Fedora 11 due to be released soon

[Keith Wilkinson]

Fedora 11 is due to be released in a few days.
There's quite a lot of documentation at
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/

A new release of RHEL that is somewhere
between Fedora 10 and Fedora 11 will
probably appear in the second half of
the year.

[Keith Wilkinson]

First impressions very good.

Live CD recognizes video, sound and network!

[Charles Aschmann]

How is Japanese installation?

Charles Aschmann

[Wataru Tenga]

Keith Wilkinson wrote...

>
> First impressions very good.
>
> Live CD recognizes video, sound and network!

How does it do with reading/writing NTFS drives? (I'm downloading it
right now, but even the servers in Japan are slow.)

Wataru Tenga

[Keith Wilkinson]

JAIST is pretty fast. Haven't had time to install yet...
Sunday maybe.

[Wataru Tenga]

Keith Wilkinson wrote...

> JAIST is pretty fast. Haven't had time to install yet...
> Sunday maybe.

Turns out I had a bad Buffalo wireless adapter. I now have fast speeds
again.

But Linux is still not going to be viable for work. OpenOffice couldn't
even open the PowerPoint file (93 slides) I have been working on for the
past couple of weeks. This is the real weak point as far as I am
concerned.

Wataru Tenga

[Pablo Jiménez]

An interesting announce from Fedora 11 Release Notes:

IBus input method system - ibus has been rewritten in C and is the new
default input method for Asian languages. It allows input methods to
be added and removed dynamically during a desktop session. It supports
Chinese (pinyin, libchewing, tables), Indic (m17n), Japanese (anthy),
Korean (libhangul), and more. There are still some features missing
compared to scim so testing is strongly encouraged and reports of
problems and suggestions for improvements welcome.

http://tinyurl.com/moyskj

Regards,

--
Pablo Jiménez

[Keith Wilkinson]

> Linux is still not going to be viable for work. OpenOffice couldn't
> even open the PowerPoint file (93 slides) I have been working on
> for the past couple of weeks. This is the real weak point as far
> as I am concerned.

I wonder if you have access to Office 2007?
On the "Save As File" menu you can choose Open Document
Format. I presume that this is the format referred to in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205.aspx
Of course Office 2007 can read Office 2003 documents
and save them in the new Open Document format.

The latest Open Office is said to be very compatible
with the MS version of the Open Document format.

[Keith Wilkinson]

PS: It's quite possible that a default install of Office 2007
does not install the Open Document converter. In that case
you'd need to do a custom install.

[Wataru Tenga]

Keith Wilkinson wrote...

I have Office 2007 and use it regularly. In order to determine if I
could use Linux for the particular job I had been doing in Windows, I
tried to open the same PPT file in the latest OpenOffice on Linux
(openSUSE 11.1). The PPT file is in Office 2003 format. OpenOffice just
ground away for several minutes and eventually froze up entirely, on
several attempts.

Of course it's possible to convert the file to ODF in Office on Windows,
but then I would have to convert it back to DOC format before submitting
it to the client. So I would have to use Windows on both ends, and
probably do a lot of adjustment as well to overcome conversion problems.
It doesn't seem like an efficient way to proceed. What's the point?

Wataru Tenga

[Keith Wilkinson]

If the customer also has Office 2007, and is convinced
that saving the file(s) as ODF does not lose anything
(this is simply a matter of saving as ODF then opening
the same ODF file(s) again to check) then the customer
can send you the files in ODF format. You do, of course
have to install the same Windows fonts on your LINUX PC.

[Keith Wilkinson]

Novell claims that their version of Open Office
can import Office formats -- and you can have
LINUX or Windows versions:
http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/ooo.html
http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/openoffice.html
http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/ooo-statement.html
(Windows version)

[Wataru Tenga]

Keith Wilkinson <Keith.S....@gmail.com> wrote...

Does anyone on this list actually do that? Or do you know anyone who
does?

As you know, Japanese companies tend to view PowerPoint as a canvas for
stuffing all kinds of tiny details on each slide, rather than making the
concise slides for which it was intended.

Just as an experiment, I took the original PPT document (93 slides) and
converted it to ODF in PowerPoint 2007, then opened it in OpenOffice (on
Windows). While some of the slides were manageable, many were totally
mangled. Some of them had "OLE" tags because the original had embedded
data from other programs. When I clicked on such a tag, the program
crashed. Again, I ask, why bother? This is not a good way to get work
done.

Wataru Tenga