mandag 28 mars 2005, 15:31, skrev Gavin McCullagh: > Presumably debian-edu will not want to ship a java reliant > OpenOffice? �I seem to recall though that Skolelinux ships or shipped > a JRE?
mandag 28 mars 2005, 15:31, skrev Gavin McCullagh: > Presumably debian-edu will not want to ship a java reliant > OpenOffice? �I seem to recall though that Skolelinux ships or > shipped a JRE? We will ship the OpenOffice version buildt in the Debian community in future releases of Skolelinux. It's a whole lot of maintainability issues that are sorted out in a better way then to build our own OpenOffice - as we did't with OpenOffice in Skolelinux 1.0. We are also shipping j2re1.4 with permission from Sun Microsystems. There are for other reasons than a currently need for java in OpenOffice. It's the use of java applets in some browser applications that the pupils use when doing different work in their classes. It could be some use of jre (Java Runtime Environment) in OpenOffice 2.0. The new database MS Access-like frontend written in Java could more easily replace the use of Access in a minor course in the secoundary school. The pupils are learning some simple use of a datebase-application integrated with an office-application. But fortunately there are other approaches. You can easily integrate MySQL with OpenOffice, create tables in a gui-tool[1], and use OpenOffice to manipulate data, expand tables and make queries, as the this[2][3] screenshots shows: [1] http://www.knoda.org/ [2] http://ingrid.bitnexus.net/OOo/Kapittel4.html [3] http://hk-classes.sourceforge.net/screenshot.html The overall strategy that is agreed upon is to convert to a free Java Runtime Environment when it's stable enough. The timeframe on this could be: -- In short term we still will ship the proprietary jre from Sun on the downloadable Skolelinux-ISO or with apt-get to the Skolelinux apt repository. Hopefully the OpenOffice 2.0 developers has integrated the Java support as a independent component, so that de Debian maintainers don't need to hardcode exclusion of Java. AFAIK it's posible to integrate the Java-dependencies in a way that makes the OpenOffice functionality as an "independent" packages. Then the people that need proprietary Java could just plug it in. -- In a short and meedium term people that uses Java also should contribute to the Java GNU classpath proeject[4]. There are enough developers out there[5][6] who uses free software in their production change that also uses Java as their main programming plattform. They schould contribute, as Richard Stallmand has urged. [4] http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/ [5] http://www.dedasys.com/articles/language_popularity.html [6] http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm -- In a meedium to a long term, we should include the Free Java[7] as the standard jre in Skolelinux. Some of this work are still in exprimental, and we need a more stable versions of the software. The teachers and the persons who operates a Skolelinux-network don't have the time to support unstable software. To introduce an exprimental jre is not an option for a running operations with 2700 to 17000 users and 6000 terminals :-) [7] http://java.debian.net/index.php/DebianSupportsFreeJava Some exprimental testing has been done to see if the Free Java works in a browser with Java-applets. It does, and it's really fast. Sometimes 20 times faster than standard Java from Sun. So the future could be bright - but it also has to be stable ;-) - Knut Yrvin
