Few weeks ago I joined the team of open source in Seneca College. I am to work on Ooo (OpenOffiec.org) . My first goal is to be able to build the Ooo, and hack it (fix or add features). To begin I dived directly into the developers world and tried to make heads and tails out of this huge project. Unfortunately this was not most satisfactory so I had to find a way out to find my way in!!!
The first step was to install an IRC client to be able to be in direct contact with my colleagues and the community of open source developers.Long before any of the current common chat programs were out, I used to use mIRC; for this sole reason, I installed mIRC and joined the following channels:
To help you decide which IRC client to pick, take a look at HERE.
Second step was to choose an environment and try to build the project. Focusing on windows for past six years, I chose windows and not to my surprise I found out that the amount of information on the subject is much less on Windows environment compare to Linux. The open source nature of Ooo and Linux and the vast amount of available help and information on Linux lead me to decide re-learning the Linux operating system and then retry the build again on Linux. So my second step that was "choosing the operating system" switched from windows to Linux.
Having Chris, such a resourceful colleague on Fedora, out of all the available distributions of Linux, I chose Fedora.
Following Chris's advice, to start learning Linux right away, I downloaded and installed VMWare Player. VMWare is a virtual machine. It simulates a PC on your computer using a single file image. What is great about VMWare is that you can have several different images and experiment with them without worrying that you might screw things up beyond repair. These images are called Virtual Appliance. Just download one, open it and you have a pc running whatever you like.
For more than a week I worked on Linux and I have to say, I was amazed with its improvements in past few years. After working on VMWare, finally I am ready to install Fedora for real.
3 comments:
Hey Fardad,
Great to see you diving into this!
Welcome aboard :)
Welcome, it's great to have another educator involved in OpenOffice.org!
I'd like to suggest VirtualBox, a GPL competitor to VMWare, as well. It's a bit easier to use and of course the open source factor is important too:
http://virtualbox.org/
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