I have been using OpenOffice.org and its derivatives as my primary office suite for years. Latterly this has been NeoOffice since that is a native OS X app - OOo required running under X, which looked weird and was slow to startup.
So I was quite excited to read that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is available. One of the things they have been working on is a native OS X UI, and I was keen to play with that. I kicked off the download, opened up the disc image, and...
It was then that I noticed that the image was for Intel Macs. Since my iBook is a G4 PPC Mac this did not get me anywhere.
I went back to the OOo site and found a PPC image. Apparently my glass of wine with dinner confused me though - I downloaded the latest stable build, which is 2.4, rather than the 3.0 beta I wanted.
Truly, I can understand the OOo folks only supporting Intel Macs. The binary download is big enough to make a universal binary prohibitive, and all the excitement in Mac Land is around the Intel machines - it has been the best part of two years now, I believe, since they were introduced. But I am still disappointed that I won't get to try this out, at least not for a while.
Posted by Dunx at May 9, 2008 06:02 AM
Yes, but after this beta, they (or someone else) may get around to rebuilding the launcher for ancient and nearly crippled machines such as yours. ;-)
The question that I have is will OOo run with the new faster, 1.6 JVM. That may be quite sah-weeeeet.
That is of course true, although I am becoming used to PPC stuff not being as available as it once was. For example, Ubuntu doesn't do a PPC build any more.
I am not surprised by the transition, but I am surprised at its speed - Apple gear is particularly well known for its durability, so cutting yourself off from a still-large market by stopping support of PPC hardware seems less than helpful.
Never mind. NeoOffice works pretty well for now.