Re: [mac] Portable AQUA via USB on Intel

[Clytie Siddall]

Thanks to everyone for their replies. I'll try to answer all at once in one email, to avoid threadspread. ;)

On 28/08/2007, at 4:11 PM, eric.bachard wrote:

FYI, the full installation needs less than 390MB on the USB key, and any other support works. In short, install it wherever you want.

I don't think most people bother with a USB drive under 1GB nowadays, so it should be fine. USB thumb drives are widely advertized in Vietnam.

The language pack install also worked.

Say thank you to Christian Lohmaier, alias cloph, and Shaun McDonald :)

I'm sorry that I forgot to do that. Thankyou to both Christian and Shaun for their effort in supporting my language. :))

I was impressed that the language-pack install script found and identified all my different OpenOffice.org installs on my hard drive, as well as the one on the USB drive.

:-)

I am getting rather confused about how many different OpenOffice.org installs I have, so anything that _isn't_ confused by that situation is doing well IMHO. ;)

I unmounted my USB drive, then remounted it. I clicked on the Writer icon in my Dock, and an OpenOffice.org icon appeared.

That's exactly what was expected

(This is not really intuitive, because when I came back to the app, I clicked on the Writer icon to return to my document, and it started loading another OpenOffice.org instance. I'm not sure how we get around this, but we really need only one OpenOffice.org icon, or an easier way to remind the user of which icon does what.)

Yes, I agree. The problem is in the design, and someting is wrong.


we have 6 icons => one application

As I explained .. somewhere ( :-) ) recently, separated applications is not the correct design, because The opposite is imho the solution: one application, asking what, through 6 possibilities. imho, the "New" OpenOffice.org menu is wrongly designed too in that sense.

Yes, I agree. In the Help, it is also confusing, especially for the new user, to be continually referring to several different applications. They understand that one application can have multiple features, or cover multiple areas, so I don't see the need for separate apps at all, from the user POV.

The setup process worked. When I clicked on "Finish", instead of the OpenOffice.org splash screen, I saw a blank white rectangle, with a full progress bar down the bottom.

Well spoted: this is a bug. Only at first launch, though.

Yes, it didn't occur on the second launch, from USB on my daughter's Mac Mini.

Big plus: the app immediately recognized my keyboard layout choices, and input Vietnamese text correctly.

Say thank you to Herbert Duerr and Etsushi Kato :-)

<blushes again> My head is full of holes. Thankyou, Hebert and Etsushi!

Thank you. I'll have a look to see if Universal Binary is a good solution for that. If so, I'll give it a try. The immediate drawback is the needed place on the key: 550MB approximatively ( if I remember correctly the size the UB version of OpenOffice.org I tested was)

Still, if people are using a minimum 1 GB USB key, it should still be OK.

Last but not least, you are welcome to redesign the application: I prefer have user(s) point of view first, instead of the dev one. I have not too much time to help you, but I really appreciated your feedback.

Thankyou. I can't contribute code anymore, but I can tell you what works and what doesn't from the user POV. :) Eric then said, about the slow (>5 minutes) load from the same USB key, but on the Mac Mini:

Several issues can occur: USB not working properly ( I know some cases ), USB key model using USB 1.1 (instead of adviced 2.0 ), and/ or some file system check on your key, because not correctly unmounted last time, or spotlight doing some work in background... the real cause is not easy to discover remotely, but top and some other tools could be helpfull when the issue occurs.

Such slow down never occured for me, thank you for reporting it, I'll have a closer look on that, and I'll try to find other testers, to isolate the real cause.

Erich Hoch said:

On Macs the USB port in general is very slow and not very
responsive when using it with OS X. I don't know if this is kind
of "forced" by Apple so that users switch to the Apple favored
FireWire since other -nixes don't show this significant slow down
when installed on the IntelMac and neither does Windows XP
installed via BootCamp so even if the USB chips in the IntelMacs
aren't the fastest ones out there they cannot be the solemn reason
for the slowness of USB.

:(

Did you in compare the launch via USB with the launch on a hdd. Is
the launch on a hdd as slow as the one from USB?

Shaun said:

I will try to test it from the HDD, and also from the built-in USB port directly. I remember now that my daughter plugged the USB key into her USB _hub_, not the direct port. The hub already has the multifunction printer, her flatbed scanner and her graphics tablet connected (supporting my daughter's graphics habit is a major financial effort). The printer is only a few months old, the graphics tablet is a WACOM Graphire II, I think, and the scanner is rather old, so it might be USB 1, I suppose. She doesn't notice any slowness with any of those devices, though.

This will depend on the drive. Flash drives have a rated read and write speed. If you have a slower drive, then it will take ooo longer to open.

This was the same drive with both machines, so even though it was a generic brand, "cheap and nasty", it should not run much slower on another Intel Mac. Uwe reminded me:

Just one possibility: If you use an Apple Keyboard to plug in there an
USB device, you'll always have USB 1.1 instead of 2.0 an therefore a
very slow data rate.

To get a applicatin from a stick working, you always must plug in the
USB stick directly to the Mac, not into the Keyboard.

I don't know if that happened, but - just in case :-)

I think the USB hub might be the main culprit here. Sorry I didn't notice that when I reported back initially. (The Mac keyboard is plugged into the Mac Mini directly, and we don't daisy-chain anything onto it.)

I'll take an example
http://tinyurl.com/2uspl4

It has a 3MB/sec write and 6MB/sec read speed. That is one problem with the very cheap flash drives. This is too slow for running apps off.

___


___

That's a good point. It's going to be awkward if people assume you can run portable apps from _any_ USB drive, and get a really slow experience with OpenOffice.org. We need some way of marketing that positively: Free software like OpenOffice.org can be of high quality: cheap hardware rarely is. Run OpenOffice.org Portable on at least a XX/sec USB drive for optimal performance.

On the other hand there is the faster
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT4GBUFDWHTH00

which is 13MB/sec write and 25MB/sec, which is much more likely to be able to support It is sometimes very difficult to find the information like this about the flash drives.

My generic USB drive only has the chain store name and advertizing blurb, no other info. Maybe I should have held out for something snazzier. ;)

A faster ooo is much better.

Definitely. We don't want people saying, "It's a pain to load."

Is OpenOffice.org prefs compatible across different platforms?

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN

Perhaps the Linux prefs will transfer to other Linux systems? OSX to OSX shouldn't be a problem. Anyway, to end on a positive note, it was such a relief to be able to open OpenOffice.org without X11! This is definitely a huge step forward for OpenOffice.org Mac. :) from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)

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