Friend, OpenOffice & LapTop

Linux For a Trade Manager


One my best friend, she was 43 years old, enthuastic woman, work as Trade Manager for famous oil company I cant mention it . She bought Lenovo T61 lapTop after confusing . She has been using MacBook for long time. Her latest MacBook destroyed on the car accident . Lucky she was not get serious injured at that time.

Why she bought a Lenovo (?) it's rarely, Long Time Mac user can migrate easily. Guess what the reason (?). Her 14 years old boy wish to have lenovo and they both 2 units T61 with attractive discount. Her son is enthuastic ubuntu user :=)) he erase the xp-pro including the xp-iso inside and put GutsyGibbon instead. The mother will not has time for linuxing, she said "linux is for psychological sick person" ha ha ha ha ha . She may angry ; since when I have been visiting her home, her son is always enthusiasly discussing about linux. Other reason She really dont like, her son sitting infront of the monitor for long time at week end just for tweaking
linux box.

After 2 months using T61 with xp-pro, she was shocked with bunch of viruses, she bought NortonAntivirus 2008 for 3 user lisence at usd 75, another 17 days trojan, spyware attacked her LapTop. She really angry and quickly bought a
MacBook :=))

Two weeks ago, she gave me the LapTop and she wish to give a tray Linux. I joke her " do you wish to join psychological sick group ?" and we were laughing ...

What she do with LapTop
As a trade manager, her duties are accessing email a lot, 300 - 400 emails a day. Surfing the net, editing office documents, converting most office documents to *.pdf file, editing image, listening music and watch movie sometimes, accessing data-base via web browser. Its not so hard computer user.

Distro
Gentoo become the choice, but installing gentoo is pain, a lot of time investing and internet connection is mandatory, however most gentoo system is stable (opinion from a non-technical person but not faster as claimed by some gentoo's folk.

The installation went well with minimum (efficient) application :

gnome-light
Seamonkey Internet Suite (minus composer)
Gimp
XaraXtreme
F-spot
Gphoto
LeafPad
Audacious
Mplayer
Totem
Xchat
pidgin
Brasero
cups
OpenOffice Suite

Trouble with OpenOffice
The most trouble some is when installing openoffice. The applied USE Flags= binfilter odk sound webdav.
Thus the full USE Flags=binfilter odk sound webdav branding gtk gnome gstreamer and what happened 12 times failed to build with the same problem, complaining the bridgespython uno. I went to the source and did manually build and deliver python uno, but No Lucks python uno wont be delivered. Its spent the whole day struggling with oppenoffice and I almost give-up and decided to install openoffice-bin.

I left the latTop for three days

Long week end come, I touch the lapTop again, and start browsing the find clues about compiling openoffice 2.3.1-r1 in the portage. I found in the LFS web site However I prefer to use automatic installation method serve by gentoo portage, since will be easier for update, let say just running emerge -DNuv world everything will fine. I wish to show to LapTop owner, Linux is easy.

I made idiot decision. Wiping all the inetalling gentoo and start again from null. I just presumed, when openOffice itself pulling all her dependencies, then will be easier.

Installing base system just need 55 minutes a time price to install considering complete system in ubuntu since I have copy of stage-3 tarbal and portage-snapshot, thus the most time is for fetching gentoo-sources. Clean installed gentoo base system with bootable kernel, check internet connection and all went well.

Profile choosed is /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2007.0/ mean, has use flag acl cups gdbm gpm nptl nptlonly unicode its what the portage was built. I add branding gnome gtk use flag for desktop integration plus CFLAG="-O2 -march=prescott -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" and MAKEOPTS="-j3" with LINGUAS="en_US" for sure copied all in the distfiles to reduce fetching time Thats all.

When I was putting emerge -DNuvp openoffice 153 package should be fetched with 405 kb file shaould be downloaded since the rest was reside in the distfiles :=)). Before decided to compile 153 package, I worried about the RAM requirement. Well the machine have 4 GB RAM and about 11 GB free space at / partition, but compiling 153 package in one shot is not good idea. Thus the compilation doing at 4 times, after choosing certain dependencies packages with last touch openOffice itself.

By putting lm_sensors, sensord and smartmontools for monitoring the machine, starting compile openoffice time emerge -DNuv openOffice && halt. I started at 18.30 and went for hang out, back at about 22.30 and checked, the compiling run well :=)) but the both CPU Temperature indicate at 91 & 92 C deg FAN run at 3,400 RPM Free RAM 723455 kb. Really terrible. Decreasing the airCon in the room to 17 C deg and I went sleep.

Next day in the morning, I found the machine is switch-off good news :=)), swirching on and check, the openOffice well installed, check to the log, spent 485 minutes


Interesting ... but Not Good idea to compile openOffice ...