LibreOffice 4.0.3
Yesterdaty I noticed the LibreOffice 4.0.3 release.by chance, and built Slackware 14 packages for it right away (they work on -current just as well).Noteworthy statement in these release notes is “LibreOffice 4.0.3 is another important step in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of the suite, and facilitating migrations to free software by governments and enterprises“.
Relating to that statement, a personal rant is about to burst.
Because there is another interesting tidbit in those release notes: “another large migration to LibreOffice has been announced, as the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Extremadura has just begun the switch to free software of desktop PCs and expects the majority of its 40,000 PCs to be migrated by the end of 2013. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source – including LibreOffice – will help save 30 million Euro per year.“. I remember that the decision by the Extremadura government (this is a county in Spain with low industrialisation and therefore not rich) to move completely to Open Source was made more than 6 years ago. Cool to read about this achievement. I wish the dutch government had more focus on adopting Open Source and Open Standards… so far it has been an eternal uphill battle against the minions of Microsoft. I know, because I have been involved in several pilots, proposals and projects over the past 10 years.
Anyway, I am open to discussion about this, you dutchies and others!
Back to the topic of using LibreOffice on our cool Slackware platform. Get the packages from my 14.0 package repository while they are hot! If you are still running Slackware 13.37 you should stick with LibreOffice 3.6.6 for which I also have packages.
They are also available from several mirrors. Remember, the mirror sites usually have a bigger bandwidth available than the master site! If you are a mirror administrator, and want to be added to the list, contact me.
Here is the shortlist:
- http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (my own US mirror)
- http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-libreoffice/ (Indonesia)
- http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (US)
- http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (UK)
You can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.
Cheers, Eric
Thanks again, Eric!
thanks for the update. just one question: has this package been built with a static freetype? at least the font appearance seems unchanged from previous packages.
Hi Martin
I checked the build logs before uploading the new packages. The freetype library is not being built at all (statically or otherwise). Many binaries in the package link to the pre-installed shared library in /usr/lib{,64}
I have no idea why you would have better font display if you remove the local freetype source tarball before compiling libreoffice. It makes no sense. Try “ldd /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/* | grep freetype” for instance.
Eric
Hey Eric,
I can confirm your observation. I am puzzled now. Note it was kabamaru who has observed the visual improvement when excluding the freetype library from the build process. I have never managed to complete the build process, most likely because my machines (particularly the 24 GB machine) are on -current.
Martin
For some reason the new packages work fine here. I even created a fresh user account to test it. I haven’t changed a thing on my system btw.
Another question, Eric, is there a trick to get rid of the ugliness of the libreoffice menus? I’m using oxygen-gtk.
http://tinyurl.com/cj2k3of
The ugly shadow-less menus in LibreOffice are the result of KDE’s new shadow rendering which was introduced with KDE 4.7. LibreOffice’s KDE integration has not been adapted to this new shadow renderer.
You can remove LibreOffice KDE integration which will give you back the menu shadows (courtesy of oxygen-gtk2) but you will also get the GTK file-picker on “Ctrl-O” instead of the KDE file-picker.
How do you remove KDE integration? By renaming two files (for 32-bit Slackware use “lib” instead of “lib64”):
# mv /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/libvclplug_kde4lo.so{,.orig}
# mv /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/kde4be1.uno.so{,.orig}
Eric
Thanks. You gotta love the toolkit mess we live in 🙂