Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: December 19, 2013

LibreOffice 4.1.4 for Slackware 14.0 and newer

December 19, 2013 / / 13 Comments

Quite by accident I noticed that LibreOffice 4.1.4 was released yesterday, even before the DocumentFoundation’s blog post was up. The official stance for 4.1.4 is that it is “the first also suggested for corporate deployments“. Well that is good news! So I quickly cleaned up the KDE 4.12 virtual machines and started with compiling some packages.

What I also did was read this page, suggested to me by my pal Heinz: http://dilfridge.blogspot.nl/2013/12/libreoffice-kde-integration.html . This post mentions the exact issues that were also reported by Slackware users of my earlier LO packages on KDE: slowness in the “File” dialogs for opening and saving; and crashes in LO Sheets when selectiong some cells and then moving them (this would actually freeze the complete KDE desktop, not just LO). I checked out the Gentoo bug reports which are mentioned by Andreas Hüttel and extracted the patches he backported from LibreOffice 4.2. It seems (and I asked some friends to check) that these patches do indeed fix the issues on KDE.

Another change in the SlackBuild is that I switched it to use a private version of poppler, this should hopefully fix the broken PDF import in Slackware 14.1 and -current, because of a change in libpoppler library version since Slackware 14.

The LibreOffice 4.1.4 packages for Slackware are available in my 14.0 package repository – I just uploaded them. Remember, they will work on Slackware 14.1 and current just as well. Note that I ship my LibreOffice 4.1 packages with additional “libreoffice-dict-<language>” packages, containing dictionary and spellchecker support!

If you are still running Slackware 13.37 you should stick with LibreOffice 3.6.7 for which I also have packages.

At this point, I used to request that you select one of the mirrors as your preferred download location, in order to spare the master site at slackware.com. However with the launch of SLackware 14.1 the server has been placed behind the Akamai cache infrastructure, so that downloading from slackware.com will no longer hurt us;

You can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.

Cheers, Eric

Freedom of Choice 2013

December 19, 2013 / / 4 Comments

LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards

LinuxQuestionsFellow Slackers and other friends!

It’s that time of the year again where Jeremy calls upon the masses to enter the poll for the 2013 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. Remember last year, when Slackware made it to Desktop Distro of 2012 and was beaten to a hair-width by Debian for Server Distro of the year?

Please have a look at this year’s poll, it’s full of interesting choices. And make a honest selection! I don’t really care if Slackware ends up on top, it is more important that you experience that moment of realization that there is a wealth of Open Source Software out there which allows us to succeed in doing the things we like most. Freedom of choice usually comes at a high price, but Open Source Software & Standards allow you to make your choices for free and in freedom.

Please, take a moment to consider if there are ways for you to contribute back – it does not have to cost you money out of your pocket. If you are poor or can’t spare the money, your give-back can still be trememdously valuable. For instance, by helping friends with their adoption of Open Source, or by writing down your knowledge so that others can in turn advance their own knowledge; maybe you could check at your children’s school to see if there is room for a “Linux college” of sorts or prepare a hack-fest where everyone brings their computer and you bring a bunch of Slackware install CD’s 😉 Or perhaps this is the perfect time to start coding on some cool program so that we can forget about SystemD!

Realize that the Open Source (and Open Standards) ecosystem is about respect, sharing, growth and advancement. You and I, we are both part of this ecosystem. By working together without artificial boundaries or constraints and treating each other as equals, we can try to make this world a better place for all.

It’s like the spirit of Christmas which your Granny keeps talking about, but then without the turkey and the tree.

Happy polling! Happy holidays! Eric

tux-xmas

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