Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: libreoffice (Page 16 of 20)

Busy days, not Slackware related

July 11, 2012 / / 20 Comments

In the next days or weeks, I am going to try and rest and re-vitalize myself. It would be a waste of effort if I burnt myself out. But the shitty weather does not help. Who feels like it is summer in Europe? I have just emptied the buckets in the hallway which caught the water seeping through the crack in the roof… repair money is not available right now.

During the past week, there were many such distractions to keep me away from hacking at Slackware. This will likely remain unchanged during the next weeks. We had a fire in the kitchen, which caused damage (the stove and oven were destroyed), but luckily no one got hurt! It takes time to invite experts to assess the damage, arrange repairs and such. I als got hooked on some e-books I had loaded onto my Sony E-reader… reading is eating away precious time faster than you think!

Anyway, all this distraction had consequences for the package pipeline. With regular releases of KDE, LibreOffice, OpenJDK and VLC – all pretty big builds – my free time is increasingly limited to building updates for these aforementioned programs. It is frustrating at times that I have to make an advance planning because especially KDE and LibreOffice releases tend to come at roughly the same time. Building in several virtual machines at the same time hurts my server’s performance and it does not help the total build time per program…

Also, I really need to pick up the pace with my new but currently stalled ARM port of Slackware (which will have differences to the existing ARMedslack port). I am talking to some people about what would be a cool computer to own which really should be running Slackware. The outcome of those discussions I will reserve for a future post, because I will probably need assistance.

That is why I decided that I am not going to build packages for the upcoming KDE 4.9-rc2. I will wait for the final release of 4.9.0 instead.

I will try to get LibreOffice packages compiled for the 3.5.5 release which was announced today. It depends on the errors I encounter during compilation… I do not have time to hunt compilation issues down and fix them. So, fingers crossed!

End of rant.

Eric

LibreOffice 3.5.4 – speed improvements

June 1, 2012 / / 6 Comments

I finished a set of LibreOffice packages yesterday (targeting Slackware 13.37 and newer) and uploaded them last night. The new maintenance release of LibreOffice boasts “Up to 100% performance improvements thanks to the efforts  of a diverse and growing developer and QA community“.

Grab the libreoffice package (it’s huge as always) and if you want a localized version you should additionally install/upgrade one or more of the language packs. The “libreoffice-mozplugin” package enables the embedding of documents in your mozilla-compatible webbrowser.

There were issues with password-protected documentsin previous LO releases but it looks like these issues have not been resolved yet… I get the same Input/Output error still. The promised speed improvements should please those people who had complained on Linuxquestions.org that complex and large documents caused unacceptible slow responses in the program.

If you want to compile this yourself on Slackware 13.37, then you must make sure that you have applied all the available patches for 13.37 first, in particular the newer seamonkey package there. Also you have to replace your JRE package with the full JDK found in the “/extra” directory. Additional non-Slackware requirements for compilation are Apache Ant and the Archive:Zip Perl module. after installing/upgrading all that, logout from your shell and login again to update your environment (or just run ” . /etc/profile ” including that dot). None of this is necessary if you just want to use my package for LibreOffice.

You can find the packages for Slackware 13.37 (they will work without issues on -current too!) in the usual locations. All of the mirrors below also offer rsync access by the way:

Tonight, I shall continue with my KDE 4.9.beta1 packaging effort. There was progress last night, so the outcome looks promising. Hopefully I will have something for you before the end of the weekend!

Cheers, Eric

End of may ramblings

May 31, 2012 / / 22 Comments

It has been a while since my latest blog post, so I thought it would be good to talk a bit about the goings-on.

First about the Slackware web server. I know, people, that we have been without http://www.slackware.com/ for a few weeks now, but rest assured that the site will eventually be back. Either we put the old web site code on a temporary server or we wait a little longer and publish a new site based on a new CMS. It all pretty much depends on how much time we can volunteer for this – it is mostly handled by a few people in the coreteam. Pat should focus on Slackware and make sure we get a new stable release at some point – there is a lot to do still on that front.

And then about my own packaging activities.

There was a new release of LibreOffice yesterday, and I am currently building packages for that. If there are no issues with the build then you can expect those packages tomorrow.

KDE release team is in the process of releasing the first beta of KDE SC 4.9, and I intend to make packages for that. There was a heated discussion about this beta when the new release manager announced he was going to call off the beta1 release… but all issues have been resolved yesterday and new tarballs are going to be made available ahead of time to the packagers. There are quite a few changes compared to KDE 4.8.x so it will cost me a while to work out the updates to the KDE.SlackBuild framework.

I also hope that VLC releases their version 2.0.2 soon. It has been lingering just around the corner for a while, but a recent fall-out between several of the core developers threatened the whole project’s existence when their most important Linux developer quit the team out of frustration. That animosity has now subsided, the team is whole again, and development is progressing toward a new release.

I also want to thank the kind people who donated a few bucks after all the upheavals about the Slackware webserver’s outage. Although I work on Slackware in my spare time, because I like it, it’s my main hobby so to speak, getting some funds enabled me to buy a new and faster build box last year, and now I ordered a Raspberry-Pi (finally…) and I am also looking for a good tablet which allows the installation of a different OS than only Android… so that I can put my unfinished port of Slackware to modern ARM architectures on it and finally release that. A release does not make sense if it runs on only one device (the Trim Slice). Perhaps I will buy some more ARM hardware too. Even Pat was becoming excited about this ARM port.

Eric

LibreOffice 3.5.3

May 4, 2012 / / 32 Comments

I just uploaded packages (targeting Slackware 13.37 and newer) for the latest maintenance release of LibreOffice. Check out the announcement for 3.5.3: “LibreOffice 3.5.3 provides additional stability to corporate and individual users…”.

If you want to compile this yourself, then remember what I said in my post about the 3.5.2 release: “update … Slackware 13.37 with all the patches which were released by Pat. This includes a spiced-up version of Seamonkey“. All you need to install additionally are packages for Apache Ant and the Archive:Zip Perl module. None of this is necessary if you just want to use my package for LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Math (Formula)

In comments to the LO 3.5.2 blog article, both ngc891 and Willy Sudiarto Raharjo informed me that the LibreOffice Math program did not work in my 3.5.2 packages. If you tried to run “lomath” or “libreoffice–math”, then the Writer would start instead. I looked into this, and found out that several older versions of my LibreOffice packages also did not contain a working LibreOffice Math! I dissected my package and compared it to other distro’s packages. That is how I discovered that my packages were missing one critical file, which (for unknown reasons) is not getting installed by the “make install” routine. Therefore I added a check in the SlackBuild script which copies that “math.xcd” file into the package if it appears to be missing. And now, it works! In the LibreOffice main window, the “Formula” button is no longer greyed-out.

You can find the packages for Slackware 13.37 (and -current) in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer rsync access):

One word of caution!

I wrote this in my previous post as well, but if you did not upgrade from 3.4 yet and this is the first time you are going to upgrade to a 3.5 release, it is important that you follow these instructions first in order to keep your existing configuration, customization and extensions.

Between 3.4.x and 3.5.0, LibreOffice changed the location of its configuration directory (again). Originally using ~/.ooo (a heritage from OpenOffice.org) it switched to ~/.libreoffice which will probably be where you will find your custom settings stored. The 3.5 releases however, use ~/.config/libreoffice . The best thing to do is move your current configuration directory to the new location, so that LibreOffice keeps working as expected:

$ mv ~/.libreoffice ~/.config/libreoffice

If you had already started the new LibreOffice program and noticed that you seem to have lost all your configuration settings, then you will have to stop LibreOffice, delete the fresh and almost empty ~/.config/libreoffice directory and then perform the directory move as shown above.

Cheers, Eric

LibreOffice 3.5.0 is out… no Slack packages yet

February 19, 2012 / / 12 Comments

Last week, the Document Foundation released version 3.5.0 of their LibreOffice suite.

Read all about it in their official announcement “the best free office suite ever“. LibreOffice has made great strides ever since it was forked off OpenOffice. On LinuxQuestions.org, which hosts my favourite Slackware forum, LibreOffice was chosen by its member community as Office Suite of the Year (with 81.01% of the votes). Bravo!

Of course, I wanted to have Slackware packages ready ASAP. Silly me… the developers are changing the build process with each new release cycle. The 3.3 -> 3.4 switch gave me headaches and 3.4 -> 3.5 is no different. In fact, it is even worse. The build system is moving toward using standard autoconf/automake/make tooling, and piece-by-piece getting rid of java/dmake for its compilation. This means, I had to revise my libreoffice.SlackBuild script again.

Unfortunately I did not have the chance (due to time constraints) to test beta builds, so now that the release is there, I am faced with an inability to compile new packages…

I have been running compilations for days, breaking off after 12+ hours repeatedly, and currently I can’t even get past the “configure” stage… being stuck at a horribly broken SlackBuild script.

No doubt I will eventually succeed, and present you some nice packages, but not soon. Terribly sorry, but I thought I would at least let you know.

In the meantime, I did manage to build VLC packages (which you can read all about in my previous post) and soon some new QEMU and qemu-kvm packages. A lot of my time is currently spent on a new ARM port of Slackware. I hope to write some more about that too, in the near future.

Cheers, Eric

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