back to article OpenOffice.org overwhelmed by demand for version 3.0

OpenOffice.org organisers have blamed “unprecedented demand” for their site going offline as it delivered the long-awaited update of their open source office apps suite. Organisers apologised on Monday for the massive outage saying their technical teams are “trying to come up with a resolution” while the main site's remnants …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    this is working at the moment!

    http://openoffice.mirrors.tds.net/pub/openoffice/stable/3.0.0/

  2. OpenSauce
    Go

    Try Filezilla FTP client and a UK mirror, such as:

    ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/pub/openoffice/stable/3.0.0/

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Need to get themselves...

    ..a nice Microsoft IIS server there.

    Look, a Joke Icon, it's there, just look!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RSS feed of torrents for all platforms

    http://borft.student.utwente.nl/~mike/oo/bt.rss

    (Nicked from sakdoctor at /.)

  5. Giles Jones Gold badge

    And to make matters worse...

    News sites are covering the failure. This encourages scores of internet users to test the site, even though they were previously unaware that 3 was out.

  6. Neil Greatorex

    What is the rush?

    It's not as if there's a queue around the block, now is there?

    Think I'll try tomorrow, or the day after.

  7. James Le Cuirot

    Why the rush?

    I don't see why everyone is rushing to get it. Personally I'm not in any great hurry to type up another boring old document!

  8. Elmer Phud
    Happy

    @ OpenSauce

    Ta, nice and quick, too.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Now the website talks about

    Noodles - where is it based ?

  10. Darling Petunia

    OpenOffice 3.0

    Excellent software. Using on Mac.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Openistas?

    why the change from the usual derogatory freetards?

  12. David Viner Silver badge
    Alert

    Current message

    I love the current message I'm getting when trying to access www.openoffice.org:

    Forbidden

    You don't have permission to access /servlets/ContentHelmNoodle on this server.

    So what exactly IS a ContentHelmNoodle?

  13. mittfh
    Stop

    Oops!

    The main site's currently (16:21) giving a nice little 403 error...

    "You don't have permission to access /servlets/ContentHelmNoodle on this server."

    I wonder if they've heard of "chmod 644 <filename>"...

  14. Alex Wright
    Thumb Down

    Bah!

    Only Intel MacOSX support.

    That's no good!

  15. Justin Clements

    Torrent

    Isn't this a perfect application of using a legal torrent? If the chaps at NeoOffice can master torrents, what's wrong with OpenOffice guys doing the same?

  16. Charles
    Linux

    @Justin Clements

    Maybe it just didn't occur to them. Remember their roots.

    @Alex Wright: Source code is available for it. I hear PPC is still available as a target. So though you can't download precompiled versions of OOo, you can download a source package and "make" it yourself.

  17. Sam

    Re Openistas

    Because it's called Open Office, the clue's in the title.

    Timewaster.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Mirrors appear to be fine

    I just hit a mirror that was giving me around 1.1MBbytes per second. That didn't take long ^.^

    Google is your friend ... even if they may be an evil one.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Shame....

    Shame that it buckled under the load. Wanted to see more info about it.

    Paris... because she loves going down to high demand.

  20. Chris C

    So that's why...

    Well that explains why I can't connect. I'll have to check out ver 3.0 some time over the next few days. I was actually trying to access the site to report a bug in ver 2.4. For those wondering, it's a bug in the find/replace using regular expressions. It seems that "Find all" works properly, but "Replace all" does a recursive replace when you leave the replacement string blank (it seems to work properly if you enter a replacement string).

    If you have a line "aaaaaaaaa" ("a"x9), and you enter the regular expression "^a{4}" to search for and leave "replace with" blank, then find all will correctly find and highlight the first four "a" characters; but if you do a replace all, it will replace the first four, then check and replace again, then check again, leaving you with just a single "a". If you have multiple lines, and you use the replace button instead of replace all, you can see it runs recursively for each line before going to the next line. If you enter any replacement string (even one such as "aaaa", replacing the text with an exact copy of itself), it will correctly replace it only once.

  21. Mike Moyle
    Thumb Up

    @ Alex Wright

    "Only Intel MacOSX support. (...)"

    It seems that yhey're hiding the PPC version...

    Go here:

    http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/3.0.0rc4/

    and scroll down to:

    OOo_3.0.0rc4_MacOSXPowerPC_install.dmg

    or, I assume, this one:

    OOo_3.0.0rc4_MacOSXPowerPC_install_en-GB.dmg

    ...if you're on that side of the pond.

    Thus far, in the little that I've used it, it seems to run quite snappily on my machine and does what I want it to do,

    Enjoy!

  22. Samuel Walker
    Joke

    Content Helm Noodle

    They've been touched by His Noodly Appendasge ;)

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    doesn't matter

    I'm not allowed to access their site from work anyway and it's too big for my dial-up service from home.

  24. Christoph

    Interesting contrast

    Firefox tried to get as many people as possible to download on the first day, but OpenOffice.org can't cope with the rush. Did they ever talk to each other?

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    D'uh...

    filehippo.com

    Ever tried a search engine?

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Just got it ...

    Damn good and better than Kosher, being free.

    Runs fine on a Vista laptop with 1 Gig of memory.

    Bit smoother and slicker than earlier versions and renders quite challenging test docs well.

    Will try its compatibility (or otherwise) with VBA macros — up till now my only issue.

  27. vincent himpe

    as long as

    it can't run my vba macros i don't want it.

  28. Homard
    Coat

    Fuel Of Britain

    Noodles ? Pot noodles ? Yummy ! Does this mean that pot noodle supports OOO ?

    Now they're both great for being lightweight :-

    OOO for leaving your wallet intact, and doing everything you want properly. Image captioning in word for example is idiotic ! In OOO it's a doddle. Do an X-Y plot in excel where the x-axis data is not sorted - it will fail, while OOO tells you what the problem is.

    pot noodle, being dehydrated, and contained in it's own tub is great for camping/hiking/cycling trips where you don't want to be lugging loads of weight round but still want a hot meal. As long as you can recycle the plastic tub.

    Nice to see a healthy demand for this excellent software !!!!

  29. Richard Stubbs
    Coat

    @ Alex Wright

    You not on an Intel yet? .... come on as a follower of the cult of Steve Jobs, you know you have to spend at least 25% of your salary a year on apple products. mines the one trying to conceal my Apple ][ Europlus

  30. Benny
    Alert

    soap

    "it can't run my vba macros i don't want it."

    Go wash your mouth out with some soap...

  31. prathlev
    Heart

    @Bug, Chris C 2008-10-13 16:39 GMT

    Well, I don't know if I'd consider it a bug. OO 2.3 does the same thing. And so would Perl do with:

    $test = 'aaaaaaaaa';

    while ($test =~ s/^a{4}//) { 1 }

    print $test;

    Which would just print "a". So the "problem" is that the "Replace all" doesn't work line by line, but looks at the text as a stream.

    Of course if this is not what you expect then you might call it a bug. But having a free form text editor work line-by-line could be tricky, seeing that e.g. page margins makes line lengths change. :-)

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    @vincent himpe

    If it *CAN* run VBA macros - I don't want it.

  33. Homard
    Flame

    @vacuous hump (vincent himpe)

    re m$ orifice : it doesn't work properly, is overpriced, overfeatured, and a complete waste of money, be your copy legit, pirate, or currently serving as a drinks coaster. I've already highlighted 2 common situations with m$ orifice where the behaviour is crazy. These are normal/common use activities that don't work properly ! Properly tested ? Hmmmmm I think not. Most real office users don't need m$ orifice, and shouldn't have it. The only time you might is that special add-in for a particular business need that is only available for excel.

    Now OOO may not be perfect, but it does what I want, very well, and doesn't rip me off !! It *WILL* have been tested. And it is totally open, instead of trying to lock me in at every turn.

    Long live OOO !

  34. Christopher Martin

    Why is this so exciting?

    I like OOo as much as the next guy... but I think I can stand to wait until the ubuntu repo picks up version 3.

  35. Grant

    "it can't run my vba macros i don't want it."

    Er, and the other issue is that as a 'feature' they now support VBA macros.

  36. Lee Chong Yew
    Boffin

    Packages

    So, is the Debian packages out on the repository yet? Or do I have to wait a year or five for them?

  37. david Silver badge

    VBA Macro's

    Version 2.? crashed on my abuse tests -- Microsoft tests for and corrects stack corruption after calls to external objects, the version of Open Office I tested just crashed. Worse problem was that several versions of Calc couldn't save macro's at all in the default configuration - everything was lost when you closed the spreadsheet.

    It will be interesting to see if that has been improved.

  38. Peter Gold badge
    Thumb Up

    Yippie - a patch for MS Office..

    Hurray, now I can at least fix all those dead XML files that MS Office creates.

    I have noticed that OOo is always able to open files and at least partially rescue the content of them where MS Office (which corrupted the files in the first place) simply would give up or crash.

    I prefer OO, just because of that - and because it doesn't run VBA..

  39. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Languages

    Looks like they only do the english version in US.

    Us poor Brits will have to put up with the American spell checker.

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    google cache

    search google for the mirror list and view the cached version, from there select you local mirror. very challenging.

    Mine's the one with the book of puzzles in the pocket.

  41. GrantK
    Black Helicopters

    Suspicious

    If an Open Source release does not bring the server down these days then it is probably considered unsuccessful. What better publicity (to the average Joe) than that your servers crashed due to demand for your product.

    Black helicopter cos I reckon they pulled the plug themselves

  42. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    @Chris C

    Get a life, like we all want to know about your travails with Open Office...

  43. Chris Bradshaw

    @Bug, Chris C 2008-10-13 16:39 GMT

    Nice troll.

  44. graeme leggett Silver badge

    @Homard

    "Do an X-Y plot in excel where the x-axis data is not sorted - it will fail, while OOO tells you what the problem is"

    In what version of Excel does that fail? In all versions of Excel I've used it plots the data as it comes which is what you've told it to do. Not as if sorting data in Excel is hard either.

    Aside: Is "openista" comparable to "fashionista"

  45. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Disappointed

    I have just downloaded and installed this and I am very disappointed. I was expecting Open Office to be identical to Office 2007 or at least even 2003 but it looks very old. I'm going to reinstall Office. I have wasted hours.

  46. Graham Anderson
    Stop

    Why no torrents?

    Perhaps if they had posted some torrents of the files, they wouldn't have fally over servers. I'm pretty sure they used to encourage you to download via Torrent before, but this time around they seem to offer only HTTP and FTP links.

    Even now - with their super small emergency homepage - they are pushing you to HTTP/FTP.

  47. Stone Fox
    Flame

    @darling petunia

    It's alright love, we all have our crosses to bear. :)

  48. Robert Ramsay

    sounds like a great idea...

    your server goes titsup for some reason, and you blame it on "unprecedented demand"...

  49. sproot

    @ Chris Martin

    I installed Mandriva 2009 recently, that came with OOo3 :)

  50. Mark

    re: Disappointed

    So you're disappointed that some UI candy you were expecting wasn't there?

    Take a look at all the patents on "UI candy". E.g. Apple Dock, etc.

    Boy you REALLY LOVE being rammed up the arse, don't you.

  51. Mark

    re: as long as

    And have you tried?

    What if the next version of Office doesn't run them without porting? Will you NOT WANT the new office goodness?

  52. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    All mirrors, no smoke

    http://download.openoffice.org/

    Or your ISP's mirror site, if you have one.

  53. mike

    torrents here:

    Check the torrents page:

    http://borft.student.utwente.nl/~mike/oo/

  54. Bruno Girin
    Thumb Up

    @Mike Moyle

    Thanks! I was rather disappointed to see they didn't have a PPC build on the official site. Now I'll be able to enjoy OOo3 on the home desktop: result!

  55. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    Just love the whingers...

    "It doesn't this or that, not good enough!"

    OK, fair enough. These guys bang something out for nothing, they have to fight tooth and nail to get any specs to write the code to make it work with the worst standards ever invented by Evil M$ and all you can do is whinge. Jeez your lucky it even loads an Office 95 docs, let alone some of the latest abominations that MS push on everyone.

    If you don't like Marmite, you don't eat it, right? I don't see many people standing in the aisles of the local ASDA shouting the odds about how much they hate sprouts or chickpeas.

  56. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    @AC "doesn't matter"

    Post your home address, I'm sure we can email you a copy...

  57. Kenny Millar
    Coat

    As the Open University would say...

    OpenOffice.org power presentation (word processing) connection server status, downloading for fun is always, and often not, to used as a measure of open source conclusion.

    The very fact there is some downloading activity, and that is is open source, suggest that the uptake of the waterfall model of development, using a close set of contributors is in some minds, better for accurate results, and superior for inaccurate results.

    When compared to more proprietory (non gpld) public closed code bases, these development factories could benefit from use of some more open-source concepts such as code-re-use, licensing, development mentoring and artist procurement.

    The days of the bedroom coder and dead, but far from over.

  58. Jodo Kast
    Go

    Finally took down the bloated web page

    Honestly, does anyone know what they're doing with web servers?

    They finally replaced their bloated GIF/JPEG filled homepage with text only.

    How long did it take them to figure out that little fix? LOL

    It's online at least...

  59. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Re Just love the whingers

    "If you don't like Marmite, you don't eat it, right? I don't see many people standing in the aisles of the local ASDA shouting the odds about how much they hate sprouts or chickpeas."

    Don't know why I bother, but you *do* realise that's all you Linux/Firefox/OpenOffice/PS3/Xbox gimps do, don't you? Lackwit.

    Oh, and with regard to "... your lucky ..." and "... loads an Office 95 docs ..." you obviously shouldn't be commenting on anything used to produce documents. Either get some English lessons or take some time to check what you're writing. Or, ideally, could you and your ilk stop wasting time and bandwidth with your inane glee about things just because they're not MS? Please? Believe me, you're not earning any respect outside your own circle.

  60. A J Stiles

    Got it and it works

    I fetched the Source Code from the Debian Experimental repository and set it a-building last night. Installed the debs this morning.

    I like.

    For those who can't be bothered with building from Source, It'll be in Sid soon enough anyway ....

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