My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: OOo (Page 4 of 11)

LibreOffice 6.1.2 packages available

The Document Foundation announced version 6.1.2 of their office suite last week. Today, new LibreOffice packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current are done compiling and available in my repository.

Get the packages from my repository or any mirror, like:

I also updated the VeraCrypt package to version 1.23, and you’ll find one for Slackware 14.2 as well as -current. Next on the list to update are: handbrake, ffmpeg, mkvtoolnix and probably others that I have neglected. All of these will become available shortly for 14.2 and -current. Fans of Plasma5 will have to wait a bit… Plasma 5.14 is just around the corner but I may wait until 5.14.1.

Have a good weekend, Eric

What all happened in March so far

I realize I have been a wee bit silent on the blog (not counting my replies in the comments section). This was due to private issues that drained the desire for social interactions. Nevertheless there was quite a bit of activity on the Slackware packaging front.

So, what new stuff?

First of all: yesterday, Adobe released a security update for their Flash plugins for Mozilla-compatible (NPAPI) and Chromium-compatible (PPAPI) browsers. Check the version 29.0.0.113 installation status on http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/about/. You are encouraged to upgrade.

Chromium browser was updated twice… last week I made the final release in the 64 series available and today (repositories have not been updated yet) I am updating again, to the 65 release. Version 65.0.3325.146 comes with a large list of 45 security fixes, read the release notes to get the gist. Unfortunately, this new release has cost me a full week of recompiles, day & night, all the time running into new compilation errors. It was not trivial to come up with a set of patches that eradicated all the compilation errors. I wrote a couple myself, reverted a chromium commit and borrowed from Gentoo – thanks as always for these guys’ code troubleshooting skills. The discussion on the Chromium Packagers list has given me some ideas for the next iteration of the SlackBuild script that may not require this much patching. But I am pushing this version to my repository anyway, even though I just spotted a newer version on the Google blog… released yesterday. Damn.

Pale Moon browser got an update to  27.8.1. Many improvements and fixes over the 27.7.x versions, check their release notes for the details. Despite the fact that the new Mozilla Firefox is much improved as well, and a lot speedier since Mozilla switched to the Quantum codebase, people may still prefer the older codebase of Firefox from which Pale Moon was forked.

LibreOffice 6.0.2 was released last week and I built packages for Slackware 14.2 as well as -current. Still the best office suite available. I should try to build the LibreOffice online version sometime…

When Slackware 14.2 was graced with an updated set of gcc packages in the “patches” section (gcc-5.5.0 with a series of patches related to retpoline countermeasures for the recent Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities) I took the opportunity not only to give the multilib repository for Slackware 14.2 a refresher to gcc-5.5.0_multilib, but I also updated the gcc5 package for slackware-current in my regular repository to that 5.5.0 release – including the retpoline patches. Remember, my gcc5 package for slackware-current contains just the C, C++ and Java compilers and has two purposes: first it re-introduces  the GCC Java compiler which was removed in gcc-7; and second, compiling Pale Moon on slackware-current can not be done with its gcc-7 compiler… you need this gcc5 package.

E-book lovers with a fondness for organizing their collection using open source software will find a new Calibre package in my repository. Calibre 3.x for Slackware 14.2 and -current depends on libxkbcommon, podofo, qt5, qt5-webkit and unrar, and for Slackware 14.2 two additional dependencies are libinput and libwacom. All of those can be obtained from my repository as well. If you are not in need of an e-book catalogue and library program, then Calibre still has its usefulness as it includes a versatile E-book reader and a powerful EPUB editor.

Last but not least: I released a new set of Plasma5 packages. The KDE-5_18.03 release of ‘ktown‘ for Slackware-current offers the latest KDE Frameworks (5.44.0), Plasma (5.12.3) and Applications (17.12.3). Read the README file for more details and for installation/upgrade instructions. If you are adventurous, check out the ‘testing‘ variant of the ktown repository as opposed to the ‘latest‘ variant. In ‘testing’ you will find Wayland support. Note that this is experimental (hence the ‘testing’ tag of course) and not fit for day-to-day production work. The ‘latest’ repository contains a stable and productive, complete, and fun to use, Plasma 5 desktop environment.
One thing I want to mention is that I have added the new Falkon browser to the applications-extra section. Falkon is the renamed Qupzilla browser, based on Qt5, and it is destined to be added to the core Applications (not sure when precisely, probably later this year) and it will take the place of the venerable Konqueror. If you are using slackpkg with the slackpkg+ extension, don’t forget to run “slackpkg install ktown” to get the new falkon package installed, because “slackpkg install-new” will not catch new packages in 3rd-party repositories like ‘ktown’.

I promise to get a new PLASMA5 variant of the Slackware Live ISO image out soon, containing all this new stuff! Stay tuned for more.

LibreOffice 6 packaged for Slackware

The new major release ‘6’ of LibreOffice was made available almost two weeks ago but I have been struggling with the 32bit build. Despite the fact that my 64bit -current packages for libreoffice-6.0.0 were online for a short while (almost nobody noticed), I did not have anything good to share so I removed those again.
And in the meantime, faster than scheduled because of some serious regressions and a security report, I noticed the release of version 6.0.1 two days ago. I had been busy with new Plasma5, VLC and GCC packages but with those out of the way I set myself again to the task of fixing the 32bit build. And I nailed it, so now I can finally announce packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current.

There’s a lot to write about what has been improved or added to LibreOffice 6, the release page names quite a few already and here is a selection of features that I found striking:

  • modernized look & feel of the user interface
  • gpg-based document signing & encryption, yay!
  • export to epub
  • better unicode font coverage by including a selection of noto fonts
  • improved spell-checker and custom dictionaries
  • improved help system
  • interactive form creation through a new ‘form’ menu in writer
  • impress templates are re-designed into 16:9 format
  • etc…

The Document Foundation has also recorded a video summarizing the best new features of LibreOffice 6. i invite you to take a look at it.

You can get the new libreoffice-6.0.1 packages from my repository or any mirror, like:

I have also added this release of LibreOffice to my just-uploaded PLASMA5 Live ISO which is based on Plasma 5.12 LTS.

Updates for LibreOffice and multilib, more to come

libreoffce_logoBecause of recent updates in slackware-current (in this case, the boost package) the LibreOffice in my own repository stopped working. Library conflict. Don’t you love the life on the bleeding edge 😉

By coïncidence, the Document Foundation had just released a new version of their LibreOffice sources, so instead of recompiling the old 5.4.3 packages I could grab the new 5.4.4 release and turn those sources into Slackware packages (Slackware 14.2 and -current). The next major release 6.0 is just around the corner but I am not going to wait for that.
You can get the new packages from my repository – like https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ .

Also, I updated the multilib repository with the latest updates in slackware-current (the new l/Mako, a/lzlib and a/plzip are now also available in a “compat32” version).
Remember to also install the new packages, not just upgrade the existing ones! If you have a local mirror, that means using “upgradepkg –install-new” and if you use slackpkg with slackpkg+, you need to do “slackpkg update; slackpkg install multilib ; slackpkg upgrade-all”. That “slackpkg install multilib” takes care of installing any package you are still missing.

Work on a new Plasma5 package set is also well underway. The 64bit -current bit is done so I know I have my sources and scripts in order, and I am generating a new PLASMA5 Live ISO for testing. Stay tuned.

LibreOffice 5.4.3 packages available

libreoffce_logoThe Document Foundation released the third update for LibreOffice 5.4 last week, as you can read on their blog where they write about the new LibreOffice 5.4.3 . My manic-depressive mood-swings are on the manic side at the moment so next to baking sausage rolls (brabantse worstenbroodjes for which I will publish an updated recipe on this blog soon) and a batch of sourdough bread, I finally had the energy to fix the admin interface for the SlackDocs mailing lists, wrestled myself through 14,000+ emails in my administrative mailboxes, wrote a plan to migrate my LAN services from the ageing server to the new server I bought this summer (which involves conversion of several large databases to InnoDB and loads of custom packages), plus I binge-watched almost 2 full seasons of Stranger Things in 3 days’ time. I know I will crash hard in a couple of days but I hope to have a new Plasma ‘ktown’ update before that happens.

Back to the topic: the LibreOffice 5.4 release notes contain full detail about its features:  https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.4. Note that the developers state that “LibreOffice 5.4.3 continues to represent the bleeding edge in term of features, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts and early adopters” and I think that describes us Slackware users well enough 🙂
Their advice for more conservative users is to stick to the 5.3 releases but I am no longer compiling packages for that.

 

In any case, thanks to the 16 cores on my build server it did not take all that much time to generate packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current.
When I tried the new programs on my laptop (which is running Plasma5) I noticed that the default User Interface for LibreOffice causes rendering issues. Also, my Plasma5 destop is configured to move application menus out of the application window into a button in the window’s top bar. That setting is apparently not compatible with the default User Interface and it caused the loss of the LibreOffice menu.
I could fix these issues by editing the profile script “/etc/profile.d/libreoffice.sh” and un-commenting the line “export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk3” to force LibreOffice to use GTK+3 as the widget set.

The libreoffice packages for Slackware can be downloaded from any mirror like this one: http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/.

Have fun! Eric

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