Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: lo (Page 1 of 2)

LibreOffice 7.4.1 for Slackware 15.0 and -current

September 15, 2022 / / 32 Comments

LibreOffice Community Edition 7.4.1 was released today and I already have the packages in my repository for Slackware 15.0 and -current. The Document Foundation blog post has all the details, let me do a verbatim copy of the most striking features in the 7.4 releases:

GENERAL

  • Support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files
  • Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library
  • Search field for the Extension Manager
  • Performance and compatibility improvements

WRITER

  • Better change tracking in the footnote area
  • Edited lists show original numbers in change tracking
  • New typographic settings for hyphenation

CALC

  • Support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets
  • Extra functions in drop-down AutoSum widget
  • New menu item to search for sheet names

IMPRESS

  • New support for document themes

Note that I compile these packages on Slackware 15.0. If you install them on Slackware -current you will also need to download ‘icu4c-compat‘ and boost-compat from my repository and install them. They are two compatibility packages containing older versions of the icu4c and boost libraries, in particular the versions that are part of Slackware 15.0 but no longer part of -current.

Get libreoffice packages from my own Europe-based server: https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ or my US-based server: https://us.slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ ;or any mirror if you wait a day, for instance https://slackware.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ .
These servers all offer rsync access if you prefer that to http.

Enjoy – Eric

LibreOffice 6.4.5 finally for Slackware 14.2

August 14, 2020 / / 16 Comments

The Document Foundation recently released version 7.0.0 of their Libre Office suite of applications. The packages for Slackware-current can be found in my repository. But the situation for Slackware 14.2 used to be different – I got stuck after LibreOffice 6.2 because the newer source releases (6.3 and onwards) require versions of system software that our stable Slackware 14.2 platform does not offer.

From time to time during the last year, when there was time and the build box was not compiling packages, I messed around with the libreoffice.SlackBuild script in futile attempts to compile recent versions of LibreOffice on Slackware 14.2. I failed all the time.
Until last week. After I had uploaded the new KDE Plasma5 packages to ‘ktown‘, I had an epiphany and decided to use a new approach. What I did was: question all the historic stuff in the SlackBuild script that got added whenever I needed to work around compilation failures; and accept that the compilation needs newer versions of software than Slackware 14.2 offers. The first statement meant that I disabled patches and variable declarations that messed with compiler and linker; and for the second statement I stuck to a single guideline: the end product, if I were able to compile a package successfully, has to run out of the box on Slackware 14.2 without the need to update any of the core Slackware packages.

So I ended with a script that only has two new compile-time requirements: use the ‘unsupported‘ gcc 9.2.0 compilers instead of Slackware’s ageing gcc-5.5.0. And update gperf to the version you find in Slackware-current. The rest of the required supporting libraries will be compiled into LibreOffice automatically. And this time, the LibreOffice sources compiled without errors.
The resulting binaries would however fail to run on a regular Slackware 14.2 (with the stock versions of gcc and gperf packages) because of missing symbols in the dynamically linked system libraries.
I managed to get around that issue, by adding the two runtime support libraries that come with gcc-9.2.0 (libgcc_s.so.1 and libstdc++.so.6) into the ‘program’ directory of LibreOffice. Those libraries contain the symbols LibreOffice is looking for; a simple runtime dependency on gcc.
By the way: you cannot expect everybody to install a set of compilers just to run programs, Slackware solves this dilemma by adding the GCC runtime libraries to the ‘aaa_elflibs‘ package which is usually one of the first packages to get installed on a new system.

That worked! LibreOffice 6.4.5 for Slackware 14.2 is now available in my package repository. And I even built LibreOffice 7.0.0 in the same manner. I stuck with 6.4.5 because I want people to be able to use a stable and well-established version of an office suite on the stable Slackware platform. The more experimental 7.0.0 release is for Slackware-current.

Guess what! Today, just when I uploaded the 6.4.5 packages I noticed that the release of LibreOffice 6.4.6 has been announced (and in October we’ll see the final release in the 6.4 cycle – being 6.4.7).

I will try to find some time to compile those fresh tarballs; but first I do like feedback about the new 6.4.5 packages that are now downloadable for Slackware 14.2.

Get the packages – as usual – from my own server or one of its mirrors; https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/) or https://slackware.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (rsync://slackware.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/)

Enjoy! Eric

LibreOffice updates for Slackware 14.2 and -current

September 1, 2019 / / 15 Comments

This month, I am building different versions for LibreOffice, for our stable Slackware 14.2 and for the -current testing ground. During my holiday, new versions became available and last week I built packages from those sources.

The 6.2.6 release which was announced by the Document Foundation two weeks ago brings some security fixes to the 6.2 series. Therefore it was important to get rid of the old 6.2.5 packages. I built 6.2.6 for Slackware 14.2 and those packages have been available for download now since early last week. Go get them!

Note: as of this package release, I am no longer including support for KDE4. The “libreoffice-kde-integration” package is no longer available in my repository and you should “removepkg” the older version if you have that installed. The KDE4 support in LibreOffice has been broken for a while and your Office applications will run great on KDE4 without that “KDE integration”. The LibreOffice UI will be based on GTK3 widgets instead and KDE4’s theming engine will make that its User Interface blends in properly.

For Slackware-current I went for the new 6.3 series of LibreOffice instead. The sources for this new release were made public three weeks ago. The release notes state that the 6.3.x office suite should be a lot faster than the previous 6.2.x series with impressively notched-up interoperability support for the Microsoft Office document formats. Go check it out!

The packages for LibreOffice 6.3.0 which are ready for download in my repository, do contain “libreoffice-kde-integration”, yes! Unlike the packages for Slackware 14.2 I have decided to add KDE5 (aka Plasma5) support to my LibreOffice packages for slackware-current from now on.
If you do not have KDE5 packages installed at all, don’t worry. LibreOffice will work great. The KDE integration package will just not add anything useful for you. On the other hand, if you have Plasma5 installed you will benefit from native file selection dialog windows and other integration features. And even if you do not have Plasma5 but you do have Qt5 installed, then you will be able to run LibreOffice with Qt5 User Interface elements instead of defaulting to GTK3.

If you want to compile these Libreoffice 6.3.0 packages yourself, then be aware that by default no KDE5 support will be added. You will have to set the value of the script parameter “ADD_KDE5” to “YES”. Additionally you will have to install the packages that this functionality depends on. Those are: qt5, libxkbcommon, OpenAL, SDL_sound, and all the packages of KDE Frameworks 5. All of these can be  found in my ‘ktown’ repository: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/

Enjoy! Eric

LibreOffice 5.3.0 for slackware-current

February 16, 2017 / / 13 Comments

libreoffce_logoIn a previous post I mentioned that  LibreOffice 5.3 was released the first of February. At that time, I provided you with a LibreOffice 5.2.5 package instead, because I was rebuilding the 5.2 packages anyway and usually I need a bit of research time to make new releases compile.

And indeed… I hit a snag along the road which initially prevented me from compiling 5.3.0 packages, but a patch was shared by orbea on the blog which pointed the way to solving my issue with harfbuzz. For your information, the Slackware version of harfbuzz is not compiled with graphite support (because Slackware does not have a package for graphite) and the new LibreOffice requires this – so my libreoffice package has to compile an internal version of harfbuzz.

As said previously on the blog, the new LibreOffice 5.3 series introduces Collaborative editing which to me is the major highlight. A Docker image is available if you want to experience LibreOffice Online on your own private server.
Better text rendering is another highlight, hence the new requirements for harfbuzz (which is used as the rendering engine).
A detailed description of new features was made available as a web page:  http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.

Get my fresh libreoffice packages for Slackware-current from a mirror like this one: http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/.

Note: the LibreOffice browser plugin (NPAPI based) has been removed in LibreOffice 4.4.0:  https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/killing-the-npapi-plugin/

I also added LibreOffice 5.3.0 to a re-spin of my PLASMA5 Live ISO which I uploaded last night, so if you want to play with the new features in a safe environment, try it on Slackware Live Edition. I will write more about the new PLASMA5 ISO in another post.

As a closing remark, I advise you to read the statement issued by the Document Foundation on the intentions of the Munich City Counsel to replace their version of Linux (LiMux) and LibreOffice with MS Windows 10 and MS Office by 2021. A sad example of how behind-the-scene lobbying of Microsoft and its partners is threatening to overturn one of the most well-known Open Source success stories in Western Europe.

Cheers! Eric

LibreOffice 5.1.4 (bugfix release)

July 3, 2016 / / 20 Comments

libreoffce_logoThe Document Foundation released Libreoffice 5.1.4 on June 23, but I was kept busy with preparing my own packaging and scripting stuff for the release of Slackware 14.2. In addition, a new release of Plasma (5.7) is near, for which I promised a Live ISO to be available on July 5.
Still, I thought new packages were needed after someone pointed out that there is a CVE associated with the 5.1.4 release because it fixes a security bug:  CVE-2016-4324. Therefore I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Slackware (14.2 and -current) packages for LibreOffice 5.1.4.
According to the announcement this LO release is “targeted at individual users and enterprise deployments. Users of previous LibreOffice releases should start planning the update to the new version“.

 

lo514_about

LibreOffice 5.1.4 is otherwise a minor update, focusing on bug fixes.

Packages can be obtained from these mirror sites and probably others too:

Cheers! Eric

PS: for those who had not noticed: the LibreOffice browser plugin (NPAPI based) has been removed in 4.4.0: https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/killing-the-npapi-plugin/

« Older posts

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑