Finally, LibreOffice 3.5.2 compiles

April 12, 2012 / alienbob / 29 Comments

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

Uncategorized

28 Comments

Ellendhel
April 12, 2012 at 22:11

This is a good news.

Thanks a lot for your work and your time!

Reply
gegechris99
April 12, 2012 at 22:33

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

Reply
Didier Spaier
April 12, 2012 at 22:55

Merci beaucoup !
Thanks a lot!
Heel erg bedankt!

Reply
metageek
April 12, 2012 at 23:00

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

Reply
LoneStar
April 12, 2012 at 23:28

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

Reply
Willy Sudiarto Raharjo
April 13, 2012 at 00:33

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

Reply
escaflown
April 13, 2012 at 01:08

Thanks Eric!

Reply
tchanafana
April 13, 2012 at 03:54

thanks a lot

Reply
alienbob (Post author)
April 13, 2012 at 08:15

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

Reply
John
April 13, 2012 at 11:49

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

Reply
dolphin77
April 13, 2012 at 12:22

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.

Reply
alienbob (Post author)
April 13, 2012 at 14:57

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

Reply
Brad
April 13, 2012 at 15:45

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)

Reply
alienbob (Post author)
April 13, 2012 at 16:07

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

Reply
Brad
April 13, 2012 at 18:29

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.

Reply
Widya Walesa
April 14, 2012 at 04:42

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

Reply
ngc891
April 14, 2012 at 09:06

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?

Reply
alienbob (Post author)
April 14, 2012 at 13:32

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

Reply
alienbob (Post author)
April 14, 2012 at 13:36

@Widya

Calligra 2.4 will be available as a package soon.

Eric

Reply
alienbob (Post author)
April 14, 2012 at 13:38

@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

Reply
gauchão
April 14, 2012 at 18:02

Thank you, Eric. Nice work!

Reply
Brad
April 14, 2012 at 18:39

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.

Reply
Desiderius
April 27, 2012 at 11:24

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 ?

Reply
Didier Spaier
April 27, 2012 at 12:00

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?

Reply
Didier Spaier
April 27, 2012 at 12:09

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.

Reply
Willy Sudiarto Raharjo
April 27, 2012 at 14:24

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

Reply
alienbob (Post author)
May 4, 2012 at 00:19

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

Reply
Willy Sudiarto Raharjo
May 4, 2012 at 01:50

Great news. Thanks Eric 🙂

Reply