We always stress that people should only install the ‘test’ versions of OpenOffice.org on spare PCs. Needless to say I ignored that advice and installed the new Release Candidate on my everyday Eee PC. I’d already installed the 3.0 beta on it without problems, so why not?

Anyway, this proved to be a mistake, with all sorts of bizarre symptoms – Calc wouldn’t start, although everything else was ok; and I couldn’t get any language tools to work.

So, I did a complete purge of anything OpenOffice.org related on the laptop, installed the Release Candidate again, and everything was fine. It even imported my OpenOffice.org 2.0 settings correctly.

So if you’re testing and see something similar – before protesting, do a clean install. For the record, the Release Candidate is working fine for me. The one issue I found in the Beta – a failure to export a particularly complex document as a pdf – now works fine.

However, other testers have reported issues, mostly language related, so expect another Release Candidate, and the final product towards the end of September. I can already anticipate the question: “Why delay the English version if it’s ok?” Well, I haven’t done the sums, but I’m willing to bet there are far fewer people using OpenOffice.org in English than there are in other languages. Certainly the activity in the various Native Language Projects puts the English speaking countries to shame!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 7:42 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.