I reserved all weekend to get Open Office installed on my iBook. It took 45 minutes. And that included babysitting a puppy between tech activities.

Based on my success and happiness with Open Office on my Win98SE machine, I decided to install the same program on my Jaguar (10.2.8) iBook.

Open Office runs under X11 (a Unix shell) for Mac OSX. The X11 available at Apple's website only works with Panther, so I had to find the original beta for Jaguar. It's nice that MacUpdate provides a download at it's Gimp update page (see the first paragraph entitled Editor Notes, and understand the download is over 40mb). And they have the latest Open Office 170mb download, too.

After downloading those two items, I installed X11 in my Applications folder. Then I installed Open Office, also in Applications. The Open Office installer required other ancillary packages be installed, too, so I had to babysit the whole process pretty carefully.

Once everything was installed, I noticed this small icon in the Open Office folder:



I opened it. What the hell, eh? It asked me where my X11 application was located, and after I pointed it in the right place, Open Office proceeded to open slowly. It only needs help finding X11 once, so I put an alias in my Favorites. Clicking on the alias opens X11 and then Open Office.

I have tested Open Office with a spreadsheet and a text document (the fax cover sheet partially shown here), and it works. I don't know if the program is ready to replace AppleWorks on this iBook, but I find it very convenient to open and save documents without having to worry about converting back and forth between Apple and MS formats.

The installation was easy but complex. I'd have to say it's not for computer beginners, or Apple users who are not experimentally oriented.