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Tag: libreoffice (Page 10 of 20)

LibreOffice 4.3.1 packages are ready

August 31, 2014 / / 3 Comments

On August 28, The Document Foundation announced LibreOffice 4.3.1, the first minor release of LibreOffice 4.3 “fresh” family, with over 100 fixes (including patches for two CVEs). The CVEs that were patched in LibreOffice 4.3.1 (and also in LibreOffice 4.2.6) are CVE-2014-3524 “CSV Command Injection and DDE formulas” and CVE-2014-3575 “Arbitrary File Disclosure using crafted OLE objects“.

If you want to be reminded of the new features in LibreOffice 4.3 then I advise you to read the Release Notes. My previous post on LO 4.3.0 mentions some of these improvements as well.

Note that when I upgraded the LibreOffice packages in my Slackware 14.1/current repository from 4.2.5 to 4.3.0 last month, the result was that there is no 4.2 version to be found anymore  in the repository (I offer LibreOffice 4.1.6 in the Slackware 14.0 repository). I added a build script for LibreOffice 4.2.6 in the sources directory, in case you want to try building 4.2.6 yourself. The two aforementioned CVE’s have been applied to the latest source tarballs of LibreOffice 4.2.6, versioned “4.2.6.3”.

Font compatibility:

With regard to MS Office compatibility, I have another remark. In the 4.2 releases I added copies of two open source TrueType fonts which are metric-compatible with two popular Microsoft fonts. Having these fonts available to LibreOffice means that the layout of MS Office documents when you open them in LibreOffice will be unaltered because the replacement fonts (Carlito for MS Calibri and Caladea for MS Cambria) have the same font metrics as the Microsoft ones. When updating the libreoffice.SlackBuild script I decided that I would rather have these two fonts available to the whole system, not just to LibreOffice. Therefore I created two separate packages for these fonts, and if you do not yet have the (non-free) Microsoft web core fonts installed I advise you strongly to install the open source Carlito and Caladea font packages.

Package availability:

LibreOffice 4.3.1 packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are ready for download from the usual mirror locations:

A note about KDE integration:

If you are on KDE and simply “upgradepkg” the libreoffice packages, your application may suddenly look very out of style, having switched to a GTK look & feel. All you need to do is “installpkg” the new libreoffice-kde-integration package (I split the KDE support out of the big LO package and into its own separate package for LO 4.2.3, so it’s possible that you already have it). One thing is worth noting, despite the fact that this is called “KDE integration”: due to bugs in Qt4 which have not been patched in Slackware’s version of the Qt4 package, the KDE file picker has been disabled in this package. Here is the relevant piece of build output:

*WARNING: native KDE4 file pickers will be disabled at runtime, Qt4 fixes needed
*WARNING: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-37380 (needed)
*WARNING: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-34614 (needed)
*WARNING: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-38585 (recommended)

If you have a lot of spare time available, you can hunt down those three Qt4 patches, apply them to the Slackware package source and then recompile the qt4 and libreoffice packages…

Eric

LibreOffice moves up to 4.3 – today, you can’t own a better Office Suite

August 6, 2014 / / 46 Comments

Two versions of LibreOffice were released in quick succession. You’ll find the latest iteration of the successful 4.2 series announced here, but slightly ahead of that 4.2.6 release, there was also the bump to a new development cycle. I was on a field trip to the US at the time of the 4.3.0 release announcement and was unable to devote time to updating the SlackBuild script and provide packages earlier than today.

The 4.3.0 announcement claims that the new release comes with “a large number of improvements and new features, including: Document interoperability, Comment management and intuitive spreadsheet handling“.

What’s new in LibreOffice?

Here is some more detail about these three major improvements in 4.3.0:

  • Document interoperability: support of OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support of 30 new Excel formulas, support of MS Works spreadsheets and databases, and Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and more.
  • Comment management: comments can now be printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported – including nested comments – in ODF, DOC, OOXML and RTF documents, for improved productivity and better collaboration.
  • Intuitive spreadsheet handling: Calc now allows the performing of several tasks more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it, and being able to fully select text conversion models by the user.

Equally interesting news is that the developers state the following about the first 4.3 version even though this is a milestone release: LibreOffice “has reached a point of maturity that makes it suitable for every kind of deployment, if backed by value added services by the growing LibreOffice ecosystem“. This is a claim which would be made in the past only after several bug fix iterations had seen the light. To stress this point, the announcement informs us that “the quality of LibreOffice source code has improved dramatically during the last two years, with a reduction of the defect density per 1,000 lines of code from an above the average 1.11 to an industry leading 0.08“. Impressive maturing of a complex piece of software, which tells something about the dedication with which the developer community works on LibreOffice!

If you want to read more about all the new stuff in LibreOffice 4.3.0 there’s also the release notes. Lots of information there!

Note that I upgraded the LibreOffice packages in my Slackware 14.1/current repository from 4.2.5 to 4.3.0, which means that currently there is no 4.2 version to be found anymore (I offer LibreOffice 4.1.6 in the Slackware 14.0 repository). I am assuming that there are no major regressions in the 4.3.0 release but in the case where LibreOffice 4.3.0 proves unworkable, let me know and we’ll work something out with regard to availability of the old 4.2.5 packages. I added a build script for LibreOffice 4.2.6 in the sources directory, in case you want to try building 4.2.6 yourself.

Font compatibility:

With regard to MS Office compatibility, I have another remark. In the 4.2 releases I added copies of two open source TrueType fonts which are metric-compatible with two popular Microsoft fonts. Having these fonts available to LibreOffice means that the layout of MS Office documents when you open them in LibreOffice will be unaltered because the replacement fonts (Carlito for MS Calibri and Caladea for MS Cambria) have the same font metrics as the Microsoft ones. When updating the libreoffice.SlackBuild script I decided that I would rather have these two fonts available to the whole system, not just to LibreOffice. Therefore I created two separate packages for these fonts, and if you do not yet have the (non-free) Microsoft web core fonts installed I advise you strongly to install the open source Carlito and Caladea font packages.

Package availability:

LibreOffice 4.3.0 packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are ready for download from the usual mirror locations:

A note about KDE integration:

If you are on KDE and simply “upgradepkg” the libreoffice packages, your application may suddenly look very out of style, having switched to a GTK look & feel. All you need to do is “installpkg” the new libreoffice-kde-integration package (I split the KDE support out of the big LO package and into its own separate package for LO 4.2.3, so it’s possible that you already have it).

Eric

Field trip

July 2, 2014 / / 5 Comments
Me

Me

During the next few weeks, my package and article output will be rather limited. You probably already noticed the relative silence.

I have been preparing for a “field trip”, i.e. a visit to one of my customers. If you are going to watch the Indepencence Day fireworks in San Diego you might just bump into me. I’ll be the gray guy with “Slackware @alien” written on his cap 🙂

But seriously, I have no idea what kind of connectivity I will have while traveling. I hope to post a few stories and pics if time and opportunity present themselves.

Let me part with a reminder (not previously announced on this blog but if you follow my RSS feed you’ll have noticed): there are new packages for LibreOffice. The version 4.2.5 was released a little over a week ago and I built this for Slackware 14.1 and -current.

Also updated, but then in the ‘ktown‘ repository of KDE packages (Slackware 14.1 and -current), is kdeconnect-kde. The new 0.7 release fixes a lot of bugs, allows you to use your Android phone as a mousepad for your KDE desktop, and finally there is a working two-way file transfer between your KDE computer and your Android phone (provided they are on the same network).

Take care! Eric

Rebuilt LibreOffice 4.2.3 packages fix KDE-related bug

April 21, 2014 / / 14 Comments

libreoffce_logo Today I uploaded new packages for the LibreOffice 4.2.3 . The original packages were made available a little while ago but several people (myself included) were not happy with them.

LibreOffice 4.2.3 has an issue when you are running KDE. A bug in the session-restore functionality caused the LibreOffice applications to “hang” after the window outlines had been drawn on the screen. I took a commit from the development tree and used that as a patch to recompile my libreoffice packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current.

I can confirm that the patched package solved the problem for me.

Get the new packages here (Slackware 14.1 and -current):

Eric

LibreOffice 4.2.3 – addresses Heartbleed vulnerability

April 12, 2014 / / 11 Comments

Last week was a black page in Open Source security with the publication of the Heartbleed vulnerability. For those of you who think the hype is overrated and no one will be able to get at your private keys and passwords, better check out the results of the Cloudflare Challenge (the SSL certificate for that site has been revoked in order to stop it from being abused so that page won’t load).  Cloudflare’s security engineers were unable to exploit the vulnerability and retrieve their server’s private key so they confidently made it a public challenge… and at least three people independently obtained the server’s private key through the exploit! Proof was given by posting messages signed with that same private key. Read all about it on the Cloudflare blog. Don’t take this vulnerability too lightly! Slackware 14.0, 14.1 and -current users should apply the openssl patch packages as soon as possible. And if your machine was exposed to the Internet, running a secure web server (https://) then it is wise to revoke your SSL certificate and create a new one. It may also be a good idea to change the passwords of the accounts on that server.

Not just OpenSSL-protected web sites are affected; regular “client” software can be abused by attacks when these applications contain the vulnerable code because they statically link to the openssl library. I’ll post some more later, but here is the first fix:

The Document Foundation added a fix for Heartbleed to their latest LibreOffice 4.2.3 (codenamed ‘Fresh’) release. It took an additional day for me to get rid of the bugs in my revised SlackBuild script, because I had decided to split the “big” libreoffice package in three sub-packages. The SDK documentation (several hundreds of MB) has now moved into a separate package “libreoffice-sdkdoc” which you will not need unless you are a developer. And the KDE integration libraries have been moved into their own package as well: “libreoffice-kde-integration”. It’s these libraries which give the LibreOffice user interface the “KDE look” when you are running KDE, and make it use the KDE file dialogs. Some people experienced issues in KDE which were solved by removing these KDE libraries, and the new sub-package was born to help you get a better experience out of LibreOffice on Slackware. Note that if you are on KDE and simply “upgradepkg” the libreoffice package, your application will suddenly look very out of style, having switched to a GTK look & feel. All you need to do is “installpkg” the new libreoffice-kde-integration package.

If you are in need of stability, note that the official statement from the Document Foundation is that LibreOffice 4.2.3 is “the most feature rich version of the software, and is suited for early adopters willing to leverage a larger number of innovations. For enterprise deployments and for more conservative users, The Document Foundation suggests the more mature LibreOffice 4.1.5“. You can find Slackware packages for LibreOffice 4.1.5 in my repository onder the “14.0”directory. They were built on Slackware 14.0 and work well on Slackware 14.1 and -current.

Packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are ready for download from the usual mirror locations:

Eric

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