MEPIS Community Forum

yes, the file formats are the same FOR NOW. however, these projects have been forked and there is never any guarantee that interoperability will remain 100%... changes in functionality have a weird tendency of causes drift in file formats

creating a pdf is one way to avoid file format issues, but it's not a cure and does nothing to address the ability to work on files at different locales. for now, i can go from home to campus and be able to use libre/open office without issue. but i can't always assume that's going to be the case, and i can't assume that libre office will ever be installed.

look for oracle to begin using their foothold in the database market to somehow "encourage" folks to use openoffice...

With complex MS Office spreadsheets and some complex cell formulas and OpenOffice, I have had issues requiring redoing the formulas in OO. It is not inconceivable that your scenario going forward will occur between OO and Libre, and probably likely.

Anything that "the man" can do to force you to buy his flavor of product, history has shown that he will do. Fortunately, history also shows that we, little guys, also have tools to fight back with. Oracle can go bite the big one.

Hello Guys,
I use Open Office only locally (retired) and I don't use it much. Therefore I would like to have the same program on my Mepis distro and XP. In other words how do I migrate to "libreoffice3" on Mepis8.5 ?
I can un-install Oo and install libre from scratch. But I feel it's an easier way to do it, right ?

Can somebody please explain to me what "sid" and "squeeze" is and how I can use it in my effort to migrate.

Any response will be appreciated.

Last question answered first, Debian is made up of different repositories, they are in the main, Old Stable (lenny), Stable (squeeze) , testing (wheezy), unstable (sid) and experimental, when a new application / package is introduced into Debian it first go's into experimental, and then passes down the repositories until it reaches stable, hopefully with all the bugs removed.
The main problem you have is 8.5 is now built using lenny as it's base,
So although libreoffice can be installed in 8.5, my own personal view is you would be better to install the next beta release of 11 then it is installed by default, and you would be running an up to date system based on squeeze which is now debian stable.

Tank's for reply Danum,
Suddenly the meaning of sid and squeeze becomes crystal clear.
Your advice to wait for next mepis 11 beta is a good one. I will wait.
Any idea when the next beta will come and an estimation of final realize date?

Excellent thread, and one I am quite interested in. LO seems to be the office suite Mepis is going to support for now, and I'm all for that.

Here's my situation: MySQL is my back-end and OOo is my front-end for all my databases, both personal and for the church I pastor. I couldn't ask for an easier set up. The databases are created in MySQL, then I fire up OOo and do a few things and I'm off to the races, so to speak.

Does anyone have any knowledge about LO and MySQL playing nice together as in the set up I've described? I ask because it would be nice to install Mepis 11.0, but if LO doesn't fit the bill, what would the point be? I suppose I could always install OOo after removing LO.

Thanks for the help.

Reminds me of the transition of my beloved KDE 3.5 to 4.3

- and clawing

until I looked around
and the view was .. pretty cool
and everyone was there .