Calligra and kde-runtime ports

1

Many of you will have already seen my recent thread on this forum where I enquired about the state of office productivity software under Haiku:

https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/what_happened_koffice_and_scribus

The TLDR edition is that basically there are no working and usable word processor or spreadsheet apps for Haiku currently unless you are happy to use online alternatives. I can only speak for myself but online apps don’t cut it for me for this purpose and I was unable to get Google Docs to work under Webpositive or Qupzilla. It is rumoured that somebody is working on a Libreoffice port for Haiku but my enquiries indicate its far from ready and there is no public code available for testing yet.

Unlike Linux and the BSDs, which at least in their early days were much more developer/sysadmin focused (I’d say the BSDs still are), Haiku is targetting desktop computer users. A word processor and spreadsheet are viewed as essential apps by the majority of regular computer users and because these are absent from Haiku I’m unfortunately unable to recommend Haiku to anyone other than developers right now, which is a shame but I’m sure everybody in the Haiku community knows this already.

I’d personally prefer to see Libreoffice ported but common sense says it’ll be much easier to port the Calligra office suite because it is simply a newer version of KOffice which has been at least partially ported to Haiku in the past. Due to the lack of a Haiku Qt5 port at present, we can’t build any version after 2.9.2 but that is its most recent stable release and it handles Office/OpenDocument docs quite well these days it seems, which is what the computing masses need.

I’m not a developer but I looked into building Calligra for Haiku last night and, between Haikuports and Depot, all of the required dependencies to build Calligra are available with one major exception - kde-runtime. I successfully built kdelibs with Haikuporter last night so I found it a bit strange that kde-runtime doesn’t have a recipe too. In order to build Calligra Sheets we also require libeigen which already has a recipe but it needs to be updated as the current one is broken. The same applies to libexiv2 if we want to also port Krita.

Having working recipes and packages for kdelibs and kde-runtime would be a big win for porting apps to Haiku as this could also potentially allow for a port of KDEnlive. BeOS / Haiku being hyped as a great media OS would benefit greatly from having a good video editor! :wink:

I tried building kde-runtime-4.13.2 but I didn’t get very far as cmake errors on:

ERROR: cmake/modules/FindKDE4Internal.cmake not found in

This file is within the kdelibs-dev hpkg so from what I’ve read I should be able to get it to find it by running

export CMAKE_MODULE_PATH=/boot/system/data/cmake/Modules

as thats where the file is but I still get the same error. Whats odd is that the error seems incomplete as even after exporting the cmake module path I still just get ‘ERROR: cmake/modules/FindKDE4Internal.cmake not found in’ when I’d expect it to list the search path at the end of that error instead of it being blank. I built kdelibs as an x86 package and I’m running cmake after invoking setarch x86.

2

Hi danboid

i am more dev an not so much in building cross platform stuff.
You can also hand over cmake build flags with cmake -G “Unix Makefiles” … -DCMAKE_MODULE_PATH=/boot/system/data/cmake/Modules

Maybe this is working better.

Anyway i would suggest to post this request to the porting mailing list - because there are the pros like waddlesplash and so on.

I really dont like the gui concept of calligra (not usable and also not verry haiku like - for me) but anyway it would be great to have it. :slight_smile:

3

Hi Paradoxon

I forgot to mention I’d already tried passing -DCMAKE_MODULE_PATH=/boot/system/data/cmake/Modules to cmake with exactly the same results as exporting the env var.

I didn’t know there was a porting ML so I presume that is the best place to discuss this.

Thanks!

4

I posted these same questions to the haikuports-devs ML and these were the initial responses I got:

"Kdelibs is only there because I was attempting to port Calligra, and the reason I didn’t get to porting Calligra is because KDElibs is really borked in some way surrounding linking, which is beyond my skill to fix. You just get an eternal stream of linker errors when trying to run anything linked to libkde* (yes, even kde-config).

kde-runtime is included in KDElibs.

Oh, also - don’t get your heart set on Kdenlive. Even on Linux it’s pretty flaky, having the audio system screw up exports every other render for me. :confused:

Try Clockwerk, it’s a native Haiku media editor. You might be impressed. :)"

"kdenlive works pretty well for me in kxstudio. even renders meant for a cinema projector came out flawless. not to say it’s the best for haiku, of course.

kde frameworks 5 might be an easier job after the qt5 port, since it’s now just qt5 libraries, and calligra for kde5 wouldn’t be far behind."

5

Here is a summary of the dependencies required to build Libreoffice under Haiku and which are already available:

https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikuports/issue/108/libreoffice-dependencies

Whilst it seems most deps are available now, there are still a few biggies missing like mariadb.

Under Linux you can use LO under the browser via https://www.rollapp.com/libreoffice which would seem to be a web interface to a virtualized app instance running, wait fot it, “in the cloud” (gag) but rollapp doesn’t work under webpostive or Qupzilla, not even if you tweak the user agent id to spoof being Chrome or Firefox.

LO have got an official, proper web-based version of LO in development so hopefully that will work under the Haiku browsers.

6

Hi,

Just an FYI that MariaDB is a fork of MySQL. MySQL is ported to Haiku and there is a BEP, maybe even a package.

  • https://www.google-melange.com/gci/task/view/google/gci2011/7122227
7

ThinkFree office works great for me… it is a Java app but it actually looks quite native and works well with MS documents. Good luck with Calligra though!