The feedback we got for the Aqua port of OpenOffice.org 3 Beta was extremely encouraging. This is very motivating. Thank you!

There was some constructive criticisms about some aspects of the port too. I'm happy to note that many of the issues are already solved in two developer's child workspaces (aquavcl07 and aquabmpfix01): keyboard handling, graphics performance and some visual details will improve considerably soon in one of the next regular development snapshots.

tags: aqua beta development openoffice.org

tags: automated_tests qa quaste statuspage

If you test the OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta on the Windows platform, you might be wondered about the missing system integration. Well, we decided to avoid the system integration in the Windows registry, because it conflicts with an existing system integration of an OOo 2.x, that you are probably using for your daily work. But if you know, what you do, you can of course get the complete system integration for your Beta tests. You only have to set the global property WRITE_REGISTRY, that is used as condition in the Windows Installer database. So please use

 setup.exe WRITE_REGISTRY=1

 or if you prefer the direct call with Windows Installer service:

 msiexec.exe /i <msi_database> WRITE_REGISTRY=1

 If you want to work with your OOo 2.x after you have tested the OOo 3.0 Beta and want to get the system integration for the OOo 2.x back again, you can achieve this by starting a "Repair" for the OOo 2.x that is available in the Control Panel in the Add/Remove software applet.

tags:

One week later – 21^st of April – the CWS was again ready for QA and with the integration of the CWS xsltfilter09 to the DEV300 master workspace the OpenOffice.org will get some really great enhancements for the XHTML export and also the other XSLT based filters (e.g. DocBook XML):

• change of the default extension for the XHTML export from .xhtml to .html

• with that change the Internet Explorer is able to load the exported XHTML documents of OOo [issue 85268]

• Footnotes are now supported also in XHTML export [issue 34424]

• Field values are now supported in XHTML export [issue 75125]

• Export of headings greater six now according to XHTML specification [issue 80679]

Great work Mathias and Svante!

tags: cws qa xml

I'm happy to announce the new logo of the User Experience Team.
The main goal of the logo is to penetrate core values of the project:

• Usability,
• Productivity,
• Enjoyment
  

tags: user-experience

• The zipped JavaDoc API
  
• The JAR of the reference Java 5 implementation
  
• The zipped NetBeans package containing the sources of ODFDOM v0.6.

tags: api architecture code development netbeans odf opendocument software specification sun xml

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta (build BEA300_m2) has been released.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

For US English installation files please use the following link
http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/index.html

Localized builds and Language Packs can be downloaded from one of the mirror servers listed at http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors#extmirrors
OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta files are within the ../extended/3.0.0beta directory.

MD5SUMS:
http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/md5sums.html

tags: beta openoffice.org qa release

I'm back from the QA weekend in Essen, Germany. The meeting took place at the "Linux Hotel" - Villa Vogelsang and it was coordinated by a team from the "OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V.". There were about 18 participants from Germany, Swizerland, the Netherlands and from Mongolia.

Most people came on Friday afternoon and in the evening we had a barbecue and we had a lot of fun... On Saturday morning Jacqueline Rahemipour and André Schnabel started with a tract about the current translation process and how it is seen by the German community.
Then Stefan Baltzer and I talked about the mission and dependencies of QA work within the project. Topics like "compliance of deadlines" and how it relates to QA work or if checks of already integrated issue fixes having the state "verified/fixed" help to identify potential problems of the integration process of child workspaces were discussed. Then we talked about creating synergies between the QA teams of OpenOffice.org native language teams. We discussed that it might be relevant that contact persons of different native language QA teams are published on the QA web page to be able to ask for advice.
After a lunch break Cor Nouws from the Dutch native language team informed us how QA work in the Netherlands is coordinated and he talked about other activities in the Netherlands like an "OpenOffice.org Café" that will be started as an event in a town near the Belgian border in June 2008. Then Badral Sanligiin representing the Mongolian community talked about his work on translating OpenOffice.org into the Mongolian language. It was very interesting to learn about this project. He said that UI translation is about 90% complete and he will commit it back to the OpenOffice.org code base in June/July this year as well as he commited patches that are needed for the input method needed for the traditional mongolian written language as it uses complex text layout that is different from the Cyrillic alphabet that is commonly used nowerdays. In the evening there was some kind of bug hunting party with a focus on the current developer snapshot BEA300_m2. It was a late night.

On Sunday Helge Delfs demoed his (still local) version of the QA status page called "QUASTE". Using this web application it will be possible to upload testtool results to a server to get immediate feedback about how this test results eg. of a CWS build relate to the master workspace where this CWS has been created on. Afterwards we talked about QA work on child workspaces and how someone can get information from the EIS webapplication. After a brainstorming session about spoilsport for community members and how to address these problems at the end of this weekend we talked about how to do some advertisement for QA application related sub projects.

All in all it was a really productive meeting and it was really good to have members of other native language projects who shared their knowledge with the other attendees. Special thanks go to Jacqueline who mostly planned this event.

tags: community event openoffice.org qa

Starting with milestone DEV300 m11, Sun (Hamburg) release engineering will regularly build OpenOffice.org for the Linux x64 (aka AMD64, aka EM64T) platform with every new milestone. We have promised this a long time ago, I'm glad that it finally happened. The main purpose is, naturally, to find 64 bit specific build- and obvious runtime problems during the initial milestone build and "smoke test". This should hopefully ease the burden of the maintainers of the OOo 64 bit ports.

We plan to publish 64 bit Linux OOo installation sets with one of the next DEV300 developer snapshots. Many thanks go to the original porters, Caolan, Jan (Kendy), MartinK, Pavel, Stefan and others who did great work here.

 For those who are interested in the details, the installation sets:

• are targeted for Linux x64 systems with libc-2.3.6 or newer
• will work with 64 bit Java runtimes - at least jre-1.5, I've tested it with the latest jre-1.6, a recent gij should work as well
  
• are build with "vanilla" gcc-2.4.3 and the compiler provided STL
  

tags: release

OOo-Dev3.0 Developer Snapshot build BEA300_m2 (BEA300 is the release branch for OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta) which installs as OOo-Dev 3.0 has been uploaded to the mirror network.

The rename of the product name to OOo-Dev allows the installation of the OpenOffice.org snapshot parallel to an OpenOffice.org  'final' (released) version. For this version some language packs have been uploaded and they should install into the OOo-Dev installation.



If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link
http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html

If the Bouncer links that I've placed into the download page do not work for you then you might want to use the 'non JavaScript' page
http://download.openoffice.org/680/index-nojs.html

Or you may take one of the mirror servers listed at http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/
and take the files from the ../developer/BEA300_m2 directory.

MD5SUMS:
http://download.openoffice.org/680/md5sums.html

tags: openoffice.org qa release snapshot