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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Standalone KOffice for Linux, Please
From:       Boudewijn Rempt <boud () valdyas ! org>
Date:       2008-08-20 9:53:52
Message-ID: 200808201153.52993.boud () valdyas ! org
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On Tuesday 19 August 2008, Larry Short wrote:
> I understand that this is going to a KOffice mailing list; it is an idea
> and a request that I am hoping someone might respond to.  I first looked
> for a forum or other way of sending this request.  If I am in the wrong
> place with this, I would greatly appreciate being told where I might
> take it (I am reluctant to ask where I should put it!)

It's more about development, so koffice-develop would have been ok, too. We 
don't really do web forums: those take way too much time from development.

> *I think a standalone KOffice for Linux would be a wonderful thing.*
> That way it would be available to people who for one reason or another
> do not use KDE.  My reason, for instance, is that I work with a much
> smaller and lighter distribution named Puppy, but I would like to use
> KOffice, as it is lighter and faster than the other office suites, it
> looks very good, and it is comprehensive and powerful . I wanted to
> recommend a windows standalone too, but it seems like that is already on
> the way.  So windows will have a standalone KOffice and Linux won't?  Oh
> my!

Well... On Windows, you also need kdelibs and kdebase-runtime installed to be
able to run koffice. So there's no real difference. We also don't have a 
standalone installer for Windows, nor is there one planned at the moment, you 
have to use the kde-windows installer.

> I do not think the standalone would be prohibitively difficult to
> make--of course, I know virtually nothing.  I don't know totally nothing
> though, because I have been trying to prepare a standalone KOffice to
> work with Puppy Linux.  So far, *I have a 150 MB package that very
> nearly works! * This is about one-fourth of the size of a full KDE
> installation I guess. 

But that's just the package size, right? I would think that if you translate 
this to actually running koffice, you'd get the same memory footprint as 
you'd get when you just installed kdelibs, kdebase-runtime and koffice. Of 
course, it's a pretty good achievement on your part, and I think that if 
you'd make available a self-contained standalone package of koffice (through 
autopackage, klik or any other way), then that would be awesome.

Are you working on KOffice 2.0 or the old 1.6 version, btw?

> I hope to shrink it somewhat more also.  All of 
> the programs start and all or almost all run well (depending on the day
> ;-).  No joke.  They all open, run, and save their respective files.
> They also look good on the screen. To give you an idea of how I am
> doing, here is a list of the things that are left.
>
> If I can't convince someone at KOffice to take this on as a project of
> interest,

Given that we are with a really small number of volunteers, it's unlikely any 
of the current developers would be able to pick up on this, even with a 
financial inducement. We're really busy getting into release mode right now 
and have a TODO that stretches from Paris to Tokyo.

> I hope I might interest someone in possibly answering 
> questions and/or giving some guidance.  As with Crossover Linux and
> Wine, I would be happy to make a small contribution of $50-100 for help
> with completing the project.  And if all of that fails, I would like to
> try to find a list of what programs and processes KOffice expects to be
> running or available.  As I hope you can see from the Todo list, I have
> gotten a lot done, but now I am left with the problems that are tough
> because I  don't know enough about KOffice.  At least there really are
> only these few of them.  I will be grateful for any help.  Thanks for
> your time, Larry Short

The important thing would be the dbus daemon -- and even that is probably not 
really used at the moment for KOffice 2.0. Other daemon processes

>
> /1. Dictionary. It is missing and the spell checker in KWord and
> KPresenter doesn't work. I tried american.hash from Ispell and KOffifce
> recognizes that as a dictionary but reports that it is in bad format.
> Without american.hash spell check finds no misspelled words; with
> american.hash spell check finds that *every* word is misspelled Wink It
> appears that kde3.5.8 sfs (a package for puppy) has the same problem, at
> least for me. Will recheck. My plan is to install full kde+koffice on
> another distro and see what I can learn. Unfortunately the fix doesn't
> seem to be as straightforward as installing one of the i10 or i18
> language support/locale files, since there is no en_US i10 or i18 (en_US
> is the built-in default. I learned yesterday).

Sounds like you're working on 1.6 -- I'm not sure that that is even worth it 
anymore. I might do another 1.6 release, but I planned to do that last week 
and real life interfered so I didn't have the time. But 1.6 is thoroughly 
end-of-life. In 2.0, the spell checking system has been completely redone, so 
you probably will have quite different problems.

> 2 Gamin. I remembered that I had installed libfam, which is a library
> that KOffice would not start without (libfam is a part of gamin) but I
> did not install full gamin. Installing full gamin does prevent
> Code:
>     failed to find gam_server
>     Failed to connect to socket /tmp/fam-root-
>
> 3. I sometimes get errors about failing to find "applications.menu in
> /root/.config/menus/,/etc/xdg/menus/". My previous experience with KDE
> is that if one watches a console, KDE generates beaucoup warnings and
> errors, even in a default installation from major distributions, but it
> still runs apparently well from the gui. In other words, in some ways it
> seems normal for kde to generate a lot of console messages, warnings,
> and errors, but still run within parameters--this applies to the gamin
> server also maybe. I surmise that the kde goal is to run stably as gui,
> regardless of messages--"robust" in this way.  This is all ongoing.

The messages you get about errors in configuration files aren't harmful: they 
simply flag superfluous, outdated or non-standard options present in 
the .desktop files. Cleaning those up is a long-term thing. Of course, 
kbuildsycoca4 (which reads the config files to build a cache) could be more 
silent about it.

> 4. KChart. KChart (on Puppy 4.00) doesn't run for me beyond the intro
> screen. Maybe I didn't check that previously. X goes to 100% cpu and
> stays there. This is a show stopper. And on 3.01, KChart works fine, but
> Karbon crashes at that same point (picking a template and going on).

Does attaching gdb to the kchart process and breaking it give any useful 
backtrace?

> 5. Khelpcenter does not work. Some required files are not installed.

Does it say which ones?



-- 
Boudewijn Rempt 
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi
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