Hi,
I recently migrated from Slackware 10.2 to CentOS 4.3, upon advice of fellow Slacker and CentOS user Daniel de Kok. Been working very intensively for the last three weeks with it, and I must say: I really like it. This is the Real Work(tm) Distro I was always looking for!
There's a practical reason for this: beginning on June 1st I will be chief sysadmin of our village's town hall. Don't be too impressed... besides the mayor and his dog, we're 900 people living here, mostly farmers... But the village got a nice budget to build an even nicer public "salle multimedia", the house is ready (with a nice view over the South French hills), and here's the scenario. About ten PC's will be acquired new, so they will be equipped with a shiny CentOS 4.3. The remaining PC's in the town hall will either get some light Linux distro (Slack with XFCE or something like this)... but some people here desperately cling to their Windows 98 or Windows XP and don't want this Linux thing.
At least two Windows machines here are equipped with the latest OpenOffice.org. Now there's a slight compatibility issue. OO 2.0.x defaults to the .odt file format, which OO 1.2.2 can't read.
I know that stock rpm's from openoffice.org *can* be installed, but I think it would be a pity to ruin the otherwise great artwork consistency (I have to seduce the new Linux users, remember).
The latest Fedora 5 came out, and I see that there's a source rpm available at rpm.pbone.net. Unfortunately, I'm on dialup here, and there's no chance I can get this until next week. Plus, I'm only a beginner with source RPM's, and OO is somewhat of a bear to compile. Now what if one of the gurus here gave it a shot? Got some bandwidth and some CPU to spare? Or maybe evaluate my chances as to the outcome? Or is it better to tell the Windows people to default to .sxw and stick with the present version (which, I must say, looks quite bug-free)?
Cheers,
Niki Kovacs
I know that stock rpm's from openoffice.org *can* be installed, but I think it would be a pity to ruin the otherwise great artwork consistency (I have to seduce the new Linux users, remember).
The latest Fedora 5 came out, and I see that there's a source rpm available at rpm.pbone.net. Unfortunately, I'm on dialup here, and there's no chance I can get this until next week. Plus, I'm only a beginner with source RPM's, and OO is somewhat of a bear to compile. Now what if one of the gurus here gave it a shot? Got some bandwidth and some CPU to spare? Or maybe evaluate my chances as to the outcome? Or is it better to tell the Windows people to default to .sxw and stick with the present version (which, I must say, looks quite bug-free)?
Rebuilding the OOo 2.x rpms from fedora require significant rebuilding of several other packages as well, and what you end up with is closer to fedora than centos. Because of the major package upgrades required, we decided against a rebuild. The official openoffice rpms from openoffice.org work perfectly, and install right beside the current centos 1.x rpms. The 2.x rpms will import the centos/rhel settings and 'just work' if you install all the rpms (there's one in another folder that people forget when they unpack the tarball).
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Jim Perrin -
Niki Kovacs