Wow , Openoffice 3.2 is extremely fast on Ubuntu 9.10

I have been using Openoffice for years, and while it's compatibility has always been good with other office products, speed has never been one of it's strong suites, but boy has that all changed with this latest release. When you click on the menu item to start the application, even on a machine that is busy, as mine always are, it is near as damn it instantly there. Now you can't get much better than that.

I will also comment that the last release - 3.1.1 - had made moves to getting faster anyway, so it is obviously something the dev's have been looking at.

On Ubuntu it has not made it into the standard repositories to install, so you have to do it manually, which really isn't that dificult.

Basically go to the Openoffice web site HERE and grab the file that contains all the installation files.

Untar this file into your home directories tmp directory and then from a command line change into the directory it creates, which in out case is the DEB's directory and run the command shown below, simples as the Meerkat says ;-)



Now, as we already have Openoffice 3.1.1 installed, setting up an icon to access the program is slightly harder, if you don't remove that version first. I didn't as I wanted to keep both around for now.

So you need to right click on your Applications menu on the task panel, and add a link to the new application manually, like so.



Enjoy

Migrating my Dell laptop to Ubuntu 9.10 64bit

I have used 64bit Fedora before on a works workstation, but I haven't until now decide to move any of my personal workstations to a 64 bit operating system. Well , as always with these decisions, there have been a couple of events that make this move now easier, though I fully suspect I will hit the odd road bump on the way.

The three main announcements that have changed my mind are - Adobe have a 64bit version of the flash player available , and both Firefox and Chromium/Chrome are available in 64bit versions. I know there are some applications like Adobe Air that are stubbornly remaining 32bit for now, but you can work around this with 32bit libraries. This is not ideal, but I can live with it for now.

I have this morning burnt the beta to a USB pen drive to test the Dell XPS 1330, and all went well, with the wireless connecting instantly and I was browsing the web within seconds of the OS booting. I downloaded the 64bit version of the flash player and it worked with both Chromium and Firefox. The one thing I noticed was how rapid the system worked, considering it was working in Live mode from a USB pen drive. This could be a combination of the new version of Ubuntu and the native 64bit applications, but time will tell on that one.

I now have to back up all the "stuff" I have managed to collect in /home over the last couple of years , and then I will blow away the currently install OS and give Ubuntu 64bit the harddisk, and unless I hit any really major problems, I 'm going to stick with this as it really does seem silly to be running a 32bit OS on the latest 64bit hardware.

I will post again shortly after the upgrade and on any issues I hit on the road.