OxygenOffice-2.4.1 Blues on Mandriva 2008 PowerPack

Enough Open XML and ODF battle for standards. The topic of "which is the better" apart, the bare truth is that many people have to deal with docx, xlsx and pptx files, willingly or unwillingly. Last night I got an xlsx file from my colleague at the last minute. By that time he had left for home. I was left with two options - surf the web for online Open XML converters or use that standalone OdfConverter (I extracted from one of the Novell's rpm). I choose the later with resulted in a shoddy conversion.

These incidents happen on a regular basis. Somebody told me to use OpenOffice 3 Beta. I dropped that idea after all it is in BETA. Then I hit on this OxygenOffice. Its enhancements over OpenOffice (though it is based on OOo) seemed alluring. Of all the features I liked its support for importing MS Office 2007 Open XML files to native ODF. Downloading was damn easy. The full suite was just 292 MB. The real struggle was installing. Because it did not have any setup shell script (like the one's presents in OpenOffice tar.gz files). All it had were a RPMS directory and some, may be release notes or other unusable information. It had no instruction for installation! Then I removed some unnecessary rpms and tried that old formula "rpm -Uvih *.rpm" inside that RPMS directory containing packages. It ran for sometime than asked for Java Runtime. Dear me! I had removed those Sun Java packages from my Mandy notebook (But OOo did run without those JRE). Why did it ask for JRE? Trust me I have no use of JRE, it just takes some moments to run OOo.

Anyways, I installed the Sun Java packages from Mandriva PowerPack DVD and issued that "rpm -Uvih" and it installed pretty well.

Now the real trouble. When I started OxygenOffice writer, it entered to document recover. What a hell! I never worked on any documents before, and it was just first-run. Well, I okeyed the document recovery, strangely after recovery the OxygenOffice freezed right after the splash.

Then after a little legging around I removed that .openoffice.org2 directory from my /home/user and rebooted the notebook. There was no such problem thereafter.

But this experience of OxygenOffice made me think the program is anorexic. However, it is good to use it till the big release of OpenOffice 3.