There’s a new LibreOffice release with a lot of improvements: 5.2.0. The announcement on the Document Foundation blog shows quite a lot of extensive information this time because of the version number jump and the changes implied by it. I’ll mention just a couple of semi-random facts here:
Document classification has been added as a major feature. Two-factor authentication for Google Docs storage finally works in Writer. Interoperability (with the MS Office file formats of course) has been improved and an import filter for Word for DOS was added. In Calc, new functions were added along with tooltips showing context information about functions. Source code quality has been measurably improved again.
I’ll share a picture from that blog post. It is a timeline detailing the roadmap of the last 5 years (2011 – 2016) on how LibreOffice has matured after it was forked off of OpenOffice. From the onset, the developers have focused on code cleaning and refactoring; the codebase was old, originating in StarOffice with tens of thousands of lines of german comments that had to be translated to english, and the ancient build system was switched to GNU make. With the codebase at an acceptible quality level and ready for collaborative development using git and gerrit, the focus for the 5.x releases has been to improve the user experience through a better and more fuctional UI:
Michael Meeks wrote a presentation several years ago which offers more insight into this re-factoring process.
A series of short videos have been created to showcase the new and improved User Interface functionality.
Packages for the new LibreOffice 5.2.0 are now ready on mirror servers for Slackware 14.2 and -current. Note that according to the announcement this LO release is “targeted to early adopters and power users“. For better stability, the 5.1.x releases are worth considering, but I will gladly welcome any feedback about (lack of) issues you are encountering with this new version 5.2.0 if you decide to go with it.
Get the packages here:
- http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/ (US master site)
- http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/ (my own fast mirror)
- http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/ (US)
- http://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/distributions/slackware/people/alien/slackbuilds/ (FR mirror)
- http://slackware.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/ (UK – fast mirror!)
PS: for those who had not noticed: the LibreOffice browser plugin (NPAPI based) has been removed in 4.4.0: https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/killing-the-npapi-plugin/
Let’s not forget that there was also a new release of the Chromium browser. This event is a lot more common than LibreOffice releases but since chromium is the single most used program on my computer apart from konsole, vlc and vim, it is worth mentioning… if just for my own sake.
The Google Chrome Releases blog mentions a list of vulnerabilities that were addressed with this release. Here are the ones that were contributed by external researchers as well as the Google team:
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[$4000][629542] High CVE-2016-5141 Address bar spoofing. Credit to anonymous
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[$4000][626948] High CVE-2016-5142 Use-after-free in Blink. Credit to anonymous
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[$3000][625541] High CVE-2016-5139 Heap overflow in pdfium. Credit to GiWan Go of Stealien
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[$3500][619405] High CVE-2016-5140 Heap overflow in pdfium. Credit to Ke Liu of Tencent’s Xuanwu LAB
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[$4000][623406] Medium CVE-2016-5145 Same origin bypass for images in Blink. Credit to anonymous
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[$1000][619414] Medium CVE-2016-5143 Parameter sanitization failure in DevTools. Credit to Gregory Panakkal
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[$1000][618333] Medium CVE-2016-5144 Parameter sanitization failure in DevTools. Credit to Gregory Panakkal
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[633486] CVE-2016-5146: Various fixes from internal audits, fuzzing and other initiatives.
Packages for Slackware 14.1, 14.2 and -current are now available from my repository. Be sure to upgrade!
Have fun! Eric
This version of LibreOffice has improved A LOT! Thanks Eric!
Greetings Bob
Builds:
Libreoffice-dict*.txz
Libreoffice-sdk*.txz
Libreoffice-kde*.txz
Does not build
Libreoffice-5.2*.txz
No errors in any of the logs except ‘error-libreoffice-log’
“./libreoffice.Slackbuild failed at line 1600”
Fresh VM install from Slackware64-14.2 DVD
With Jdk, Apache-ant, and Per-Archive-zip installed. and rebooted.
Not a clue where to look for answers
Thanks
John
John Yost, you’ll figure it out. I do not know the circumstances of your compilation. So there is nothing I can hint about.
My packages were build on a clean Slackware 14.2 with JDK, apache-ant and perl-archive-zip packages installed additionally. Nothing more. Just a 2GB RAM virtual machine with lots of swap space.
Hi Eric, so far LibreOffice is working great in my box. Thanks!!
Thanks Eric.
Inserting a ‘#’ at the begining of line 1600 in the Slackbuild worked. As $PKG/etc/profile.d/* is an empty directory
# chmod 755 $PKG/etc/profile.d/*
All packages build fine.
Thanks
John
I have added LibreOffice 5.1.5 for Slackware 14.1 and while generating the repository metadata I found out in parallel that I had not uploaded the profile scripts to the mirrorserver when I released LO 5.2.0 packages. My miss, apologies.
Those profile scripts will be available for download soon. What they do is allow you more easily to configure the GTK2 based user interface in case the GTK3 interface is too buggy or unstable.
By the way, LibreOffice 5.1.5 for Slackware 14.1 will not even have a GTK3 based user interface… the gtk+-3 package in Slackware 14.1 is too old.
Hi Eric, now I can report some problems.
1. Upon opening a heavy PowerPoint file the program crashed, but on a second try it opened correctly and behaved right.
2. Even though I use your latest Plasma packages and I have the required ‘kde-integration’ package, I cannot get LibreOffice 5.2 to integrate with Plasma.
Thanks again Eric!
@Eduardo and anyone else wanting KDE integration with LO:
You can force KDE integration by editing /etc/profile.d/libreoffice.sh and switching to ‘SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=kde4’.
Not sure why it’s defaulting to gtk2 on slackware, but after logging out and back in that got my KDE theme loading.
Thank you Derek. I’m not a great fan of LO’s KDE integration, it looks to me sloppy and not done right, but however it seems essential to me because the GTK file dialogs are a nightmare to navigate. Will try your advice.
Hi Derek, I’m happy to report that I’m able to use LO with KDE integration now
Hi Eric, do you keep old builds in an archive repo of some sort? I want to downgrade. I upgraded Chromium and it’s not picking up my GTK UI font size settings anymore like other applications (Pidgin, Firefox) do. The previous version displayed them correctly. I can change the theme and Chromium changes accordingly except for the UI font size.
Gerardo, have you filed a bug report for that font size issue? Better to ensure that future versions are fixed than to downgrade and be left out in the cold.
Do you plan to upgrade or rebuild LibreOffice 5.2.0 for -current now that -current includes Boost 1.61.0?
I have not plans either way. I do not have the time for a LibreOffice rebuild right now. It takes two days.
Okay.
Hi Eric
I have an issue where the chromium build causes my machine to shut down ( probably due to thermal overload – it’s quite warm here in the south ) – is there any way I can limit the amount of cores/CPUs used in the slackbuild?
Robby, try adding “-j 1” to the ninja commandline. Ninja builds in parallel automatically based on the number of detected CPU cores, so you need the “-j” parameter to specify a custom parallellism (1 job in parallel effectively means no parallellism).
Or you can just download my pre-built package of course… I am not SBo; the packages are my real content in the repositories.
Thanks Eric – your statement for ninja has worked spot on. And you are of course correct on the packages – really not sure why I’m stilling building chrome …