Open Project

Here's a nice cross platform application to do project planning. Maintained by Projity, it claims to be able to open Microsoft Project files. Finding an immediate need to open an old MS Project file, I needed to try it out.

I downloaded the tarball from the sourceforge page, and did this:

# tar -xzvf openproj-beta2.tar.gz
# cd openproj-beta2/
# ./openproj.sh

but I got this error:

Exception in thread "main" java.awt.AWTError: Cannot load AWT toolkit: gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GtkToolkit
at java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(libgcj.so.70)
at java.awt.Font.tk(libgcj.so.70)
at java.awt.Font.getPeerFromToolkit(libgcj.so.70)
at java.awt.Font.(libgcj.so.70)
at javax.swing.plaf.FontUIResource.(libgcj.so.70)
:

No Java JRE installed. So used this command to install java in ubuntu:

# sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
java-common odbcinst1debian1 sun-java6-bin unixodbc
Suggested packages:
equivs sun-java6-plugin ia32-sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts ttf-sazanami-gothic ttf-sazanami-mincho libmyodbc
odbc-postgresql libct1
Recommended packages:
gsfonts-x11
The following NEW packages will be installed:
java-common odbcinst1debian1 sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre unixodbc
0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 32.5MB/33.0MB of archives.
After unpacking 94.4MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Get:1 http://mirror.nttu.edu.tw feisty/multiverse sun-java6-bin 6-00-2ubuntu2 [26.2MB]
Get:2 http://mirror.nttu.edu.tw feisty/multiverse sun-java6-jre 6-00-2ubuntu2 [6324kB]
85% [2 sun-java6-jre 1544093/6324kB 24%] 106kB/s 44s
Fetched 32.5MB in 3m33s (153kB/s)

Had to agree with some java licenses, and after 5 minutes, all requirements were downloaded and installed. Then I ran the openproj script again, and I could open the old .MPP project which eluded me since my ubuntu migration.

Overall the interface is sluggish, but seems full featured. The fact that I now have access to MPP files certainly is a boon, without having to pay over RM1945 to access my old data.

I found this application via Bob Sutor's recent post, "Project Management via Open Source and Open Standards". What is interesting is that in a Computer World article "Saas rival to Microsoft Project goes open source":

Projity plans to invest “significant resources” into driving the creation of an open standards document format for project management that would be an alternative to the .mpp/.mpx formats used by Microsoft Project, and would eventually become a subset of the OpenDocument Format natively used by OpenOffice and StarOffice.

So what other productivity applications is Desktop Linux lacking? Ive been using Ubuntu for over 3 months now as my main OS, and Ive found that 90% of the things I need for daily usage are available for free.

Whats stopping you?


yk