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Thursday, 19 Nov 2009
Improved websites to download OpenOffice.org builds
Marcus Lange

The current setup of websites for downloading OpenOffice.org installation sets provides builds for several languages and operating systems. But nowadays a lot more are built. Unfortunately they are not that easy to find as they are on mirror servers. The most users do not know this or how to come to these mirrors.

Furthermore there was no comfortable way to download language packs (currently for 96 languages !).

Another reason is that many native language teams have only a small staff or do not have the time to test all available Release Candidate (RC) builds on all platforms for their language. However, these are very close to a final release but have not got the latest tests. But why not offering these to the users with a hint to be carefully when using?

To improve this situation and to deliver more choice we have created a new download website layout.

Main Download Page

http://download.openoffice.org

This website was enhanced to download easily the build you want. Of course the well-known (green) One-Click download remains the same easy way to get your favorite version. The same for the orange button for Developer Snapshots. The new thing is the yellow button that will guide you to the website for Release Candidates.

Full Installations and Language Packs

The improvements were done here to provide all available stable builds:

http://download.openoffice.org/other.html

The first table provides all full installation sets as stable release of the current OpenOffice.org version. The second table provides all stable language packs.

BTW:
A language pack contains only resource files for a specific language and platform to show, e.g., menus, dialogs and error messages in your language. If translated it may contain also the help content. It's a comfortable way to get several languages without to install the applications double and triple. After installation change the languages via menu "Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages - User Interface".

Release Candidates

A complete new website was created to offer all Release Candidates. Also here the first table has links to the full installation sets and the second to all language packs:

http://download.openoffice.org/all_rc.html

Some days ago the 100 millionth download of an OpenOffice.org build was announced. We hope to increase this impressive number with the new download websites.

Happy downloading. :-)

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Posted by Marcus Lange on 19 Nov 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[1]

Friday, 07 Aug 2009
More than twentymillion downloads
Joost Andrae
I just did a query of download numbers counted within OpenOffice.org's load balancing system Bouncer. When counting all downloads since 7th of May (3.1.0 release date) since today we had more than twenty million downloads.

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Posted by Joost Andrae on 07 Aug 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[2]

Tuesday, 24 Feb 2009
New download location for Developer Builds, Release Candidates and Beta versions
Marcus Lange
We have build a new location for downloading unstable builds like Developer Builds, Release Candidates and Beta versions:

http://download.openoffice.org/next

Because I'm dealing with uploading OOo builds together with Joost Andrae, I've seen that we have to change much data in several files to make an upload public and downloadable. So I had the idea to simplify this much more.

When looking at the main download site (http://download.openoffice.org) it is quite simple to get the newest stable release. The platform and language will be taken from your browser and together with the version data a respective link will be offered for a one-click-download.

Now when you think how to download Dev Builds, then the current situation is really uncomfortable and needs to be improved.

So, I've started to think about this and have also written a proposal and some comments in the website-dev mailing list (http://website.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=10396) and releases (http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=releases&msgNo=13111). Ivan M. was that good with coloring the links and created appropriate arrows, so that the website is similar to the main download site and Kay Schenk is still helping with Javascript work. Frank Mau has helped to get the one-click-download technology behind it to work.

What are the advantages for all of us:
Today we would like to point you to the website for testing. All is working but do not see it as finalized, so more changes are still possible. We would like to know your feedback. Do you like the easier way to get the newest Dev Builds? Do you have any suggestions what could be made better? Do not hesitate to tell us on the mailing lists.

Thank you very much in advance for your support.

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Posted by Marcus Lange on 24 Feb 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[7]

Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008
Download system supports extended mirrors
Frank Mau

Welcome OpenOffice.org 3.0

Yesterday OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released, in the first 24 hours over 350000 downloads were initiated over the main download-mirror system bouncer. It could be more but the huge traffic on www.openoffice.org  bear down the web-infrastructure on the site hoster. Hope the next days will bring up the service back on a stable base.

The download system of OpenOffice.org was updated a week ago to support extended mirrors. Main reason for this is the increasing number of localized download sets for the office suite on all supported platforms. By the way, we support Mac OS native! - Image we have seven standard platforms, four of them have the alternative with/without JRE, so in real we support 11 download sets for each language. Typical download sets have a size between 120-150 MB. In sum we have a huge bunch of bits and bytes which is too much for normal mirrors with limited size. The new extended support brings up us in the situation to have more localized downloads in our mirror system. Good for the community and the spoken languages in OpenOffice.org. That was so far on the software side.

But this was not all, hardware was also updated. Sun sponsored a new server for the bouncer service of OpenOffice.org to handle the number of increasing downloads version by version. So in combination of hard- and software we have a good system to handle the new version.

Some features will come up later, therefor we have an wiki page for bouncer enhancements. It's not forgotten, explicit named here the geo-support!

And now let me say thank you for the support by Oregon State University Lab. Everyone did a great job to have the whole system running in time before OpenOffice.org 3.0 release.

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Posted by Frank Mau on 14 Oct 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[3]

Monday, 23 Jun 2008
Downloads on OpenOffice.org
Frank Mau

Downloads on OpenOffice.org

First, let me congratulate the Mozilla community on the very, very high download number of Firefox 3 in the first 24 hours. The download-day was in my eyes a great success for the Mozilla community. Marketing and all background-members of Mozilla.org did a good job and raise the bar for a software-rollout.

Back to OpenOffice.org and its versions. Looking back on our last download numbers we can see them increasing version by version. We grow over 20% from Version 2.3.1 to 2.4.0. Now the 2.4.1 started and it looks good to beat our own record.

Some possible reasons for the strong growth

Well, certainly our OpenOffice.org is a good product, for free and localized in many languages. We have extensions to extend office functionality if needed. In the back-ground runs the update-service to guarantee that the user get the latest updates. Apropos notification, our friends from java.com notified by each java-update that you can get the office productity suite. Big thank you for this hint! - But beside this we also changed some things in the web-area.

The OpenOffice.org website-team, here explicit named Maarten and Ivan did a very good job changing the whole web-design to a new look-and-feel plus a redesign of our pages. This improves the usability enormously.

Another factor is the one-download-click that enables the user to get the download starting with one-click from the homepage or the download main-page. In numbers, before we started with the one-click and the redesign of the pages 10% of visitors started a download of OpenOffice.org after visting the homepage. After the introduction of the one-click and the other web-changes 20%. Hey, this was a big step forward to grow.

Expectations for the future

The OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 is on the way and I believe it will break our previous download-numbers. Looking at Firefox and their version number 3, I hope we will also have a big success with our upcoming OpenOffice.org 3. Please help testing and fixing latest issues, get the Beta!


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Posted by Frank Mau on 23 Jun 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[8]

Tuesday, 22 Jan 2008
Tracking download numbers
Frank Mau

The new OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 release exceeds every previous download numbers.

Good to hear this. But the next upcoming questions are targeting statistics about platforms, languages and other criteria.

This request is not new. A try to get these data in the heterogeneous world of the OpenOffice.org projects including the native language projects is to use tags. A few months ago, during the OOo-Con Sept. 2007 in Barcelona, Stefan Taxhet asked the native language-leads to do so. We started with the Dutch project and have found an easy way to put them into the download-pages without any changes in the look and feel for the user.

Currently three other native language-leads beside the one for English-US agreed to modify their pages:
French (finished), Russian (finished) and German (comes soon) community. Many thanks to all of them.

The fruits of the work can be found on the Dashboard OpenOffice.org Downloads. The data will be updated daily and I believe it will help to have a better focus on customer needs.

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Posted by Frank Mau on 22 Jan 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this

Thursday, 07 Dec 2006
Download Pages and Bouncer
Stefan Taxhet

The OpenOffice.org website project and the distribution project share the burden to provide our users and developers download pages without broken links. For some years we tracked our mirrors with mirmon and manually maintained a list of URLs for the JavaScript-driven download forms. With about 100 mirrors and files for 4 platforms, variations with and without JRE plus sources this is error-prone and certainly led to broken links.

Fortunately Oregon State University Open Source Lab ( osuosl) offered to host Bouncer for OpenOffice.org. Bouncer is a database driven mirror management application that has three main components - a bounce script, a sentry script to check mirrors and files for integrity and a set of web-based administration tools.
We are able to provide an URL for a file in download pages and bouncer takes care of the redirection to a mirror. Just add files with md5sums and bouncer ensures that the load is distributed according to mirror's weight. You'll never run into broken links. If it only were that easy...



For 2.1.0rc2 links using bouncer look like

http://openoffice.bouncer.osuosl.org/?product=OpenOffice.org&os=src_bzip&lang=src&version=2.1.0 RC2 http://openoffice.bouncer.osuosl.org/?product=OpenOffice.org&os=src&lang=system&version=2.1.0 RC2
for sources; splitted sources src-binfilter, src-l10n, src-sdk are formed accordingly. The language “src” equals to an empty string.

http://openoffice.bouncer.osuosl.org/?product=OpenOffice.org&os=linuxintel&lang=en-US&version=2.1.0 RC2
for installation sets; platforms macosxintel, macosxppc, solarisx86, solarissparc, win have been configured so far.

It starts to become interesting if localized builds are enhanced with a JRE or provided as debian packages and served from a path containing the locale ... The tricky part is the maintenance of full pathname templates for files related to a release. Those consist of fixed parts and placeholders for product, version, os, language and extension. The templates for 2.1.0rc2 look like

${mirror_baseurl}/contrib/rc/${pv_path}/\
${pv_product_short_name}_${pv_path}_20061201_${os_path}${lang_path}${os_extension}
${mirror_baseurl}/contrib/rc/${pv_path}/\
${pv_product_short_name}_${pv_path}_20061130_${os_path}_${lang_path}.${os_extension}
...



If you look at our file naming scheme you'll notice that we have to stretch the system a bit.

OOo(product name)_Version(incl. date stamp)\
_OSCPU_what_locale(optional _wJRE).ext

But it wouldn't be too hard to press optional portions like wJRE and the date in the variable os_path of our fixed structure. Let's refrain from naming directories zn-TW but files zn-tw, Or was it vice versa? Splitted source tarballs can work also, if we give all pieces an additional “ locale” like sdk, core, ... Unfortunately you don't see immediately whether your changes work as intended. One has to check the status pages and wait for the next update cycle. Additionally access to the logfile of a mirror can tell you which URLs are requested.

We have to be consistent in our naming. Then it's just the upload of the md5sum file and all files are available for download with their respective URL as soon as some mirrors are ready. Joost, I'm sure you'll like it as soon as we have templates for all our file and release types in stock. Feel free to add localized builds on request of the NLC QA groups.

Let's see whether new versions will work for OpenOffice.org too now that Mike moved to Mozilla. There are some interesting features planned. Thanks Corey, Mike, ... for your support for OpenOffice.org and help.with bouncer.

Please allow me to point you to the OSL Rackathon:


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Posted by Stefan Taxhet on 07 Dec 2006  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[5]

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