Hello Christian On 02/02/2005, you wrote: Well, as you know, my name is Christophe Ochal, also known as Amon_Re on various websites, my involvement with the Amiga goes back a long time, in the early nineties i think, and i was involved, amongst others, with the Belgian Amiga club 'Waaslandia'. During this involvement i have aided in Amiga shows in Germany, United Kingdom and Belgium. My role in those days was mostly technical (repairs and such). After the collapse of Amiga's second coming, and the removal of Jim Collas, the club did collapse, and my activity was reduced greatly, thankfully, i never lost my fascination with AmigaOS. It was only when Hyperion announced that they were going to do AmigaOS 4 that my involvement with the community picked up again, and now i'm doing my best to support the community in any way i can. The things i am doing are: - http://amigadev.amigaworld.net A support site for Amiga developers where they can find documentation and help from other developers, this site is simular to utilitybase, and me and Nicolas get along great, there's no power struggle involved ;) - OpenOffice.org: This is the big one, it's probably the largest open source effort ever on our platform, hopefully we can pull it off. - GCC installers and tools This is a simple GeekGadgets installer suite. Well, OpenOffice for AmigaOS has been a fantasy for many people, dating back to several years ago, but the recent activity was started by EnthilZa (Thomas Frieden) in a thread on amigaworld.net. From there on we took the initiative, and we got the ball rolling Hyperion is more or less involved through the fact that OS4 and OOo share common coders, other then that there is no active involvement from Hyperion. We have over 70 people on the mailinglist, but at this moment most work is being done by a smaller team. I am involved as Project Manager, Peter Bengtsson is working on porting NAS (one of OOo's dependencies), Mark Bond is helping out with Project Management, Ole-Egil Hvitmyren is managing the mailinglist, aswell as hosting the OOo sources, Paul Heams is putting the finishing touches to his ASPELL port (another OOo dependency) Henning Nielsen Lund is also helping out with various build related tools, Tony Wyatt is working on Berkely DB (another dependency) and Andy Hall is working on porting SANE, a scanner API. The biggest part are all the dependencies, these need to be resolved before anything else can be done, as for making a "light" version, i don't think that's intresting. As for a time frame, it's impossible to give any guess, the work is huge, and we all have dayjobs, so it won't happen over night, so i guess it'll "when it's done". This is one of the reasons why we are targetting the more usefull dependencies first (like SANE and ASPELL), this will be usefull for the community, and will help us gain momentum and possibly even some extra coders. There is no financing asof yet, we are all doing this without the intent of making any money out of it. The port will be free, as it is on all platforms, and the sources will remain open. Hosting of the site was kindly donated to us by David Doyle, and the sources will be hosted on http://www.sf.net We are still working on going through the sources, trying to figure out how everything fits together, and some ports have already been started (ASPELL, SANE, NAS), basicly, what needs doing is this: - Examine all known & unknown dependencies - Examine available ports of said dependencies if they exist - Port the remaining dependencies - Recreate the build environment for eighter cross compilation or native - Port the remaining code - Debug This is a rough sketch of the work envolved, and several steps can be done in parrallel. There currently is no timeline. We are communicating weekly with the Jamiga team, and will also investigate kaffe. Luckally, OOo can be used without java, although some features won't work without it. OOo is in no way any competition for Papyrus and Pagestream, at this time it's best considered vapourware, it'll take alot of work to port it, and waiting for us to finish makes no sense. Regards -- Amon_Re Christophe Ochal Hoge Buizemont 168 9500 Geraardsbergen, Belgium Mobile: 0032 (0)479/46 45 74 http://www.kefren.be http://www.metalfest.be