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Glow - Getting Started

Introduction

With the release of Glow 0.3beta (Candle), we encourage everyone using Glow to submit bugs. Anything that does not work as you expect can be regarded as a bug; our goal is to make the Glow user interface as intuitive as possible, so we are interested in improving any operation in Glow that you could not perform in a way that was natural to you.

Before submitting a request, check you are running the current version of Glow (0.3beta) and look at the list of already known issues.

If you are interested in contributing more actively to Glow, please see our Getting Started page for contributors!

Getting up and running

The steps below make it pretty easy, but we will have a Web Start download in the next few days and then you will be just one click away from running Glow. Until then, you need maybe 5 clicks ;)
  1. First, you need Java 1.4 or later; the nice folks over on the J2SE download page probably have what you need.
  2. Now that you are Java-enabled, download a ready-to-run Glow package; the latest files are provided in a single zip file on the OOoGW Files page. The file is around 1Mb so it should not take long.
  3. Unpack the archive using your favourite tool (usually unzip or WinZip)
  4. Now you have a few options; perhaps the simplest one is simply to run glow.jar. If you have installed Java in a desktop environment, you can just double-click or Open the glow.jar file. If you are running Java from the command-line, you can use the following command: java -jar glow.jar
There are also run scripts (run.sh and run.bat) which you can use to start Glow on UNIX-like or Windows systems; generally you don't need to use those unless you want to pass some custom parameters to Java. This used to be the only way to set your http proxy to use a WCAP calendar server from behind a firewall, but this use case has been solved by allowing you to put these settings into your .glow/userconfig.xml file in your home (or documents & settings) folder.

Checking your environment

The most common sources of problems are:
  1. Wrong version of Java - from the command-line run java -version; this should display "1.4.0" or an even higher version.
  2. Incomplete downloads - compare the size of your glow binary .zip file with the size on the OOoGW Files page. If it is a different size, try the download again.
If after checking both of these you are still having problems, help is at hand! You can either mail a message to users @ groupware.openoffice.org or raise a bug report in the OOoGW Issues page. In either case, you should send the version of Java you are using, the name of your desktop's operating system and the command-line output of running Glow. We will endeavour to get back to you in a day or so with some advice to help you get up and running.

Feedback

So, you've tried Glow and you like it (or hate it). What now?

If you like it, tell your friends and colleagues! (and drop us a line on users @ groupware.openoffice.org)

If you hate it, tell us first; we are continuously improving Glow, so your suggestion may be implemented in an upcoming version of Glow.

Using a calendar server

Calendaring is one area where the internet standards have not been finalised - Glow currently supports two calendar servers based on the WCAP protocol (and with the help of the OOoGW developer community we plan to support more): You can configure a WCAP calendar easily within Glow. Below are the steps required to connect to the public server at http://socs.services.openoffice.org which is provided as a service to Glow developers and users.

Configuring a calendar server in Glow

  1. Under the Tools menu, select Configure Calendars. This displays the Calendar Configuration dialog.
  2. Press the New button to display the Setup a new calendar dialog.
  3. Fill in the dialog similar to the screenshot below.
  4. Press OK in the Setup a new calendar dialog and Close the Calendar Configuration dialog.

Now you can just select the new calendar under the Servers folder in the Folder List in the main Glow window to work with the server-based calendar. A dialog will appear to ask you for the password; all of the test accounts on this server have passwords the same as the calendar name, so the password is caltest1. You should notice that the server calendar is almost as fast as accessing a local file-based calendar due to intelligent caching.

As soon as we get configuration details for a public OpenGroupware.org server, we will share this here also.