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AbiWord 2.6.3 Released!

admin — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:58:54 +0000

AbiWord 2.6.3 is a nice cleanup release; make sure you get it!

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

OLPC finally ditches annoying education goals

admin — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:24:10 +0000

“[…] 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

admin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:31:45 +0000

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

admin — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:16:17 +0000

@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!

admin — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:17:49 +0000

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 ]

Declaration of Human Rights killed

admin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:44:52 +0000

Appalled as to why almost no-one seems to be bothered by the death of the Declaration of Human Rights as we know it.

PET scan

admin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:10:15 +0000

Tomorrow Wendy will finally get a PET scan to see what is causing her fever. She has had a constant fever ranging from ~38C to ~38.8C for about 6 years now (amongst an increasingly large number of other issues, suchs as inflammation of her eyes). The University Medical Centrum Groningen has been rocking so far, throwing all their technology at it to find the cause of her problems. Something our local hospital would and could not do. So next is the PET scan, which is typically used to 1) find cancer 2) find inflammation. Naturally we hope for the latter; not finding any problem would, as weird as it sounds, be a dissapointment. When they find something, they’ll try to biopsy it to determine what is actually going on.

AbiWord 2.6.0 Released!

admin — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:15:24 +0000

Release Notes | Download

Martin is a bug killing machine!

admin — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:51:09 +0000

The last few days I’ve been feeding the bug that annoyed me the most in AbiWord to Martin. One bug every day before I went to bed. Since Martin is about 18000 KM away, he had the whole evening to fix it. Nothing (well, if you only consider geekdom land) beats waking up and seeing a commit message in your IRC logs that kills your most hated bug! I wonder how long Martin can keep this up :-P

Rock on, AbiWord 2.6 will be neat!