

[Via Google Translate: By the end of 2009, all school computers will be installed package of free software (PSPO). This is how transfers «Prime-TASS», today announced Minister of Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation Igor Shchyogolev at the plenary session «Information Society and the modern technologies of information» in the international exhibition «InfoCom-2008».]

This isn’t just an option for those brave souls who might want to try something different: this is now the official approach. If schools want to use proprietary software, they have to pay for it themselves:

Read the full article to get further details.

Then scroll down the page and read some of the comments…

It starts with the first post saying we should teach M$ because that’s what business uses today. It’s the only “pro” proprietary comment and rightly gets pretty short shrift from every subsequent commenter.

But then a remarkable thing starts happening, which emphasises yet again, why Free Software is SO important in Education: In that it absolutely encourages innovation, inquisitiveness, collaboration, and – above all – learning from and with others.

How to Install OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex [Updated]

I have been using the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) since the Alpha 5 testing version; the same time I built Lobsang.

Apart from a few early glitches with the Nvidia graphics drivers and some printing issues, my overall experience with Ibex has been excellent and as we are now in the beta stage it should only get better. Ibex certainly boots faster than Hardy, the update to Gnome 2.24 is most welcome with new features such as tabing in Nautilus, and a major update to the Network Manager applet. You can read about the main additions here.

One thing I wanted to do today, was upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3.0. Unfortunately, according to a bug on Launchpad, OOo 3.0 will not make it into the final release of Ubuntu 8.10. It may get added later, but personally I think it is a shame if it will not make the release. It’s a major upgrade to OOo and has appeared 2 weeks prior to the 8.10 ship date so I think it would make a good candidate for inclusion. The new Mandriva 2009 release has it and that was released last week…

I think for many the support for Microsoft’s OOXML format on OOo 3.0 will be the major new feature. It certainly gives one a great reason to not have to upgrade, at vast expense, to MS Office 2007.

Anyway, thankfully some bright spark has built the required packages on a PPA (Personal Package Archive) on Lauchpad making install as easy as adding two lines to your package manager’s source list.

Please remember this is for Intrepid Ibex. I don’t have a Hardy (8.04) install to hand any more and so I don’t know if this PPA will work for Hardy users or not. I’d love to hear from anyone if they do try it though.

Begin How To

[UPDATE] I am not sure if this repo is still maintained for Intrepid. I would strongly suggest that users follow John McCreesh’s suggested method he described in the comments below. Here it is for ease of reading:

I just do:

To get rid of the release candidates I’ve installed previously:

sudo aptitude purge ‘~nopenoffice.org3′
sudo aptitude purge ‘~nooobasis3′

download the debs from the OOo site and tar -xvfz them.
cd to the directory containing the debs

sudo dpkg -i o*.deb
sudo dpkg -i desktop_integration/o*.deb

John

John’s method seems quite straightforward and works for me.

The original method (below) also worked for me but I am not using it any more and am still getting lots of hits to this article so I thought I should update the information.

So the following might work but, as they say, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

From the menu choose “System->Administration->Software Sources” and enter your password if asked.

Click on the Third Party Software tab and then click on the “+ Add” button. Cut and paste the following line into the box

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

and then click on the “Add Source” button to save it. Repeat and add this line too:

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

Make sure the two new lines have the checkbox ticked (see screenshot above) and then close the Software Sources application. You should then be asked to reload the package manager database:

To install software and updates from newly added or changed sources, you have to reload the information about available software.

Once I did this, the “Updates Available” star appear in the top panel of Gnome. Running the update manager showed me the updates available, e.g. OpenOffice.org, which it then downloaded (about 95Mb) and installed. It was as simple as that.

If for some reason the update manager star doesn’t appear then just open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

End How To

Behold, OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Intrepid Ibex.

[Update]

This morning the auto updater wouldn’t run because of a conflict with the OOo packages I installed from the PPA. The simplest way I found to rectify this, was to simply turn off the PPA repos by removing the tick from the relevant boxes in the Software Sources manager. Then the update went ahead as it should.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 immensely, staggeringly popular

Just a quick note really on the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 yesterday.

A message on the OOo mailing list from Louis Suarez-Potts says it all:

All,

We must apologize. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is proving immensely, staggeringly popular. And our site is down as a result. While we fix things, we urge you to be patient and try again later on tonight, tomorrow, this week. It will still be there.

Oh, by popular, we mean it: figure hundreds of thousands of users, mostly Windows users, but also Mac OS X and Linux and Solaris users, all trying to download it all at once…..

Cheers, and thanks for your patience,
Louis

Hundreds of thousands of users… That’s really great. Congratulations to everyone who has contributed in whatever way to this release.

If you are still struggling to get to a download, a very fast UK mirror (I just checked it) can be found here:

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ny1.mirror.openoffice.org/stable/3.0.0/

Cheers

OpenOffice.org 3.0 appears on the mirrors

Open Source in Education

The very limited use of FOSS in the UK’s education sector has long been a source of much puzzlement and even anger – from this side of the IT divide at least.

In the last year or so we have, happily, seen a rise in the background noise level, and more recently with BECTA’s activities and the award of the approved supplier status to Sirius IT as signs that things are finally changing.

This morning, I saw a post on the OOo marketing list from Ian Lynch publicising this new place of reference and support for the education sector: Open Source Schools:

Open Source Schools is an initiative to inform schools about Open Source Software (OSS). A number of schools are already realising the benefits of OSS within their ICT strategy. This project will work to share their experiences with the wider community of educational practitioners.

The project will support a community of practice that engages those who are currently using OSS and welcomes and supports new members. Our aim is to create an educationally focused project driven by the needs of the community – giving them the means to become confident users of OSS.

A great idea Ian and I hope it gets wide publicity. It was a very timely post considering a couple of conversations I had yesterday at the Woking Business Expo where we were exhibiting…

The first discussion was with a parent and school Governor who has really started to understand FOSS and the benefits it brings from several meetings we have had with him over the last few months on a more professional basis. He dropped by yesterday to say hi and was very keen to introduce the concepts and ideals of FOSS into his school and LEA. We will help him in this as much as possible. Dave, let’s arrange that beer!

The second, and far more worrying conversation, just shows what a total travesty it is that we continue to teach our children not how to use a computer as a tool, but instead teach our kids how to open and create a Microsoft Word or Excel document. Another visitor to our stand (and parent) was discussing the experience of a colleague whose child came home from school with some homework only to find he couldn’t open the files on his home PC as they were created in Office 2007! The family couldn’t afford to buy it – and why the hell should they frankly? This was obviously very distressing for the family and child concerned.

Our our schools now a sales channel for Microsoft I wonder?

The result of this kind of upgrade-treadmill that MS would love us all to live on permanently, is to create a two-tier system of education for our children: those whose parents can afford to buy expensive commercial software and those who cant.

The UK Government, even more so now they have just spanked £500bn propping up the banking system, must start to act and reduce the outrageous and completely wasteful expenditure on proprietary software. Why oh why don’t we just do a nation-wide roll out of OpenOffice.org to EVERY computer in the public sector and especially in Education? It would be a good start, and then we can get rid of that festering boil called Windows later.

• No more extortionate upgrade costs,
• no more public documents created in binary, patent encumbered formats,
• an end to the single vendor lock-in and monopoly,
• no more two-tier children…

We can always dream I guess.