Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: libreoffice (Page 12 of 20)

LibreOffice 4.1.4 for Slackware 14.0 and newer

December 19, 2013 / / 13 Comments

Quite by accident I noticed that LibreOffice 4.1.4 was released yesterday, even before the DocumentFoundation’s blog post was up. The official stance for 4.1.4 is that it is “the first also suggested for corporate deployments“. Well that is good news! So I quickly cleaned up the KDE 4.12 virtual machines and started with compiling some packages.

What I also did was read this page, suggested to me by my pal Heinz: http://dilfridge.blogspot.nl/2013/12/libreoffice-kde-integration.html . This post mentions the exact issues that were also reported by Slackware users of my earlier LO packages on KDE: slowness in the “File” dialogs for opening and saving; and crashes in LO Sheets when selectiong some cells and then moving them (this would actually freeze the complete KDE desktop, not just LO). I checked out the Gentoo bug reports which are mentioned by Andreas Hüttel and extracted the patches he backported from LibreOffice 4.2. It seems (and I asked some friends to check) that these patches do indeed fix the issues on KDE.

Another change in the SlackBuild is that I switched it to use a private version of poppler, this should hopefully fix the broken PDF import in Slackware 14.1 and -current, because of a change in libpoppler library version since Slackware 14.

The LibreOffice 4.1.4 packages for Slackware are available in my 14.0 package repository – I just uploaded them. Remember, they will work on Slackware 14.1 and current just as well. Note that I ship my LibreOffice 4.1 packages with additional “libreoffice-dict-<language>” packages, containing dictionary and spellchecker support!

If you are still running Slackware 13.37 you should stick with LibreOffice 3.6.7 for which I also have packages.

At this point, I used to request that you select one of the mirrors as your preferred download location, in order to spare the master site at slackware.com. However with the launch of SLackware 14.1 the server has been placed behind the Akamai cache infrastructure, so that downloading from slackware.com will no longer hurt us;

You can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.

Cheers, Eric

LibreOffice 4.1.3 for Slackware 14.0 and -current

November 2, 2013 / / 14 Comments

There is a new source release of LibreOffice.- thanks Willy for notifying me this morning. The new 4.1.3 is another stability and bugfix release. Note that the developers are stating that LibreOffice 4.1.3 “is suitable for early adopters and private power users — for conservative requirements, we refer you to LibreOffice 4.0.6 from the previous series“. But, I think you can safely upgrade.

The fresh LibreOffice 4.1.3 packages for Slackware are available in my 14.0 package repository –  I just uploaded them. Remember, they will work on Slackware-current just as well. Note that I ship my LibreOffice 4.1 packages with additional “libreoffice-dict-<language>” packages, containing dictionary and spellchecker support!

If you are still running Slackware 13.37 you should stick with LibreOffice 3.6.7 for which I also have packages.

Please select one of the mirrors as your preferred download location, because they offer bigger bandwidth than the master site at slackware.com.

You can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.

Cheers, Eric

Libreoffice 4.1.2 packages and the blog is back up

October 9, 2013 / / 15 Comments

harrierOh my. The server which hosts my blog, as well as sbopkg.org, rlworkman.net, the SlackBuilds.org mailing lists and several more personal web sites, and on top of that is also known as “mirrors.slackware.com“, lost both of its RAID-configured drives. One drive is completely dead but Robby Workman was able to rescue much of the data on the other drive. It’s still a mystery as to why two disk drives failed at the same second, and accusing fingers are being pointed at the on-board SATA controller of the server.

Fortunately, Robby managed to install Slackware anew, and configure it back to operational status. Only a lot of mirror data is still not available but that is being sucked back in from other Internet mirror servers, so I expect that full services will be restored pretty soon.

My blog and Wiki are fully restored but I have switched to a backup twice a day (I used to backup once a day) just to be on the safe side…

TekLinks, the company which hosts the server in its datacenter, has provided full support in order to get the server back up and running again as fast as possible, thanks for that!

 

And now, on to the topic which I could not write aboout since the blog was down (but Willy helped with that) 🙂

I finally managed to re-write the libreOffice.SlackBuild for the 4.1 releases. It took a while to get everything right, and get the various language dictionaries properly split off into their own packages. Just when I had built libreoffice-4.1.1 there was a source release of 4.1.2 so I never made my 4.1.1 packages public and instead went for the newest release.

If you want to read more about the improvements of the 4.1 release, you should read the official announcement of 4.1.0. The main focus is on interoperability (with the arch rival MS Office of course). More detail is to be found in the “4.1 new features and fixes” article.

LibreOffice 4.1.2 packages for Slackware can now be obtained from my 14.0 package repository – they will work on Slackware-current just as well. Note that there are now additional “libreoffice-dict-<language>” packages!

If you are still running Slackware 13.37 you should stick with LibreOffice 3.6.7 for which I also have packages.

They are also available from several mirrors. Remember, the mirror sites usually have a bigger bandwidth available than the master site! If you are a mirror administrator, and want to be added to the list, contact me.

Here is the shortlist:

You can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.

Cheers, Eric

So I finally packaged VLC 2.1. And what about LibreOffice?

September 29, 2013 / / 18 Comments

VLC

Finally, the daunting task of compiling 12 packages for VLC has come to completion. I created packages for the latest VLC 2.1 (codenamed ‘rincewind’… who the heck keeps thinking that these half-arsed nicks are useful). Like with the release candidate which I packaged last month, the internally used libraries are up to date again (ffmpeg, fluidsynth, libass, libcdio, libdc1394, libdvbpsi, libebml, libmatroska, libva, opus, orc, schroedinger, vcdimager, vo-amrwbenc, and x264).

Those of you who are running Slackware 13.37, 14.0 and -current will rejoice 🙂 That being said, it is likely that this is the last major VLC update for which I will produce a Slackware 13.37 package – the effort is just becoming too big.

The 2.1 release is the culmination of nearly two years of work by the team, squashing over a thousand bugs (although it is not mentioned anywhere how many of those were caused by actually coding the 2.1 branch). More importantly, the commit history shows that VLC is very much alive, evidenced by the fact that 140 code committers do not belong to the actual VideoLAN team. Good news because my expericnce was that the 1.x and 2.0 development cycles have actually caused a decrease in the quality and robustness of VLC as an allround media player. Let’s see if 2.1 will turn this around. With a new audio core and lots of work on improving the ports to other platform, I really hope that much of the deficits of the video decoders which made me switch back to MPlayer as my video app of choice, have been addressed as well.

Where to find my 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.

libreoffce_logoLibreOffice

My latest LibreOffice packages (for Slackware 14) are version 4.0.5. In the meantime, those hard-working LibreOffice developers are almost at version 4.2.1… so what happened to the ‘alien’ builds of LibreOffice 4.1?

Well, during the packaging of 4.0 I noticed that the dictionaries which are now being offered as a source tarball, including many languages, needed another way of building and installing. I have been trying to find time to investigate and come up with proper packages, but I ran into a snag with the SlackBuild script and kept telling to myself that I would look into it right after the next KDE… OpenJDK… Calibre… whatever package would have been created. To be honest…. I am swamped with work during my paid daytime job and I spend more hours per week at work. It takes time to finish the bigger projects (like LibreOffice) in my spare time. Be patient, packages will be released eventually.

Oh yeah…

I helped my son today with the home-made pizza he had promised to create. I did something I realized I had never done before… I created the pizza dough from scratch: flour, yeast, water, olive oil, salt. Kneading the dough, seeing it rise and flattening it out to an oven-plate sized pizza bottom was very rewarding. Eating the pizza was rewarding as well! I have promised myself to finally bake that Focaccia bread which I have been wanting to try forever.

And finally:

Anyone with a Google Nexus tablet out there and experience with unlocking it, putting some brand of real Linux on it? I am going to pick up my own ARM port after Slackware 14.1 is released and besides my personal targets (getting it to boot on my TrimSlice and my ChromeBook) I was wondering how open the Google Nexus tablets really are with regard to having linux device drivers available. I am dead-curious about seeing how well Slackware behaves on a touch device… and both the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 look like they are awesome devices.

Be good! Eric

 

 

LibreOffice 3.6.7 (last in series) packaged for Slackware 13.37

July 20, 2013 / / 6 Comments

I thought that with 3.6.6 the LibreOffice developers had released the last update in the 3.6 series. However, there is yet another release. and it looks like 3.6.7 is really going to be the final incremental release. LibreOffice 3.6.7 is a bugfix release (changes in 3.6.7.1 and 3.6.7.2) which was added to the release schedule in a late stage. This means end-of-life for the 3.6 series and everybody is encouraged to migrate to the stable 4.0 series.

These LibreOffice 3.6.7 packages which I am making available have been built on Slackware 13.37. They can be installed on Slackware 14 as well, but of course I have LibreOffice 4.0.4 packages (32bit, 64bit) in my repository for Slackware 14 and -current. Perhaps it is time for you to upgrade your Slackware along with LibreOffice in a little while, if you are still running 13.37? The new Slackware 14.1 should not be too far off.

The LibreOffice 3.6.7 packages are available here:

Eric

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