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------- Additional comments from ttre...@openoffice.org Mon Mar 22 17:55:10 +0000 2010 ------- I attempted to get the jre _18 installed and experimented via the www.java.com page. I won't go into the details but it didn't work. The effort resulted in having to uninstalll all of oo.org 3.2 and reinstall from scratch. (It was extremely time consuming.) Sun Java doesn't appear to have a mechanism available to update Ubuntu to its latest version. It looks like it does for all the paid OSes-- Redhat, Suse, OS X and Windows, but there appears to be no support for Ubuntu, or general Linux. This effort, however, has lead me to what I believe is a clearer understanding of the problem at hand and the nature of this bug. I am going to once again recharacterize the "single problem" bug of this report as follows: Base 3.2, as installed on Ubuntu 9.10 per the process outlined earlier in this bug report using an installation of the Sun JRE which is at version 1.6.0_15 in the Aptitude (Synaptic) packages, fails to run any of its Wizards (Table, Query, Form, or Reporter). Now you may tell me that this is not a bug, and that I need to somehow get the latest Sun JRE running on Ubuntu, but if this is your position, I could not possibly disagree more. It is wholly *untenable* to have a database program which is so delicately sensitive to changes in the Sun JRE. One of two things is occuring here. Either 1) Sun's JRE product development team is taking absolutely no reasonable backward compatibility into account or 2) Base has been written in a manner that violates JRE standards such that it has become unduly sensitive to changes in the Sun JRE. Either of these situations is completely untenable to anyone attempting to manage a database using this system. You can't wake up one day, update the Sun JRE (a common occurence), and have your database fail. If you are telling me to accept this, you are basically telling me to give up on Base. I don't want to give up on Base. I think it is a really good system. The more I have worked with it, the more I realize how solid it is as a desktop rdbms. But for these kinds of issues this product could sore. It is highly under rated, but I think the devlopment world doesn't understand it. It fills a niche that no other rdbmss fill other than Access and Filemaker Pro, both of which are not Opensource and unavailable on Opensource platforms. My application is dependent on oo.org running on an opensource OS. Nothing is more mainstream opensource than Ubuntu. If Sun doesn't support this platform then they simply don't support oo.org running on any opensource OS. If it is not a paid OS, Base won't run. I know that this is running on, but it is worth giving some history here about my particular dbase app and what lead up to this bug report because this history is entirely relevant to this bug report, and I didn't realize this until this last attempt at getting this to work. Until recently, I ran this app on oo.org on a Mac laptop running OS X 10.4 under oo.org 2.4. The nature of this app is that the information is highly sensitive, but it needs to be highly portable and easily available. My old Mac laptop was easy to carry around, and didn't get used for much. It stayed off the internet most of the time. The database was kept on a USB stick, too for greater isolation. Upgrades to this configuration until recently were few. Until oo.org 3.2, there was no native OS X install of oo.org. While other platforms moved forward on oo.org, I was left behind on the upgrade curve. By the way, for the record the most critical wizard it needs access to is the form wizard because this provides the seemless creation of UI components that support subforms. Subforms are foundationally important in developing meaningful and usable db apps. Trying to build such forms in design mode is unwieldy and untenable. The wizard is essential. This is the primary wizard I need access to right now, but they all need to work. They all have their place. Recently, I was using the db on the Mac laptop when it failed. All the form dropdown listers tied to queries quit populating in my form. I had changed nothing. I was just using the system. Why this happened was a mystery, but I now believe it was the result of a JRE update on the OS X laptop. Given the history of oo.org updates to my PPC platform and OS X 10.4, I decided it was time to migrate the db to a platform poised to move forward and more portable. This app needs to be easily accessable most of the time, but highly portable. It needs to be highly secure. It needs to not be dependent on a particular piece of hardware like a specific laptop. The answer I came up with was as follows: I created a VMware virtual machine that will run in VMware player on any platform. The vm will run Ubuntu installed on an encrypted LVM partition. This vm is installed on an 8G USB flash drive. All it needs is a machine that has VMware player installed on any platform. I have searched the host memory while my app is running and no sign of my sensitive data is found. This app works amazingly well but for the failure of Sun oo.org3 running with Sun's JRE on Ubuntu. I work on OS X, Windows, and Linux all the time. With this app I don't have to carry an extra laptop around, just a USB key and have access to a machine running VMware player on any platform, yet my data remains reasonably safe. Ironically, during my testing this weekend, I went back to the Mac laptop and tested my old copy with the new 3.2 oo.org install. Amazingly, and much to my surprise, oo.org is now available as a *native* PPC app for this aging OS. The updated oo.org 3.2 that is installed works just fine. The wizards work on this platform. Once again, it is a paid OS platform-- non-open source. Openoffice.org seems only to support paid platforms, not Opensource Linux, not even Ubuntu. I know that there is more to the story here. I know that there are probably some issues with Ubuntu and its packaging policy. But this is not good enough. Ubuntu depends on oo.org as its anchor office suite-- a product that if it didn't exist would make Ubuntu nothing more than a technical curiosity. oo.org makes Ubuntu practical. Sun and Ubuntu need to sort this out. The way I see it you need to do one of three things: 1) Provide me with unambiguous explicit instructions on how I get this to work both now *and* from here on out so that I don't go through this every time a JRE update comes through the Ubuntu patch system, or 2) Acknowledge that it is a bug and work through how this is never going to happen again (can't maintain a db that could break with the next JRE update), or 3) Publicly declare that Base will not be supported on Ubuntu (so that we don't waste our time mucking around with this as I have up to this point.) I can port this db to LAMP and use other tools. I don't want to. I want to use Base and I want to help you finish making it the prime-time desktop db that you have designed *and* implemented it to be. In my view it has to work flawlessly on Ubuntu or Base is effectively not supportive of opensource!!! So I think you need to escalate this suport request and provide me with an answer that is definitive. You can't throw your hands up in the air on this. What is the answer? --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: issues-unsubscr...@dba.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: issues-h...@dba.openoffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: allbugs-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: allbugs-h...@openoffice.org
