steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

     I recently had some irritating issues with my G5 that (in the end) required me to rebuild the system. After two days of hard labor (I had to move websites and monitoring programs over to a FreeBSD system), I finally rebuilt the machine. In the process of doing so, I downloaded the latest installer for Open Office and to my surprise, between the last time I installed it and now, there have been some dramatic improvements. Firstly, the installer has been shrunk down to one installer (instead of the old installer within an installer routine). Secondly, the look (widgets, fonts and screen layout) of the windows are much better. Everything is so much easier that I thought I would write to say just that! If you have shied away from Open Office because of difficulty in getting it installed, I recommend you consider it again. In order to do so, you need X11 installed (it's pretty easy to find either in the extra installation items on your rebuild disc or on Apple's website). Other than that, nothing more is needed. Of course, it is a bit slower than other applications because it usually has to launch X, but for whatever reason, the application itself is even faster. Kudos to the Open Office team and especially those that work on the OS X distribution!