How to Install an OOo Build from DEV300_m45

I have noticed some of my fellow classmates are still appearing to have some trouble getting the install working from an OOo build. To make their lives easier, and the lives of anyone else trying to do this task, I will post how I got my build to install.

From the DEV300_m45 folder type in:

setup_native/unxlngi6.pro/bin/install /home/bartosz/Desktop/DEV300_m45/instsetoo_native/unxlngi6.pro/OpenOffice/rpm/install/en-US/RPMS /home/bartosz/Desktop/OOoTEST

Obviously you have to change the /home/bartosz/Desktop to wherever you have the DEV folder checked out. Also the last parameter (/home/bartosz/Desktop/OOo) you can change that to whatever you want the installation folder to be.

Then cd into your installation folder, in my case

cd /home/bartosz/Desktop/OOo

then type

./opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice

or simpress or whatever program you need to run.

Assignment Update

During my talk with Thorsten last week he told me to complete my project I would need to write the master page to the clipboard, to the best of my knowledge that would require me to get a Windows build going since all of the operating systems appear to have different ways of writing to a clipboard.

I found the Windows way of doing it, unfortunately I do not have a Windows build yet. I might get that done over the summer break when I can afford to tie up my computer for 8 hours or more.

I wanted to look for how the other parts of Open Office write to the clipboard since they already must have the code somewhere. So I turned to my trusty friend OpenGrok.

And found some interesting pieces of code: I initially found a clipboard.java file, the file looked very helpful, but of course its just a tutorial so I wanted to look for a real working example. I eventually found a g_clipboard.inc, sadly some of that is not in English. So I translated the text, it sounds like what I've been looking for, but clicking the InhaltEinfuegen name led me to this. Which was not very helpful.

I decided to just try to use the tutorial and fool around with the code myself. Of course I would need to add something to the menu bar. I tried adding an item to the menu bar, but it didn't work out, so I figured there must be other places where the menu items are created.

OOo Class Project Updates

During the past couple weeks, we have had project updates on our Open Office projects. We were told to make notes about the presentations and write a blog about them. My initial reaction was that I realized that everyone is in a similar spot in the project.

The first project that was presented was upgrading to python 2.6. I thought it was a little weird that they don't just spend the extra time and upgrade to 3.0 right away, but the explanation of 3.0 being completly different then 2.6.1 was a good enough reason for me.

The next presentation was improving Impress' style. I am still not quite sure what kind of improvements they want, I guess I'll see next presentation. It was really cool how Daeson would change the code and rebuild during the presentation, even though sometimes the rebuild didn't seem to work.

Building Open Office on Open Solaris seemed like a really cool project, I might want to help out Thiago on this one if I get some free time. Of course that would mean I'd need to install another OS which might take my interest out of the project.

I liked how Ladan showed her bug in action during her presentation. I think the way that Microsoft solves that problem in Excel would probably be the best way for Open Office to solve the bug, but I'm not sure how Ladan plans on solving the issue.

Implementing additional slide show transitions was probably the most graphically appealing presentation. Some of the transitions in the video Jerry showed looked very impressive. However it was weird that a binary output was not generated but dmake was up to date. He says its a source code error, but I assumed a source code error wouldn't result in a dmake up to date message.

Finally understanding Impress. I feel bad for Fred, I hated drawing class diagrams for some of our tiny projects. I dont know how he is going to get one done for something so big.

My OOo Project - Making Master Pages Copyable

I have decided to work on the project that makes Master Pages copyable for the Impress application. I chose to work on this project because it requires C++ knowledge, which I feel I have a lot of, and Uno knowledge, which I don't even know what that means. While it might seem like a bad idea to take a project that I am not fully qualified for, I like the challenge and it seems as if a lot of projects require some knowledge of Uno, so maybe it will help me with fixing other open office bugs.

I decided to start learning about this project by first figuring out what Uno is, this lead me to this website explaining Uno, which lead me to the SDK. I then decided that it might be best to wait to talk to Thorsten so that I could get a better understanding of Uno and why do I need it for my project.

My next step was to go to Open Grok to search for Master Page functions that might be useful to me. I found this one which looked very interesting. The comments say that the function returns a copy of the master page being used in the current document. Of course that is only a header file, so I needed to find the actual "meat and potatoes" of that function. That wasn't too difficult to find.

My current idea on how to solve this bug is to use the function that I found to return a copy of the Master Page used in the current document. Then saving it to a temporary file, then when the user selects paste it then reads the file and puts all that information into the new documents Master Page. Of course this is easier said then done, and I will definitely need to discuss this with Thorsten before I get started.

DEV300M42 build

Late last night/earlier this morning I ran into this build error on build 42.

mkdir -p ../unxlngi6.pro/misc/install/fake-db-root
rpm --define "_builddir /home/bartosz/Desktop/DEV300_m42/setup_native/unxlngi6.pro/misc/install/fake-db-root" --define "_rpmdir /home/bartosz/Desktop/DEV300_m42/setup_native/unxlngi6.pro/bin" -bb fake-db.spec
-bb: unknown option
dmake: Error code 1, while making '../unxlngi6.pro/bin/noarch/fake-db-1.0-0.noarch.rpm'

ERROR: Error 65280 occurred while making /home/bartosz/Desktop/DEV300_m42/setup_native/scripts
rmdir /tmp/15952

I couldn't fix this error, so I went to the irc chat at #dev.openoffice.org, I got some help from someone named cloph. It appears that .configure doesn't check to see if rpm-build is installed. Since I installed Fedora and uninstalled Ubuntu over the reading week, I'm not surprised I missed some of the packages I needed to install. As of about 7:45 the build has been going strong, so I guess I'll find something else to work on until this is done/keep everyone updated on my progress.

10:48: Build Succesful. Milestone 42 seems much easier to build I dont know if its because I did it on Fedora instead of on Ubuntu, but this definitly doesn't get the NSS 3.10 error that everyone in my class seemed to have problems with.

Build SUCCESS!

Finally I completed my OOo_m40 build on the CDot computers. Now I just need to get it up and running on my local machine which I will work on after dinner. The problem I was having was solved by my classmate Daeson, he emailed me a patch he wrote to solve the error, unfortunatly when I tried the patch a part of it failed. I figured it was because I tried a variety of different patches from the internet that didn't solve my problem so I removed my current build and started again from scratch. My build still crashed in the same place, but at least now I knew I was only going to apply 1 patch instead of the 3 or 4 I tried earlier. After the patch was complete I attempted to build again but got an error saying that "dict-ru:: No such file or directory" I found the file in my filesystem so I tried building it again and it finally worked.

If anyone is still working on the build and crashes in the same spot as I did here is a link to Daeson's patch

OOo Still not Building

Well after trying for a couple days to build Open Office M40 I am still having problems. My last blog post talked about an error which was fixed pretty easily, turned out I was using the wrong -p number for the patch provided(-p0 should have been -p1). This error is a little trickier. Here is a pastebin of my CDot error.

I assume that the build should be close to completing once this bug is fixed since the build lasts a really long time, but I'm not 100% sure.

I am also building OOo M40 on my local machine, and that is going much worse then my build on the CDot computer. Here is a pastebin of the output of my make build.