My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

New libreoffice, vlc packages for your Slackware

Yummy food for your hungry Slackware boxen!

* VLC 1.1.8 available

Another minor release in the 1.1 series, version 1.1.8 saw the light yesterday. Bugfixes and updates for the translations are its main features, but several small enhancements were made to the codec modules.

New encoders for dirac video (now using the schroedinger implementation) and webm /vp8 were added but to be honest, I have not looked at those since I rarely encode audio or video. Feedback welcome of course!

Noteworthy is the fact that VideoLAN celebrated its 10th birthday of going open source this february – the software was initially developed as a french student project under a closed-source license. Hilarious promotional video there… typical french humour?

Get the Slackware packages here (built on Slackware 13.1, will work on later versions too):

The “US restrictions” are ludricous crap, but there you go… otherwise I would not be able to host the packages on the slackware.com server. Of course, mp3 and aac decoding is not a problem at all.

And for you KDE 4.6 users, remember having this problem with the “Media > Open” file browser dialog box taking 30 seconds to appear, that issue has been resolved. The fix was applied on the KDE side (it was gone with KDE 4.6.1) but I thought I’d mention it here regardless because it was a nuisance. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260719 for a nice discussion between KDE and VLC developers. Interesting to read on https://bugs.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/+bug/708527 is, that while we do not have this bug anymore in Slackware’s KDE 4.6.1 (well, my own KDE 4.6.1 for Slackware 13.37 to be precise), it appears that Kubuntu’s KDE 4.6.1 still suffers from it…

* LibreOffice 3.3.2 … wow that was fast!

The LibreOffice development really shows the power of collaboration. Little over a month after their previous “micro release” 3.3.1, here we have 3.3.2 already. It shows plainly that LibreOffice is diverging fast from its origin OpenOffice.org. How is that possible? Well, the most obvious reason is the growth in numbers of developers. What was impossible while SUN and later Oracle held the reigns, is now showing its worth: people are contributing code, and with more people starting to dig at the deeper levels of code, this momentum of development will only accelerate.

Specific highlights for the 3.3.2 release are the code cleanups: german-only comments have been replaced and no longer used code has been removed. If the schedule is not slipping we’ll see the big release 3.4.0 in May. This is supposedly the release that is going to make the large step away from OpenOffice.org.

I created some Slackware packages for you (built on Slackware 13.1, works on Slackware 13.37 too). Using the new LibreOffice menu icons instead of the old OpenOffice seagull logos, its looking prettier even! I added a dictionary to the italian language pack, but other than that I did not diverge from the way I built the previous 3.3.1 packages.

One word about the dictionaries (which I included for en-GB, en-US, es, fr, it, nl language packs): they are installed as “shared dictionaries” i.e. they will show up in your extension manager as locked and unchangeable. You can still install your own dictionary on top of that, if you find one that is more advanced or better suited to your work. This personal version will be installed into your ~/.ooo3 user directory and will have preference over the shared version.

Get packages here:

Enjoy!  And tell me if you like these packages (or if you see room for improvement).

Eric

20 Comments

  1. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    Thanks a lot
    mirroring and downloading it now 🙂

  2. escaflown

    Thanks for all the hard work, Eric!

  3. zreaker

    Eric,

    Again you are amazing with the goodies you provide us,,,many thanks.

  4. yMerlin

    Thanks for the packages.
    It seems that LibreOffice 3.3.2 uses ~/.ooo3 as its default directory which was changed to ~/.libreoffice in 3.2.1. It’s a trivial problem though.

  5. Didier Spaier

    Thanks again Eric !

    At firts startup after upgradepkg I have a pop-up saying what follows:
    “Une autre instance de LibreOffice a accès à vos paramètres personnels ou les bloque.
    Un accès simultané peut provoquer des incohérences dans vos paramètres personnels. Avant de continuer, assurez-vous que l’utilisateur ‘didier’ quitte bien LibreOffice sur l’hôte ‘darkstar’.

    Êtes-vous sûr de vouloir continuer ?”

    then “Oui” “Non” buttons.

    I do not know if this has something to do with the fact that LibreOffice 3.3.1 was in use at time of upgradepkg.

    Anyhow, no big deal: I simply answer ‘Oui’ and it works.

  6. Didier Spaier

    I almost forgot: the “media => file” problem has disappeard under fluxbox as well :cooll:

  7. David

    As usual, thanks a lot for your great work!

  8. Lysender

    Downloading them now, as always thanks for the hard work!

  9. Mike Langdon (mlangdn)

    Thanks Eric! Everything is working fine!

  10. V. T. Eric Layton

    Installed and running in my 13.37. Thanks, Eric, for ALL that you do for Slackware and for its users. 🙂

    Regards,

    ~Eric

  11. Dr.Lun

    After spending 10 minutes in writing comment, I’ve clicked on ‘Submit!’ and received message:

    Error: please fill the required fields (name, email).

    Back button discarded comment text!!!

    Grrrr!

    (Grrrrr++ – I’ve entered name)

  12. alienbob

    Dr. Lun…. no idea what happened, but I feel sorry for you. I hope you manage to find some time to type your story again.

    Cheers, Eric

  13. m3d

    I think we have a typo, according to the schedule the May release of Libre Office will be 3.4.0, not 3.3.4 😉

  14. alienbob

    You are right m3d. I fixed it.

    Eric

  15. tekknogenius

    I cannot seem to compile this using your build script. I am running slackware current 64. It compiles most of the stuff but then it is missing a bunch of files it seems at the end. Is there anything specific you have installed in order to compile it from source?

    Thank you

  16. alienbob

    @tekknogenius – what do you mean by “this”, vlc or libreoffice?

    I compiled both on Slackware 13.1. Read the header of the SlackBuild scripts for information on what is required before you start compiling; in the case of libreofice, removing seamonkey and seamonkey-solibs seems to be required.

    Also do not forget to logoff as root, and login again, because installing xulrunner and jdk changes the environment and you need those changes to be applied or else the compilation fails.

    No “secret stuff” that I am not telling you about. That is not how I work.

    Eric

  17. michelino

    thanks as usual….especially for the Italian dictionary!!!

  18. diwljina

    Hi Eric!

    I’m using your VLC package (on current) and trying to access Hikvision IP camera (RTSP). I’m getting some live555 error:

    cvlc rtsp://192.168.1.50/h264/ch1/sub
    VLC media player 1.1.8 The Luggage (revision exported)
    Blocked: call to unsetenv(“DBUS_ACTIVATION_ADDRESS”)
    Blocked: call to unsetenv(“DBUS_ACTIVATION_BUS_TYPE”)
    [0x80fffa4] dummy interface: using the dummy interface module…
    [0x8120c64] live555 demux error: Failed to connect with rtsp://192.168.1.50/h264/ch1/sub
    [0xb6a00644] main input error: open of rtsp://192.168.1.50/h264/ch1/sub‘ failed: (null)
    [0xb6a00644] main input error: Your input can’t be opened
    [0xb6a00644] main input error: VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘rtsp://192.168.1.50/h264/ch1/sub’. Check the log for details.

    Any idea what could be the problem?

  19. General Failure

    Thanks for including the German dictionary as well 😉
    Not that I need it, but it would have been appreciated by many, I guess. No offense, just constructive criticism. And since you took the time to include french (and nederlands ;)…

  20. alienbob

    Hi General –

    Thanks for your interest.

    I have scheduled a german dictionary (dict-de-DE_frami) to be included in the next package I will build.

    Cheers, Eric

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