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AbiCollab.net support in AbiWord Windows installer
For kicks I packaged a Windows installer of a snapshot of the stable AbiWord branch that includes preliminary AbiCollab.net support: abiword-setup-2.6.5-svn20080729.exe.
Note that when we enable AbiCollab.net support in the official AbiWord builds (I think that will be somewhere around 2.6.6), the collaboration protocol might be slightly different. When that happens, you will have to update this testing version.
PS. How cool is that: for Windows systems an application developer can make a single, tested application installer which people can use to install an application... and it will Just Work! Brilliant! If only we could do that on Linux... but alas, apparently that's too hard... And no, PackageKit (even though it's very cool), does not offer this. AutoPackage also had way too many problems last time we tried it. Maybe it's different these days, I dunno.
AbiWord 2.6.4 Released!
AbiWord 2.6.4 is a one of those perfect releases that the .0 release should have been :) On Windows this release fixes tons of plugin related issues, while on Unix/GTK+ we have proper front rendering again (it regressed from 2.4.x, ouch). For the rest, the usual set of fixes all over the place.
[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]
Pre-built packages with abicollab.net support
To make testing http://abicollab.net/ a bit easier for people, I've built AbiWord packages with abicollab.net support for Fedora 7, 8 and 9. All required dependencies can be found in the respective official Fedora repositories. These packages contain everything you need to easily collaborate on documents, either by directly opening them from the website or from within AbiWord using Collaborate -> Shared Documents.
Mail me (uwog@uwog.net) for an invite key, or use one from the list below and hope it's not used yet:
18A8B7E453A11431-0A632CB7-1B02A26D 278B03AF5EA6C0A0-B84C1D14-714794C4 456183B34F40B815-48831758-24CACB3B 6013026F6B9602F9-E74BD7CC-5D06B3C9 66E4258F2B13C81B-29D32296-D87EF225 86C2B4D3D972516C-8E5E0415-E55852F3 A0010345F0246DD8-7EA8F09F-38D3AC14 BDC68E6E88B22E36-E5EE7EB3-900B3073 C1C64CF0E3EAF53B-6A091BAB-7E9A255D EE2F20F375C9EE1D-163A3F4D-90F3A8A5
Time for some early AbiCollab.net testing
For those of us who couldn't attend GUADEC this year, let's build our own lil' party!
Martin, Better.be and I (all three of us founders AbiSource Corporation B.V.) have been hacking away at our new online collaboration service called AbiCollab.net. Tons of kudos to all the work done by Foddex as well; it was a good idea to talk him into joining Better.be :)
The AbiCollab.net service allows you to store and collaborate on your documents online using AbiWord. You can use the service free of charge.
Now this service is still very much a work in progress (especially noticable by the still rather technical user interface), so we don't want to bother the general public with it at the moment. However, if you don't mind compiling software, and don't mind the occasional service outage, we welcome you to try it out!
To use it, you'll need to do 2 things:
1. Compile AbiWord 2.6.x, together with the AbiCollab plugin (make sure you have at least the libsoup, gnutls and asio developer packages installed; Ubuntu users: see update 2 at the bottom of this post):
svn co http://svn.abisource.com/abiword/branches/ABI-2-6-0-STABLE/ abiword-2.6 svn co http://svn.abisource.com/abiword-plugins/branches/ABI-2-6-0-STABLE/ abiword-plugins-2.6 cd abiword-2.6 && ./autogen.sh --prefix=<your_prefix> && make && make install cd ../abiword-plugins-2.6 && ./autogen.sh --prefix=<your_prefix> \ --with-abiword=../abiword-2.6 --disable-all --enable-abicollab \ --with-abicollab-service-backend && \ make && make install
Don't forget to replace <your_prefix> with the prefix you want to use (or just leave out the option alltogether).
2. Register an account. You'll need an invite key (so be quick):
All keys taken. More to come soon! :)
Then start uploading some of your documents. You can open and edit them directly from the website (make sure to register *.abicollab files with AbiWord), or directly from within AbiWord using Collaborate -> Shared Documents. Note: If you use the second method, then you'll need to create an account first using Collaborate -> Accounts.
Nifty feature of the day: Upload your CV to AbiCollab.net. Then create a permalink to the latest version of your CV in PDF form. Use this link on your homepage, just as I did on http://uwog.net/resume/. Now as soon as you hit CTRL-S in AbiWord to save some changes you've made to your CV, the PDF will be automagically updated to reflect your changes.
Feedback would be very much appreciated!
Update: Feel free to drop me a line if you want to try it out but didn't get hold of a valid invite key.
Update 2: The libasio-dev package in the Ubuntu repositories misses the libboost-date-time-dev and libboost-regex-dev dependencies. Make sure to install those as well before you compile the AbiCollab plugin.
Hillary stays in because Obama can be assassinated
She really said it: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.". This is getting (well, it already was) hillaryous (pun intented).
AbiWord 2.6.3 Released!
AbiWord 2.6.3 is a nice cleanup release; make sure you get it!
[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]
OLPC finally ditches annoying education goals
"[...] the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible" - Charles Kane. It's good to see some clarity coming from the OLPC camp.
AbiWord developers show strong support for OOXML
The winning Google Summer of Code applications for AbiSource have been announced. The AbiWord developers show strong support for the emerging OOXML ISO standard by the selection of 2 winning proposals about improving AbiWord's OOXML import and (currently non-existent) export filters.
This year's winning entries are:
- Getting rid of non-portable library use in AbiWord/Gtk+ (read: make AbiWord use Cairo and GTK-Print)
- Improve LaTeX Support (read: improve the LaTeX exporter)
- AbiWord Multiple Page View
- Rethinking Styles (make our style related dialogs not suck)
- Improve OOXML support (this one focusses on the import filter)
- Proposal for developing OOXML Export plugin for AbiWord
PS. Please don't flame me to death. We don't particularly like or dislike the OOXML format itself. It was a joke. Funny.
Interestingly, we did receive quite a few applications about improving OOXML support, while we got zero OpenDocument related proposals. Apparently the support for the OpenDocument ISO standard isn't strong enough in the F/OSS community to actually make an effort to improve support for it. Even when paid. Food for thought.
Yes, it is stop energy
@Jason: First of all, stop bashing Red Hat. Red Hat had nothing to do with any PackageKit design decisions. It makes you look silly.
Second of all, software distribution on Linux is horribly fscked. Yes it is. There is a reason that you can't find any Linux binaries on AbiSource's download site. We've tried and tried again, it is broken. Yes, even your fancy .deb/apt-get/synaptic stuff. We had software distribution solved in Windows land 5+ years ago, and Linux still can't do it cross-distribution.
Now, for the first time in years we might actually get a good working tool that makes things like installing a dictionary from AbiWord *doable*. Hello, this is 2008, and installing a dictionary is still hard for normal users and developers alike. We have to deal with it on irc and via e-mail every single day, so we have a clue how bad it actually is.
So, what's your solution to this all? Whine that PackageKit currently does not look at fd 0 so you can slam the user a VTE in the face to totally confuse the crap out of him. If showing a terminal is so precious to you, then how hard can be to whip up a patch to do just that? It can't be more than 10 lines of Python. If that patch does not get accepted upstream, you can always put a custom patch in the PackageKit .deb.
Now stop the stop energy please.
AbiWord 2.6.2 Released!
AbiWord 2.6.2 is roughly what 2.6.0 should have been; 2.6.1 was scared, so we didn't release that one :)
[ Release Notes | Download ]