To my fellow Mac PowerPC brothers and sisters … the darkness has lifted!! The dawn of OpenOffice 3.0 is shining its light on us, too! This post gives you everything you need to get OpenOffice 3.0 up and running on your MacPPC.

RTFA: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua-PP…

OpenOffice.org Aqua for Mac OSX OpenOffice.org 3.0 Aqua

OpenOffice.org 3.0 has been released on October 13th, 2008 and has received enthusiastic feedback. Try it out!

* OpenOffice Aqua Download

OK, who doesn’t love OpenOffice 3.0? If you’ve had a chance to play around with it, you’ve found that it’s sleek, full-featured (finally: comment bubbles in track changes!), and oh-so-free. It’s completely compatible with Microsoft Office, and even has features MS Office doesn’t, such as built-in PDF creation tools. And, besides, you stopped suckling on the Microsoft teat when you bought a Mac in the first place, so what’s the point of having to pay $200-something dollars for Mac Office? With the advent of OpenOffice 3.0, the OpenOffice project group is officially supporting mac for the first time! However, OpenOffice 3.0 has only officially been released for mac if you’ve got an Intel chip (just another reason to relish a macbook). So, if you’ve got a PowerPC mac like me, then you’ve been enviously drooling over the shoulders of all your Intel-mac, Windows, and Linux-using friends.

What’s more is OpenOffice has been teasing us for more than a month now. If you go to their main openoffice.org page, their perrty javascript tells you that all you have to do is click a button and you can “Start downloading OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 for MacOSX PPC in US English.” When you click said button, it brings you to a new download page that announces “You are about to download OpenOffice.org” … then it’s time for the let-down. You are redirected to a page saying there was a problem initiating your download and you should check out the Download Overview page. When you go to this page, you discover that OpenOffice not only does not support Mac PPC, but the most updated version offered for PPC is OpenOffice 2.4. No no no!

Sadly, I’ve been playing this game at least once a week since OpenOffice 3.0 was released. I just keep believing that one day I’ll click that button and they’ll actually let me have their wonderful new software. I have yet to see this optimism realized, but I just couldn’t give up the hope … so tonight I decided to google for “OpenOffice 3.0 for Mac PPC.”

And, it turns out the OpenOffice.org Project Group is beneficent and loves us PowerPC users after all!! They have a whole project site for kindly community developers to post ports of OpenOffice 3.0 for platforms and languages that are not officially supported (porting.openoffice.org). YAY!!! This type of thing demonstrates the true beauty of the open source software movement.

OpenOffice 3.0 for PowerPC for Tiger and Leopard (OS 10.4 and 10.5)

Installing it’s a breeze! Here’s what you need to do:

1. Check out the Porting OpenOffice.org site. RTFM, people. Of particular interest will be the Installation Page, the FAQ, and the OpenOffice 3.0 README page.
2. Download the OpenOffice 3.0 PPC diskimage
• The download page is rather confusing, as it’s just an index page with a ton of not-so-intuitively-named files. The real trick is not to download the first file listed for PowerPC, “BrOo_3.0.0rc4_MacOSXPowerPC_install_pt-BR.dmg” That is, don’t download it unless you speak Brazilian Portuguese.
  • If you are an English-speaker from the US, you want to download this image (named “OOo_3.0.0rc4_MacOSXPowerPC_install.dmg” about halfway down the download index)
  • If you’re not in the US, you’ll need to find your language from the extensive list of supported languages on the full download page. Browse from among any of the files that are named ” OOo_3.0.0rc4_MacOSXPowerPC_install_[Your Language Code].dmg”
• You’ll need to be very patient while it downloads. The disk images are about 170 megs (megaBYTES, that is). My internet connection isn’t so bad, but it took about 2 hours to download this bad oscar.
3. Mount the downloaded disk image.
4. Drag the OpenOffice icon into your Applications folder.
5. Open your new OpenOffice 3.0 software and feel the surge of dopamine as your brain rewards you for the accomplishment of your goal! Good human!

Ahhhh, the sweet glory of OpenOffice 3.0 on my PowerPC Mac … so nice.

OpenOffice 3.0 for PowerPC if you have OS 10.3 or earlier

If you have OS 10.3 or earlier versions, you’ll need to use the X11 version of the OpenOffice 3.0 port. The only real caveat here is that you must have X11 installed (well, technically just gcc, a C compiler), but X11 makes for good times. Click here to download the X11 installer for Mac, and then click here for the patch. Even if you don’t end up using OpenOffice 3.0 that much, you won’t be disappointed by installing X11.

P.S. Can’t post this without mentioning NeoOffice

Of course, there’s the lovely and awesome NeoOffice project that has made its business out of providing OpenOffice in a mac-style interface for years. These people rock my world, and should have no sticks shaken at them. However, their most current version is a mac-like OpenOffice 2.5 (NeoOffice 2.5), and OO 2.5 just isn’t cutting the butter anymore. According to their website, they will release NeoOffice 3.0 to “Early Access” users on January 15, 2009. To become an early access user, you must donate $25 to the project. The price ain’t bad, no question about it (and it’s good to donate to open source projects), but it’s still not a REAL release. NeoOffice 3.0 won’t be released to all users until the 31st of March, 2009 … in the fast-paced modern world, that’s as good as a freakin’ eternity. And, I dare say, even having to wait another 2 months if I pay $25 sounds a little too long for me. Yes, I’m impatient.