OroborOSX, X11, and OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X

Chris Coleman, <chrisc@daemonnews.org>

In January of this year, Daemon News stepped into the world of Mac OS X software and released Office Applications for Mac OS X. This product is a collection of office productivity applications gathered from open source projects. Although the softwares' origins are in Unix environments, the Office Applications set has a Mac-style friendly installer, integrates the Unix/X11 apps seamlessly into the Aqua environment, and adds document association capability.

OroborOSX

One of the key pieces of the collection was OroborOSX, an X11 window manager that helped bridge the gap between X11 and Mac OS X. Release 0.8.5 pioneered several critical new features, such as document associations and desktop icons.

Another piece was XFree86, which was included on our CD as a transparent install because Mac OS X 10.2 doesn't come with it natively. Just a few days after the initial release of our CD, Apple released the first public beta of a native X11 environment for Mac OS X. Since that time, Apple has released two other beta releases of their X11 and most of the changes have been backported to the XFree86 project. Apple also includes a closed source window manager with their version of X11 that handles the integration of X11 applications into Mac OS X similarly to OroborOSX, but document associations and desktop icons are still not available in the Apple window manager.

Mac OS X Panther (10.3) promises a new level of integration as their 1.0 release of X11 will be included as an optional install. The application does seem to ride 2nd seat a bit, as it now lives in the Utilities folder along side Terminal.app. The beta releases of X11 put X11.app directly in the Applications folder.

The OroborOSX project has not been idle. In addition to the standard bug fixes, Version 0.9.0 takes advantage the hardware acceleration code in XFree86 4.3.0 as well as in Apple's X11. This allows a user to run it on Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3 and take advantage of extra features without suffering any degradation in performance. It also plays nicely with CodeTek's Virtual Desktop for Mac OS X, allowing your X11 applications to function exactly like the Aqua programs.

OpenOffice.org

Since our last release of Office Applications, we have been working closely with some of the developers of OpenOffice.org to create an enhanced version for our next release. What we came up with is OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 Enhanced.

As many of you know, OpenOffice.org is a community supported Office Suite originally developed by Sun Microsystems as Star Office. The Office Suite handles most Microsoft Office documents as well as its own and other formats. The Standard Version is available for free download at openoffice.org's website. The Enhanced version on CD includes these extra features:

• Enhanced Look-n-Feel
• Multi-User Updates
• Advanced Font Features
• Type 2 Kerning Support
• Impoved Font Layout Support
• Templates & Samples
• Clip Art
• Multi Language Support: Easily switch between languages with these add-on language packs: English, Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Dutch, French, Spanish, Finnish, Catalan, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Polish, German.

Office Applications

Our latest release of Office Applications consists of OpenOffice.org, Gimp and the supporting utilities, such as XFree86, OroborOSX, and print drivers, all of which install as necessary. We have learned much from our previous release and cut out all of the bloat. We used the extra space to add enhancements to OpenOffice.org.

The CD set relies heavily on the document associations included in OroborOSX and it's ability to create desktop icons to make this a seamless experience for Mac OS X users. The only real difference a Mac OS X user will notice is that you have to use the in-window menus instead of the Aqua style menus at the top of the screen. However, this is an inherent feature of all X11 applications. The only other "feature" users will notice is a difference in the cut-n-paste commands; however, this in an evolving issue that is mostly worked out, but keeps improving as Apple develops it's X11.

We have packaged this in the same standard Apple installers and bundled in XFree86 and OroborOSX. The installer is intelligent enough to detect if you have Apple's X11 installed and notifies you to deselect it from your install options if you want to keep it.

We really put a lot of work into making this release of Office Applications a good one and want to thank the Mac OS X developers at OpenOffice.org as well as OroborOSX for making this CD possible. They really put in the extra effort to help us create a good CD set.

Pre-order Office Applications for Mac OS X, version 2.0 at the BSD Mall.