LibreOffice Community Edition 7.3.0 was released last week… on the day we were preparing the Slackware 15.0 release. You’ll forgive me that my focus was elsewhere and that it took until today to upload a new set of packages for Slackware 15.0 and -current.
The main selling point of the 7.3 release cycle is better interoperability with Microsoft’s Office file formats. Note that the Microsoft proprietary file formats are still based on a deprecated standard (since 2008 actually), whereas LibreOffice uses the ISO standard OpenDocument Format.
These improvements center on three areas (text copied partly from the release notes):
- New ways to handle change tracking in tables and when text is moved, which have a positive impact on interoperability with Microsoft Office documents.
- Performance improvements when opening large DOCX and XLSX/XLSM files. Improved rendering speed in general, but particularly of some complex documents.
- Improvements to the import/export filters for the Microsoft Office document formats.
Furthermore, a lot of effort has gone into improving the first experiences of people who are migrating away from the Microsoft Office suite. The LibreOffice Help being the prime target since that is where new users look to understand the different ways of working with the LibreOffice applications.
The new libreoffice packages can be found in my repository (https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/) or any mirror if you wait a day, for instance https://slackware.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ . Rsync access is also available for these servers.
Enjoy the new release – Eric
PS:
A reminder for people running slackware-current and using my packages but not reading my blog… you slacker! I hope some else points you to this page.
Sometimes Slackware updates its boost, icu4c and poppler packages and a lot of non-Slackware packages break as a result of required shared libraries gone missing.
For that reason, my repository also contains the packages ‘boost-compat‘, icu4c-compat‘ and ‘poppler-compat‘.
Note that this ‘compat‘ has nothing to do with my multilib ‘compat32‘ packages! The three ‘compat‘ packages contain older versions of the Slackware packages in -current for compatibility with binary packages that are broken until their maintainer recompiles them.
You can install ‘boost-compat’, icu4c-compat’ and ‘poppler-compat’ alongside their brethren, they do not conflict with or replace them.
Eric, Your fix of the boost dependency is a quick one. Meanwhile I managed to compile LibreOffice 7.3 myself on Slackware 15.
Anyway, thank you for the new libreoffice package and certainly for all the work on Slackware 15.
Houdoe, haddig, keep safe,
Leo
Hi Eric,
I just installed it and I got an error message “Unspecified Application Error” after running it.
On an up to date Slackware 15.0 or -current?
You could try to follow the workarounds for newer Intel graphics chips as discussed here: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=6229145
In short, before starting LibreOffice, try setting either:
export MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i965
or:
export MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=iris
I hope this helps.
“For that reason, my repository also contains the packages ‘boost-compat‘, icu4c-compat‘ and ‘poppler-compat‘.”
Are these packages really needed to build or run libreoffice?
I ask the question because yesterday I installed Libreoffice 7.3 and so far I have not received any errors.
Please read my text in full and don’t put words in my mouth using out-of-context snippets.
LibreOffice *always* works correctly directly after I upload the packages. There is no need for boost-compat *until* the Boost package in slackware is upgraded.
So to avoid breakage in a pro-active way, if you use my big packages like libreoffice, vlc, but also qbittorrent and others, it is wise that you install these compat packages ahead of time.
Thanks Eric, Thank you for your valuable contribution to the Slackware community.
Thanks for the update! Works fine here. 🙂
Will give this a try..Thank you Eric.
Thanks for the update and compatibility packages heads up.
Works fine here. Regards
I installed 7.4.x on 15 current and the only thing that happens is the splash screen will flash then nothing. I unsintalled it. then was using kget to get another one for that just in case to try it again and kget crapped out. it’s late here, so that’s it for tonight.