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Tag: libreoffice (Page 11 of 20)

LibreOffice 4.2.3 – addresses Heartbleed vulnerability

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keys and passwords, better check out the results of the Cloudflare Challenge (the SSL certificate for that site has been revoked in order to stop it from being abused so that page won’t load).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

More Chromium, LibreOffice and Flash updates

That sounds a heck of a lot like another post I wrote recently on this blog…  a little more than two weeks ago. The big guys made a move again, and this is what you get from me as a result.

Chromium

chromium_iconChromium (and of course Chrome) were updated to version 33.0.1750.149, with 7 security fixes. The Chrome binaries are equipped with an updated Flash Player plugin (12.0.0.77 which is also a security upgrade, see below).  These are the highlighted fixes (aka the biggest bounties paid):

  • [$4000][344881High CVE-2014-1700: Use-after-free in speech. Credit to Chamal de Silva.
  • [$3000][342618High CVE-2014-1701: UXSS in events. Credit to aidanhs.
  • [$1000][333058High CVE-2014-1702: Use-after-free in web database. Credit to Collin Payne.

You will find the chromium packages (Slackware 14.1 and -current) here:

I also provide updated packages for chromium-pepperflash-plugin with the Fpash plugin binary taken from the official Chrome distribution.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.2.2 (codenamed ‘Fresh’) packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are ready too. The official announcement  considers LibreOffice 4.2.2 to be “the most feature rich version of the software, and is suited for early adopters willing to leverage a larger number of innovations“. However, the announcement continues with “For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation suggests the more reliable LibreOffice 4.1.5 “Stable”.” Of course I have LibreOffice 4.1.5 packages, they are built on Slackware 14.0 and work well on Slackware 14.1 and -current. It’s your choice!

Package locations:

Linux Flash Player

As mentioned above in the Chromium section, Adobe released security updates of their Flash Player for all platforms. The Adobe security bulletin shows 11.2.202.346 as the new version for native Linux. Package location:

 

Note: a new version of pipelight has not yet been released, but if you want your Wine-installed Windows Flash player to be secure and safe as well, you can run the following command (as root – not as your normal user account like I wrongly advised before):

# pipelight-plugin --update

which will update the “/usr/share/pipelight/install-dependency” script. Next time you open a web page which loads pipelight, it will automatically upgrade your Windows Flash player in the wine-pipelight directory to the latest version.

Have fun! Eric

Two not-so-exciting updates but useful to some

Today I uploaded packages for VLC and LibreOffice. They are not for everyone, but let me explain this before you start scratching your head.

LibreOffice 4.1.5 was recently released and I maintain LibreOffice 4.1.x for Slackware 14.0. The newer Slackware releases (14.1 and the -current development tree) are treated to LibreOffice 4.2.x and currently I have libreoffice-4.1.2 packages available.

I finally came round to compiling libreoffice-4.1.5 on Slackware 14.0 and you can now download these packages.

Package locations:

I suspect that many people will have transitioned to Slackware 14.1 but there will likely be some left  who will benefit from a newer LibreOffice on Slackware 14.0. I am one of them.

largeVLCAnd a commentor on my previous blog post requested packages for the new VLC 2.1.4. Actually, there was not a lot of sense to that, since the changes between 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 are targeting Mac OSX only. The VideoLAN web site still offers VLC 2.1.3 packages for Windows prominently on their homepage.

In order to quell the voices that request packages for the newest VLC release, I decided to build this version anyway and update my repositories with it. The new vlc-2.1.4 packages can be downloaded from the usual locations.

Eric

The week in review

I have not been updating this blog for a couple of days, but that did not mean I was sitting on hy hands.

These are the package updates which landed in my various repositories during the last few days:

Calibre

calibreicoNearly every week I have been updating my Calibre packages whenever Kovid Goyal released a new version. Especially the last couple of releases are really exciting. Perhaps you noticed (if you are an ebook lover or even an ebook writer) that the Sigil EPUB editor’s progress had stalled, in fact the software’s development is dead. I did not really care because Sigil had switched its Qt dependency from 4 to 5 and Slackware does not contain Qt5, so new Slackware packages were out of the question anyway. Now, Calibre has been enhanced with an ebook editor. Visually and functionally the Calibre ebook editor application shows similarities to Sigil, however it is a completely different program, and it integrates perfectly into the Calibre GUI. You can invoke it directly by running “ebook-edit” from a terminal or using the “Edit E-book” menu item in your Desktop Environment.

Calibre can also run as a Web Server with an OPDS interface, ideal for when you have an ebook reader with a Wireless network interface – you can download books directly from your library without the need for a USB cable. But it needs to be hidden behind an Apache reverse proxy to make it safe enough to use on the Internet. I recently installed COPS however, which is built from the ground up to be a replacement Calibre OPDS PHP Server. After some discussion with the developer, I talked him into adding an online web-based EPUB reader which is based on Monocle, so that I can read my ebooks directly on my ChromeBook without the need for downloads or browser plugins.

 

LibreOffice

I already posted about my gripes with building the new LibreOffice 4.2.0. Well, I finally managed to make it work, and the resulting packages (for Slackware 14.1 and -current) are available. A significant bug was rapidly discovered in Calc when using a non-english language pack. It seems that other people suffered from this in earlier releases even, and not just on Slackware. Still, this is a release with many improvements. Read more about the new features and fixes on the announcement page. Interesting tidbit: LibreOffice 4.2 offers a new Start screen, with a cleaner layout that makes better use of the available space – even on small screens – and shows a preview of the last documents you opened.

Focus for the 4.2 cycle is performance and interoperability (yeah, when is it not) with MS Office.

Note that I ship my LibreOffice 4.1 and 4.2 packages with additional “libreoffice-dict-<language>” packages, containing dictionary and spellchecker support! If you are still running Slackware 13.37 there’s LibreOffice 3.6.7 for which I also have packages, and users of Slackware 14.0 are served well with LibreOffice 4.1.4.

Package locations:

 

Chromium

chromium_iconAnother update to Chrome/Chromium brings this open source version of Chrome to 32.0.1700.107, and interestingly enough (but I disregarded this) another update appeared one day later which “upgrades” Chromium to 32.0.1700.103. A comment to that blog announcement questions the effective downgrade but there is no answer yet from the developers.

The SlackBuild was modified a bit (thanks dugan!), in order to solve several bugs in the interaction with vBulletin, which is the software powering LinuxQuestions.org (hoster of the main Slackware user forum on the Internet).

I have packages ready for the new chromium:

 

VideoLAN Player

largeVLCThe VideoLAN team released version 2.1.3 of their VLC player yesterday.

This is another maintenance release of the “Rincewind” release, “fixing numerous bugs, and improves decoders, notably for the new formats (HEVC and VP9). Important fixes involve Audio and Video output management on most platforms“. 2.1.3 also “improves the demuxer and decoders for most formats, and the various interfaces“.

Where to find the new VLC packages:

Rsync acccess is offered by the mirror server: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode mp3 and aac audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

 

Adobe’s Flash Player plugin

adobe_flash_8s600x600_2There was a minor version number update today, for Adobe’s Flash Player Plugin for web browsers. The update is accompanied by a security bulletin “apsb14-04

Packages for Mozilla compatible browsers are here (and the update to pepperflash plugin for Chromium should follow shortly):

Icedtea-web

A new release of the web browser plugin for OpenJDK is available since today. Version 1.4.2 finally makes Oracle’s Java version tester page work again (remember that you now have to explicitly allow the plugin to start inside your Firefox or Chromium browser):

java_is_working_7u51_b31

Get the packages at http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/icedtea-web/

 

 

KDE

The latest  KDE Sofware Compilation is 4.12.2 which is available now and it accompanied by Plasma Workspaces 4.11.6. Mostly bug fix release, you should have no issues upgrading.

Contrary to what I had told before, I have built these packages on Slackware 14.1. I am running them on all my Slackware-current boxes without issues. The difference between Slackware 14.1 and -current is not so big yet, which is the rationale behind my decision to use Slackware 14.1 as the compilation platform this one time (for maximum compatibility)You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script.

You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

My packages can be found in the ‘ktown’ repository which I maintain for KDE packages:

 

This concludes the week in review. I just finished baking a fresh loaf of bread and the smell makes me mad. Have to wait until the morning (it’s still hot and the time is just past midnight).

loaf-800

Remember:
You can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed (RSS for ktown and RSS for multilib available too) if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.

Have fun! Eric

Compiling new LibreOffice sources is a bitch

libreoffce_logo
<rant> After three compilation failures (each setting me back several hours) I must say this:

Whenever I have to bump a LibreOffice package – and perhaps due to moving up from Slackware 14.0 to 14.1 for compiling – it annoys the hell out of me that there are so many unexpected build failures. Not because I cannot fix them, but because every iteration of a LibreOffice compilation attempt costs another few hours. And there’s only so many hours between coming home from work and falling over because of sleep deprivation.

I am afraid that it will take some time before I can produce proper LibreOffice 4.2.0 packages for you. They will be available for Slackware 14.1 and newer . If you are running Slackware 14.0 then you’ll have to stick with LibreOffice 4.1.x (32-bit, 64-bit) for which I will build new packages soon (4.1.5 is around the corner). Users of Slackware 13.37 can still enjoy LibreOffice 3.6.7 (32-bit,64-bit).

In the meantime I am baking a fresh bread for tomorrow morning, so that I get at least something useful out of this frustrating evening.

Eric

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