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