Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: libreoffice (Page 14 of 20)

LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been released

February 8, 2013 / / 9 Comments

Yesterday the LibreOffice developers released their 4.0.0 milestone. This is essentially the same code as the 3rd Release Candidate for which I dropped some testing packages a few days ago.

Quoting the announcement, “LibreOffice 4.0.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement” (On 28 September 2010, several members of the OpenOffice.org project formed a new group called “The Document Foundation” and forked LibreOffice from their former project). These objectives are (quoting again): “a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem“.

The most important highlights of this version 4.0.0 are:

  • Integration with several content and document management systems – including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others – through the CMIS standard.
  • Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink annotations and attaching comments to text ranges.
  • Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version (just announced).
  • Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a personalized look.
  • Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface.
  • Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style.
  • Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions as defined in ODF OpenFormula.
  • First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android, supported only on some Linux distributions. (The second release, coming soon, will be supported on all platforms: Windows, MacOS X and all Linux distros and binaries.)
  • Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX spreadsheets and RTF files.
  • Improved code contribution thanks to Gerrit: a web based code review system, facilitating the task for projects using Git version control system (although this is not specific of LibreOffice 4.0, it has entered the production stage just before the 4.0 branch).

You can read the “features and fixes” page if you want to learn the full scope of the new release.

Of course, the best way to experience this new feature set is to download and install packages which have been built on and for Slackware natively!

I rebuilt the “RC3” packages which I already had, this time also compiling a dictionary for every language pack, using a newly added LibreOffice “dictionaries” source tarball (the total number of source archives has still shrunk to four). I checked with other distro packages but so far, nobody seems to be incorporating these new dictionaries. I can not tell you anything about their quality yet, so what I would appreciate is if you comment on what you think of the quality of dictionary available in the language pack you install. If you are not happy with the included dictionary you can always download and install one of the dictionaries found at the LibreOffice extensions site.

Please note that LibreOffice 4 stores its configuration in a new numbered directory, “~/.config/libreoffice/4/” and I have not found a way to automatically migrate the settings from the old “3” directory. If you find a way, let me know in a reply to this blog.

Packages can be downloaded from one of the mirrors, and keep in mnd that they were built on Slackware 14, which will make them unfit for Slackware 13.37 or earlier (but of course the packages will work on slackware-current):

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

Eric

 

Testing LibreOffice 4.0.0_rc3

February 2, 2013 / / 12 Comments

Yesterday when I announced my packages for LibreOffice 3.6.5, I told you that I had a Release Candidate for 4.0.0 already running on my Slackware desktop.

I decided to upload some packages for the new “Release Candidate 3” which was tagged and published earlier this week. I built those packages on Slackware64-current (should work on 14.0 too) and just the 64-bit versions. If you run 32-bit Slackware you’re out of luck this time.

What I would like you all to do (if you run the proper Slackware) is to give this one a test run. So far, nothing has popped up that made me unhappy.

What I still need to do in my SlackBuild (but I will get to that when I build the packages for the final stable release) is to incorporate the all-new “dictionaries” tarball into the packages. That tarball contains sources for dictionaries for all supported languages, and compiling those does not take a very long time. I guess it’s just a matter of adding the generated dictionaries to all the language packs I build for LibreOffice instead of having dictionaries for just a few of the languages like I have been doing so far.

Please note that LibreOffice 4 stores its configuration in a new numbered directory, “~/.config/libreoffice/4/” and I have not found a way to automatically migrate the settings from the old “3” directory. If you find a way, let me know in a reply to this blog.

Give it a twist and report what you find: http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/test/libreoffice-4.0.0_rc3/

Eric

Packages for LibreOffice 3.6.5, calibre and steamclient, and lots of movement on the horizon

February 2, 2013 / / 20 Comments

Yes, I finally got rid of the flu – but it took a week. I lost some weight (and I am not overweight so I am looking starved now), I still have a bad cough and my lower back muscles are strained and painful because of the continuous coughing. Otherwise I am fine.

I had a bit of a Slackware backlog which I am getting rid of now, thanks to my automated build scripts (creating these packages took time, not effort).

LibreOffice

The Libre Office developers had published their 3.6.5 release last week, and I finally felt good enough to build packages. I did a quick examination and it appears that the opening/saving of password-protected files is finally working! Other bugfixes are documented in the release notes. That shows a fairly long list, let’s hope 3.6.5 is going to be rock stable for everyone. It is the last 3.x release before moving on to 4.0.0 in February.

These LibreOffice 3.6.5 packages have been built on Slackware 13.37. They can be installed on Slackware 14 as well, but there seem to be some dynamic linking errors, so I assume that some functionality is broken. I have not yet found where that happens, though. If you find any issues on Slackware 14 please tell me.

The next series, 4.x ,will be compiled on Slackware 14.0 and that will be the end of the library errors in any case. Modifying the libreoffice.SlackBuild script for the 4.x release required real effort! I am running LibreOffice 4.0.0_RC2 here on the desktop machine and it will be worth it, I promise. I will wait with making my new packages public until the official stable 4.0.0 release, so be patient for now please… Those who are still on Slackware 13.37 will have a good fallback choice with LibreOffice 3.6.5.

Downloads are available here, as usual:

Remember, you can add more functionality by installing extensions. LibreOffice extensions are available from http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center

steam

Steam client

I also updated my steamclient package with a re-packaging of Valve’s latest binary release (a debian package for Ubuntu actually): 1.0.0.22. I am going to write a separate blog entry about Steam this weekend so I am not lingering here too long. Rest assured that the new package will rid you of the annoying “outdated client” errors and works like a charm (mostly).

calibreico

Calibre Ebook Management

And I am again in line with the weekly updates of Kovid Goyal, developer of Calibre. I still maintain an up-to-date version of my custom-built package because I think it is an important tool for anyone with an E-Reader who does not want to tie his hands to a commercial ebook management & library system. Calibre acts as my family’s library and using OPDS protocol, I do not even need a cable to download new books onto the reader. I just use the wireless network.

The Event Horizon!

The blog’s subject hinted that more is coming.. Indeed I already have my packages ready for KDE 4.10.0 but I am not yet releasing them yet… I am waiting for the official announcement next week (and maybe other packagers will find bugs in the meantime). It is looking cool and I am running it here with no issues. In fact I played several hours of Half-Life Deathmatch against my son (there’s a Linux Beta of that too, since this week on Steam – well worth the 10 bucks), and neither the new KDE nor Steam nor Half-life crashed. Also imminent is a new release of IcedTea, the build framework for OpenJDK which I use. That means, there will be a Slackware package for OpenJDK “7u12” or somewhat like that, very soon.

And last but certainly not least, the VideoLAN developers (who are currently partying at FOSDEM, Brussels) will have to come up fast with a fix for a critical vulnerability in the VLC player, which was divulged yesterday… I guess that you should not be opening ASF files in the meantime.

Eric

LibreOffice 3.6.4 has been released

December 7, 2012 / / 18 Comments

The LibreOfffice developers have published their 3.6.4 release. My packages for this release have been available since yesterday evening, so grab them if you want to profit from the bugfixes.

Remember, you can add more functionality by installing extensions. LibreOffice extensions are available from http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center

The LibreOffice 3.6.4 packages which I am making available have been built on Slackware 13.37. They can be installed on Slackware 14 as well. If you find any issues on Slackware 14 please tell me. Downloads are available here:

Enjoy the snow if you live in the Netherlands.

Eric

Update 12/12/12: removed the brazilian mirror since it is no longer being updated.

Libreoffice 3.6.3 packages available

November 3, 2012 / / 20 Comments

The LibreOfffice developers have released the next update, 3.6.3. This is again mainly a bugfix and stability update. A list with most prominent bugfixes is available too.

LibreOffice extensions are available from http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center

As LibreOffice diverges more and more from OpenOffice I am not certain that the old OOo templates are still working with LibreOffice but the collection of LibreOffice-specific templates is growing steadily in the template-center . If anyone has created a professional-looking set of Slackware themed presentations or document templates, could you offer those for download? I am not an expert in these things, but it would be a nice-to-have. Not for me alone – there are probably many more people with this wish.

The LibreOffice 3.6.3 packages which I am making available have been built on Slackware 13.37. They can be installed on Slackware 14 as well. If you find any issues on Slackware 14 please tell me.

I uploaded the packages yesterday, silently, to give the mirrors a chance to update before announcing them on my blog and in the ChangeLog (tip: subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to be informed first!). Downloads are available here:

Have a good weekend and watch out for new KDE packages next week!

Eric

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