OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 and FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE

[Tom Snell]

David Gerard wrote:
> OK. I know that after much fiddling with OOo 1.0.1 and FreeBSD 4.6.2, it
> came out that OOo basically just, er, didn't work on FreeBSD at that time.
> 
> So. On the other box (FreeBSD 4.8), we've just installed OOo 1.0.2 from
> ports. A few days' compilation from source. It, er, sort of works. It
> starts up, but crashes when you try to save anything (dies with an internal
> error).
> 
> The README claims it works with FreeBSD 4.5 and up, but I'll believe that
> when I see it doing so.
> 
> What are others' experiences so far? Is there some undocumented hoop one
> must jump through to get it to behave itself?

Like another poster mentioned, I can't say I've ever had much luck 
attempting to compile OO from source.  After several attempts beginning 
with OO 1.0, I began downloading the binary package from the OpenOffice 
FreeBSD Project at http://projects.imp.ch/openoffice/ .  OO is still a 
little quirky in FBSD....I've seen it completely crash XWindows when 
attempting to open docs in Writer, whether in .doc or its own .swx 
format, or crash just OO itself.  The latest available build, 
openoffice-1.0.3_2 (built on 4.8-RELEASE with FBSD GCC 3.2.1) is what I 
feel is the most stable build so far....it's behaving a lot better and I 
work with it regularly.  Kudos to the FBSD OpenOffice team....it's a 
massive project, but needs support for such a key desktop app.  BTW, one 
of the coolest features, available since 1.0.2 I believe, is the setup 
of the built-in PDF Converter, basically setting up a pipe to 
ghostscript in the openoffice-spadmin utility.....it rocks....opened a 
41-page MS Word doc in OO, printed to PDF Converter, got a nice .pdf doc 
in about 2 seconds!  This in itself is worth having OO installed.
-- 
    ____            ___  _______
   / __/______ ___ / _ )/ __/ _ \  Tom Snell <gracchus at getnet.net>
  / _// __/ -_) -_) _  |\ \/ // /      FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE
/_/ /_/  \__/\__/____/___/____/  XFree86 4.3.0  WindowMaker 0.80.2
                              "make buildworld...for a better tomorrow!"