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Tuesday, 13 May 2008
System Integration for OOo 3.0 Beta for Windows
Ingo Schmidt-Rosbiegal

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.





 

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Posted by Ingo Schmidt-Rosbiegal on 13 May 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to del.icio.us Bookmark to del.icio.us |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[3]

Comments:

Interesting.

I have been using the Portable version of OOo to avoid problems with corporate laptops. The portable version is not 'Installed'.

Would it be possible to extend the mechanism used here so that the official version, & the betas, could always be installed as a portable version?

Posted by Bob Harvey on May 20, 2008 at 12:11 AM CEST #

Hi Bob,

there are several installation types that we offer. What do you mean with "Portable" version of OOo and where did you download it? Is this a version, that only installs files and makes no system integration? Knowing this, I can tell you more about extending the described mechanism.
Our "official" OOo versions are installed using the Windows Installer service. For this Beta release we removed the entries for the Windows registry to avoid conflicts in file type registration. Nevertheless there is a huge number of entries in the Windows registry that are written by the Windows Installer service and that we cannot influence, because they are not part of the Windows Installer database in the installation set.

Posted by Ingo Schmidt on May 20, 2008 at 09:53 AM CEST #

The portable version comes from http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable among a host of other similarly modified apps. It is what U3 should have been but wasn't.

They are run from removable devices like USB sticks (I use an SD card in the slot in my company laptop). Corporate policy forbids installation on the laptop other than via a managed route, but they fail to provide tools like vector graphics editors and bitmap editors, so I use OOoDraw and theGimp. I also find I can drop my portable version into e.g. cybercafe machines or ones in hotels and have my preferred tools available. I've also burned the portable version to a CD. I can copy it off that to a scratch directory on a strange machine, run from there, and delete when I leave. OK, I don't get to keep any changes to templates, but that does not matter in the context.

It isn't just a reluctance to write to the registry that makes things portable. The portable versions keep all the user preferences and shared libraries on the portable device, and will run in-place on any machine the device is connected to. So, for example, there is nothing stored in the user's profile directory either, nor are windows events written to the event log.

Some apps are very easy to make portable without any modification. Filezilla or the Rainlendar calendar, for example. If you create the user configuration file in the executable directory before first run they will use that instead of creating things in the profile. Those kind of apps have never adopted the registry, and frankly I don't see why any application should, especially those created cross-platform.

If there were some install-time switch that allowed the standard OOo windows distribution to behave in a portable manner it would be very useful.

Posted by Bob Harvey on May 20, 2008 at 10:11 AM CEST #

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