Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Leopard problems with OpenOffice

Since installing an update from Apple to my X11 application, OpenOffice has refused to run. Damned annoying that Apple's development labs can't test updates properly.

Luckily I found a solution on a technical forum of running NeoOffice instead. NeoOffice uses exactly the same open source as Open Office, so saved files are completely interchangeable with OpenOffice, with the odd additional feature thrown in. NeoOffice runs natively on Leopard and so doesn't rely on X11. So far it seems to run rather better than Open Office and I have had great fun mapping out my kitchen using the drawing application (very similar features to Visio) which includes the facility to draw to scale, so my kitchen units can be represented quite accurately for my workmen to follow.

Next time I'm running updates from Apple I'll research the forums before rashly saying yes to new bugs.