My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Finally, LibreOffice 3.5.2 compiles

A while ago when Libreoffice 3.5.0 was released, I found out to my chagrin that I was unable to successfully compile it on Slackware 13.37.

There was no change when 3.5.1 came out, but thankfully we now have a new maintenance release, LibreOffice 3.5.2. Lo and behold, I could successfully compile packages, but the SlackBuild needed several updates because the build process changes quite dramatically between the various 3.x releases. The developer team is slowly getting rid of the old StarOffice heritage, and ultimately the dependency on Java for the compilation should be completely removed. We’re note yet there however.

What I did manage is to get rid of the requirement to install an xulrunner package in order to create the LibreOffice packages. I updated my virtual machine running Slackware 13.37 with all the patches which were released by Pat. This includes a spiced-up version of Seamonkey which originally got the updates in order to be able to compile OpenJDK, but it is also able to aid in the compilation of LibreOffice. All you need to add now are packages for  Apache Ant and the Archive:Zip Perl module.

You can find the packages for Slackware 13.37 (and -current) in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer rsync access):

One word of caution!

LibreOffice changed the location of its configuration directory (again). Originally using ~/.ooo it switched to ~/.libreoffice which will probably be where you will find your custom settings stored. The 3.5 releases however, use ~/.config/libreoffice . The best thing to do is move your current configuration directory to the new location, so that LibreOffice keeps working as expected:

$ mv ~/.libreoffice ~/.config/libreoffice

If you had already started the new LibreOffice program, then you will have to delete the fresh and almost empty ~/.config/libreoffice directory first of course.

Cheers, Eric

28 Comments

  1. Ellendhel

    This is a good news.

    Thanks a lot for your work and your time!

  2. gegechris99

    Thank you Eric for this new package and the word of caution that avoided me some trouble during my upgrade from 3.4 version

  3. Didier Spaier

    Merci beaucoup !
    Thanks a lot!
    Heel erg bedankt!

  4. metageek

    Great! Thanks a lot for this, it is extremely useful!

  5. LoneStar

    great job!!
    excuse me, but Apache Ant and Archive::Zip are needed only to compile LibreOffice, not when just using your packages, right?

  6. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    Wow, you finally complete this build. I will check the updated SlackBuild to see what has been changed in order to get it completed

  7. escaflown

    Thanks Eric!

  8. tchanafana

    thanks a lot

  9. alienbob

    Hi LoneStar,

    Indeed the apache-ant and perl-archive-zip packages are only required during the compilation of the package, they are not needed for actually using LibreOffice.

    Eric

  10. John

    Hey Eric
    Great work
    Compiled 3.5.2.2 overnight and using it this morning.
    All seems to be fine business
    A point of interest possibly, I compiled it with your openJDK installed.

    Thanks
    ‘wannabe compiler’
    john
    AlleyTrotter

  11. dolphin77

    Thanks a lot, Eric.

    It works much faster than the rpm rebased version from SBo. Also looks much better in KDE (the interface) and looks like fonts are rendered better.

  12. alienbob

    Thanks for that feedback dolphin77!

    I have not seen actual comparisons of the official RPM’s versus my native Slackware compilation. I am glad itr works out so well. Makes it worth the effort 🙂

    Eric

  13. Brad

    I’m glad the Slackbuild is working for others, but I can’t seem to compile it here. It has failed every time at:

    Failed to install: at /tmp/build/tmp-libreoffice/build/solenv/bin/ooinstall line 120.
    make[1]: *** [install] Error 255
    make[1]: Leaving directory /tmp/build/tmp-libreoffice/build’
    make: *** [source-env-and-recurse] Error 2
    mv: cannot stat /tmp/build/package-libreoffice/usr/lib64/libreoffice/sdk/classes’: No such file or directory
    ./libreoffice.SlackBuild FAILED at line 927

    Do I need Sun’s jdk? or are you using your openjdk? (I have openjdk installed)

  14. alienbob

    Brad,

    The actual error will be _much_ earlier than what you just posted.
    I built using a “vanilla” Slackware 13.37 with the jre package replaced by extra/jdk, and only applied all official Slackware 13.37 patches. Nothing more, nothing less. Well, apart from Ant and that single Perl module.

    Eric

  15. Brad

    I’m on -current (with your multilib additions) but somehow missed the 5 April update to qtscriptgenerator. For some reason the compile worked after updating that package.

  16. Widya Walesa

    [OOT] how about calligra? stable version (2.4) has been released this week.

  17. ngc891

    I’m not seeing any Formula module. $ soffice –math returns nothing and all the formula menu entries are grayed out. Something missing in the build?

  18. alienbob

    Hi Brad

    Pat updated qtscriptgenerator because I asked him to. I am trying to compile Libreoffice on ARM -current platform and have several issues there. One was qtscriptgenerator, another is boost (for which there will be an update in the next -current batch) and probably more issues will come up.

    Eric

  19. alienbob

    @Widya

    Calligra 2.4 will be available as a package soon.

    Eric

  20. alienbob

    @ngc891

    No idea what happened. I see that the Math module does indeed not work / not exist.
    I hope I will find time to look at this, but don’t hold your breath.

    Eric

  21. gauchão

    Thank you, Eric. Nice work!

  22. Brad

    I had been having issues trying to get the latest POVRay beta to compile after the gcc 4.7 upgrade. I ended up having to update boost to 1.49. The patches at https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/6165 were not working for me with the boost-1.45 in current.

  23. Desiderius

    Once again thanks a lot for your work Eric !

    I have installed LibreOffice 3.5.2 on my Slack 13.37 stable 64 bits using your package and everything works fine until yesterday !

    I put a large number ( > 70 000 ) floats like 232.7 or 214.6 in the B column of Calc and I wanted to see the minimum of all these values.

    So I put a formula in another cell saying “MIN(B1;B72345)”
    and I got “0” : amazing !

    So I modified the formula and tried “MIN(B1;B5)” and got again “0” which was obviouly false !

    I tried different values , tried to rewrite the formula without success: I eternally got “0” !

    Does someone see also this strange behaviour or is it a problem with my computer ?

  24. Didier Spaier

    Hello everybody, thanks Eric for your work.

    FYI, is the message I just posted to users@global.libreoffice.org:
    >—cut here—Styles and formatting” in the menu, LO crashes.

    When I launch LO again, after recovery of the files that were open the “Styles and formatting dialog” is displayed.

    Any clue ? I didn’t find this bug in this lists’s archive and do not know how to access the bug tracking system.
    >—cut here–<
    Did any Slackware user encounter the same bug?

  25. Didier Spaier

    I’ve just found that this bug has been reported already, see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45288.

    Sorry for the noise, Eric you may erase this post and the previous one.

  26. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    when we execute lomath, it will launch lowriter… so strange

  27. alienbob

    Hi Willy

    I have found the cause and my soon-to-be-released Libre Office 3.5.3 packages will have a working LO Math.

    Eric

  28. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    Great news. Thanks Eric 🙂

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