My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

LibreOffice 3.5.3

I just uploaded packages (targeting Slackware 13.37 and newer) for the latest maintenance release of LibreOffice. Check out the announcement for 3.5.3: “LibreOffice 3.5.3 provides additional stability to corporate and individual users…”.

If you want to compile this yourself, then remember what I said in my post about the 3.5.2 release: “update … Slackware 13.37 with all the patches which were released by Pat. This includes a spiced-up version of Seamonkey“. All you need to install additionally are packages for Apache Ant and the Archive:Zip Perl module. None of this is necessary if you just want to use my package for LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Math (Formula)

In comments to the LO 3.5.2 blog article, both ngc891 and Willy Sudiarto Raharjo informed me that the LibreOffice Math program did not work in my 3.5.2 packages. If you tried to run “lomath” or “libreoffice–math”, then the Writer would start instead. I looked into this, and found out that several older versions of my LibreOffice packages also did not contain a working LibreOffice Math! I dissected my package and compared it to other distro’s packages. That is how I discovered that my packages were missing one critical file, which (for unknown reasons) is not getting installed by the “make install” routine. Therefore I added a check in the SlackBuild script which copies that “math.xcd” file into the package if it appears to be missing. And now, it works! In the LibreOffice main window, the “Formula” button is no longer greyed-out.

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!

I wrote this in my previous post as well, but if you did not upgrade from 3.4 yet and this is the first time you are going to upgrade to a 3.5 release, it is important that you follow these instructions first in order to keep your existing configuration, customization and extensions.

Between 3.4.x and 3.5.0, LibreOffice changed the location of its configuration directory (again). Originally using ~/.ooo (a heritage from OpenOffice.org) 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 and noticed that you seem to have lost all your configuration settings, then you will have to stop LibreOffice, delete the fresh and almost empty ~/.config/libreoffice directory and then perform the directory move as shown above.

Cheers, Eric

32 Comments

  1. Daniel

    Hello Eric
    The “Formula” button is still greyed-out for me after an upgrade from version 3.5.2, and the writer is also still starting with the lomath command. I am using the 64 bits version with the french language pack.
    Is there somebody else still without access to the formula editor?
    Thank you for all your hard work.

  2. Daniel

    Hello Eric
    I forgot to mention in my previous message that I do not have the file “math.xcd” on my system. Is it possible for you to make available that file for download? I copied an old version of math.xcd in the “/usr/lib64/libreoffice/share/registry” directory manually and everything seems to work fine.
    Thank you

  3. gegechris99

    Hello Eric,

    Thank you for this upgrade. Math is now working here (32-bit version).

  4. alienbob

    Oh shoot! When syncing the new 32-bit packages back from the VM to my server that also overwrote the good 64-bit packages with an older (broken) version.
    Let me re-package the 64-bit version and bump the BUILD number to “2alien”… then re-upload. Should not take long, since I do not have to recompile.

    Eric

  5. John Yost

    Hey Eric!
    downloaded, built, installed, and running OK here.
    Not really a power user, lomath opens OK no buttons grayed out. Used localc and lowriter some today without problems. Point of interest compile real time 5.38 hrs on my athlon x2 64 2600.

    john
    ‘wannabe compiler’
    alleyTrotter

  6. John Yost

    sorry – compiled on 13.37

    john

  7. ngc891

    >Willy Sudiarto Raharjo informed me that the LibreOffice Math program did not work in my 3.5.2 packages

    Well, it doesn’t matter much, but actually I did report this to you. Check the comments:
    http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/finally-libreoffice-3-5-2-compiles/#comments

  8. alienbob

    Hi ngc891

    You are right, and I have updated the text in the main article. My apologies for missing your earlier post.

    Eric

  9. Steven

    First off, thanks for all the great generous work you do for the Slackware community. I’m experiencing a problem compiling the latest 3.5.3 (subversion 2) of your latest released source. When compiling, I get the following error:

    Failed to install: at /temp/build/tmp-libreoffice/build/solenv/bin/ooinstall line 120.
    make[1]: *** [install] Error 255
    make[1]: Leaving directory /temp/build/tmp-libreoffice/build’
    make: *** [source-env-and-recurse] Error 2
    cp: cannot stat postprocess/unxl*.pro/misc/math.xcd’: No such file or directory
    libreoffice.SlackBuild FAILED at line 920

    line 920 is the exact line in your SlackBuild where the missing ‘math.xcd’ file should be added as per your script. Anyhow, I think this error bears a lot of resemblance to user (Brad)’s comment in the 3.5.2 comment section. In his case you replied the actual error occurred much earlier than he posted. Though I don’t believe it has anything to do with jdk in this case, the previous remainder of my bash buffer (approx 940 lines of ERROR: File not found:) suggests the culprit of the error may have occurred much earlier.

    Things I should include:
    OS is Slackware 13.37-64bit updated to -current via one of the official mirrors.
    Your Apache Ant & Archive:Zip packages installed prior to build.
    I edited your script to change the default build location to an external USB hard drive due to lack of space in my root partition as follows:
    TMP=${TMP:-/temp/build}
    PKG=$TMP/package-$PRGNAM
    PKG2=$TMP/package-$PRGNAM-$PRGNAM2
    OUTPUT=${OUTPUT:-/temp/buildout}
    where temp is ‘bash-4,2# mount /dev/sdb2 /temp’

    The error occurred about 5 1/2 hours into the build process.

    Cheers!

  10. alienbob

    @Steven

    You should catch the output of your build process in a log file. 900 lines of terminal buffer is not going to cut it. You have missed the actual error(s). There is nothing I can advise you to do without knowing the actual errors.
    Also note that I am compiling on slackware-13.37 whereas you are compiling on slackware-current with its new compiler and glibc.

    Eric

  11. chrisretusn

    Just successfully finished compiling on -current, all looks well. Thanks!

  12. Peter

    Dear Eric,
    first, thank you for the really nice slackware-libreoffice-packages, which I use since you produce this. In your 3.5 series I find a problem: If you want to open a password protected file or if you want to save a file with password protection there is an error and you can not open or save with password. On Windows or on other Linuxes this error does not exist.
    Best regards
    Peter

  13. alienbob

    Hi Peter

    I can reproduce this.

    Looking at various bug reports, it appears that this issue only occurs with distro builds. I.e. the binaries produced by LibreOffice developers do not suffer from this defect.
    It may have to do with the initialization of the Mozilla NSS library. The LibreOffice binary distribution includes this library but I use the Slackware system library from the seamonkey package.

    I have found a patch which I have applied to my sources and I am rebuilding the package to see if that fixes the issue with saving/loading password-protected documents.

    Eric

  14. cultist

    alienbob: I encountered the same error that Steven reported. Uploaded the relevant data.
    logfile.log: http://pastebin.com/x1PMC81k
    complete build output: http://www.mediafire.com/?6kh6jsrr7j7z50c

  15. alienbob

    Hi cultist

    What version of Java do you have installed? The real errors are all related to an incomplete or outdated JDK.
    If you think you installed a recent JDK (I use the version in the /extra directory of Slackware 13.37) then did you actually logout and login again after its installation and before starting to compile LibreOffice?

    Eric

  16. cultist

    I have jdk-6u27, from /extra on the -current mirror. Could be something messed up somehow though, I had another application a while back that kept crashing because of java (can’t remember what it was off hand)

  17. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    Eric,

    I noticed you rebuilt the libreoffice package to include Math correctly this time. What’s wrong with the previous SlackBuild? I thought Math was working fine on 3.5.3.

    Does it also fixed the problem spotted by Peter about the password-protected file?

    Thanks

  18. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    ahh nevermind, i can see it on the ChangeLog

    Thanks

  19. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    There’s a duplicate on your build. -1 still exists on 32 bit directory

  20. alienbob

    The “1alien” versions of the packages have now been removed.
    The earlier packages were OK but I had re-added the missing math.xcd file by hand. The change in the libreoffice.SlackBuild was however not right, and if you would use that to rebuild the package, the file “math.xcd” would still not get added.
    So, I finally fixed the SlackBuild script and created a new set of packages to match with the new version of the script.

    I had hoped to also fix the issue with the password protected files but the patch which I added to the build did not have any effect.

    Eric

  21. alienbob

    Hi Willy

    No, I did not miss that patch but I could not believe that it would help. I checked my own mozilla profile and it is using relative paths. I even renamed my .mozilla directory, and in anothre test added just an empty .mozilla directory, but that did not change anything with regard to the error. So I did not apply this patch to my build.

    Eric

  22. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    The bug will be fixed in 3.5.4, but i’m curious about the statement that those two patches does confirmed that it fixed the problem.

    I also see other bug tracker in Ubuntu and they all have the same conclusion: both patch fixed the problem
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/919659

    I hope this convince you to try applying and testing the patch you didn’t include in your previous build.

    I hope i don’t ask too much for that

  23. alienbob

    Hi Willy

    I rebuilt LibreOffice with the additional patch, but it did not make any difference.
    I have uploaded the patch and the modified SlacKBuild script to my repository in case you would want to see for yourself.
    I guess the problem we are having in Slackware is different from the others.

    Eric

  24. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    Hm… i tried to reproduce the bug on my desktop, and i got General Input/Output Error
    i will try with a new profile of LibreOffice

  25. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    same thing. It ended on general input/output error when i tried to save a new file using a password on 3.5.3 -3alien build

  26. John

    Yo Eric!
    Using the slackbuild dated May 12 on a fully patched 64 bit 13.37 clean install it failed several times
    1. the jdk is still required compilation bombs without it
    2. there are several files in the sources directory which do not get downloaded by the slackbuild. specifically *.oxt plus others
    I can email you the log failure entry if you wish

    To get a successful compile I mirrored your sources directory to my machine and ran the slackbuild with
    jdk from extra installed
    apache-ant and perl-archive-zip installed per your notes
    ADD_LANGUAGES=””

    good run
    installed the packages
    all seems to be fine now

    thanks for all your work
    ‘wanna be compiler’
    john

  27. lazardo

    They [libreoffice] have apparently not fixed the ‘dual monitor’ problem. Works fine on :0.0, gives the following on :0.1 🙁

    ‘Gdk-CRITICAL **: IA__gdk_screen_get_monitor_geometry: assertion monitor_num n_monitors’ failed’

    LibreOffice 3.5.3.2, Build ID: 350m1(Build:2)

    [3alien package]

    Note that 3.4.5 has no issues with dual monitors.

  28. lazardo

    Patch is here:

    “http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=85211f1ef30b07927d768348ce28ac34ade62f03”

    Cheers,

  29. alienbob

    Hi lazardo

    Looks like a gtk-only issue (i.e. only a bug in XFCE, not in KDE)? I do not have a dual-monitor setup here so I can not check that.

    I will not compile an update to the package (it just takes too much time) but have I added that patch to the libreoffice “sources” directory, updated libreoffice.SlackBuild so that it uses that patch and updated the BUILD number of the package so that you can use upgradepkg.
    Get the updated sources and start compiling !

    Eric

  30. alienbob

    Hi John

    Oh, I forgot to remove the comment character from the download of .oxt files… for some reason, I do not remember why, I had those commented out. I fixed that in the libreoffice.SlackBuild and uploaded that fixed version. Thanks for mentioning.

    Yes, JDK is still required for compilation.

    Eric

  31. jplatt39

    Just thought I’d mention your builds work nice on my new computer. So nice that when Gentoo told me it wanted to install 3.5.4 on my other system I downloaded the sources, edited your – newest build, and ran it. The only dependency it asked for was dd7dab7a5fea97d2a6a43f511449b7cd-expat-2.1.0.tar.gz so once I had that it ran without giving me any error messages and I’m typing this on the new build.

    I know you’re busy but if this encourages you to take a look I’ll be happy. With the new dependency your CURRENT (newly downloaded because I built the old one with the oxt problem) slackbuild it should be mostly unattended.

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