Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: libreoffice (Page 17 of 20)

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

LibreOffice 3.4.5 released, OpenJDK package update.

January 18, 2012 / / 32 Comments

There was a new maintenance release from the Document Foundation. We now have LibreOffice 3.4.5 and I spent the night (or rather, two virtual machines did the work while I slept) to produce packages for Slackware 13.37 and later.

You can find the packages in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer  rsync access):

Also I rebuilt my OpenJDK packages (JDK as well as JRE and the browser plugin icedtea-web) to address the issues that had popped up in the comments section of my previous post:

  • The java web start (javaws, part of the “icedtea-web” package) would not work with just openjre installed – it worked fine with openjdk;
  • The openjre pakage missed two important configfiles which made it unusable,
  • The CA certificates file was empty in both JDK and JRE packages

Download locations for the updated packages: http://slackware.com/~alien/openjdk/ with a mirror here: http://alien.slackbook.org/slackware/openjdk/ . Please note that there is an updated (with regard to Slackware’s stock version) of ca-certificates. I needed that to generate a “cacerts” file for the openjdk and openjre package, but for you the upgrade is optional. You’ll see it appear in slackware-current soon enough anyway because the upgrade is well overdue.

Cheers, Eric

Fixes for LibreOffice in KDE

November 26, 2011 / / 7 Comments

Those of you who use KDE as their desktop environment and also use my LibreOffice packages, will know that there are two major annoyances, related to KDE’s theming engine but ultimately caused by bugs in LibreOffice.

Those annoyances are:

  • Tooltips in LO applications show up as black text on black background, effectively rendering them useless. You can fix that by changing the color of Tooltips in “System Settings > Application Appearance > Colors” and then in the tab called “colors” look for “Tooltip background” and change that to some lighter color. But that changes the behaviour of every tooltip in other applications as well, so this should really be fixed in LibreOffice.
  • When using KDE’s Oxygen window decorations, all LO applications will have a non-functional horizontal scrollbar – you can not grab hold of it or move it left-right with your mouse.

Two patches which I found in OpenSuse were needed to fix both these annoyances. I rebuilt my LibreOffice packages for Slackware after applying them. Get them if you were annoyed by these issues just like me.

Note that the mirror sites also offer rsync access as well as faster download speeds. Only taper.alienbase.nl and alien.slackbook.org are up to date at this moment (because I maintain those myself) but the other mirrors should pick up the updates automatically soon enough.

Eric

LibreOffice 3.4.4

November 11, 2011 / / 14 Comments

 Just released: Libreoffice 3.4.4. Please read the official announcement which tells us that “This is the fourth update to the stable version of LibreOffice. It contains only safe code fixes and translation updates, and is considered safe for production use“.

 

I have created some packages for you. Like the last time, there is the big “libreoffice” package containing all the modules and extensions, as well as US english language support (including a dictionary). Then there is the “libreoffice-mozplugin” package for those who want to be able to embed Office documents in their (Mozilla-compatible) browser window. And finally there are many language packs, containing the translated menus and help texts. Some of the language packs contain dictionaries too (german, british english, spanish, french, italian, dutch and  polish). You can of course download your own dictionary or other extensions at http://extensions.libreoffice.org/

I am contemplating another split-off. The KDE integration support is nice but has one glaring bug which has been around for ever and does not stand a big chance of getting fixed soon. Try moving the horizontal slider in a Calc spreadsheet when you are running KDE… your mouse will not be able to do it. It is trivial to split the four KDE support files into a separate package which allows you the choice of not installing it. I hesitate, because I want to keep the total amount of packages “small” (relative term, looking at all those language packs). I would only do this to alleviate the pain of KDE users. Do not think you can persuade me to split-off other things like extensions or the core components! Not going to happen.

Get the packages in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer  rsync access):

Cheers, Eric

 

Libreoffice 3.4.3

September 2, 2011 / / 18 Comments

A few days ago the Document Foundation  released their newest version of the LibreOffice open source production suite. Version 3.4.3 is now also available in Slackware package format, the packages I built for you are available here (it’s better if you try the mirrors, they should be a lot faster):

 

Note that all mirrors also have rsync available (not the slackware.com server though).

Mostly this is a maintenance release, however I made one change to the packages: I have split off the mozilla-compatible browser plugin into a separate package “libreoffice-mozplugin”. A few users of my packages reported that this plugin caused LibreOffice to start whenever they would close their Firefox browser. If you use upgradepkg to upgrade your installed libreoffice to my version 3.4.3 package, the old plugin will be automatically be removed (therefore it is recommended that you close your firefox when you upgrade to this new version of LibreOffice).

You have to use installpkg to also install the new libreoffice-mozplugin package.

Have fun! Eric

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