Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: libreoffice (Page 18 of 20)

LibreOffice 3.4.1 … almost production-ready

July 6, 2011 / / 5 Comments

Inbetween moving my office to another building (no not at home… at the customer site where I work as helpdesk controller / 3rd line UNIX support person and whatnot) my server has been compiling new LibreOffice packages for Slackware 13.37. A little while ago you could get my “stable” version 3.3.3 packages and today it is time for the “unstable” version 3.4.1. The LibreOffice developers expect that the next release (3.4.2) will be stable enough that it can be called “production-ready” so that 3.4 can finally replace 3.3 on the average user’s desktop. Remember that libreoffice-3.4 is a major move away from the old SUN/Oracle OpenOffice.org codebase with a lot of enhancements and cleanups – hence it took a while to get the new/polished code in a decent state.

As always, the primary location for my packages is at the slackware URL: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

Otherwise (and because they have bigger download speeds to offer), use one of the mirrors like:

and grab those packages (the mirrors may take a little while to get updated).

The 3.4.1 release’s announcement page states that it “can be safely deployed for production needs by most users” but adds the warning “Large enterprises deploying LibreOffice on desktop PCs, are still recommended to deploy LibreOffice 3.3.3“. The page sports a nice timeline showing that a new 3.3.x version should appear only after the release of 3.4.2. So take your pick… I guess that you should be safe with 3.4.1.

However, if the LO folks will declare the upcoming 3.4.2 as “unfit for the enterprise” then it is likely that I will compile one more set of LibreOffice 3.3.x packages – and on Slackware 13.1.

Have fun!
Eric

Libreoffice 3.3.3 versus 3.4.0

June 26, 2011 / / 3 Comments

I uploaded Slackware packages for LibreOffice 3.3.3 last week but never mentioned that on my blog.

As promised earlier, I will try to keep building packages of the 3.3 series on Slackware 13.1 for as long as the libreoffice-3.4.x series is considered “experimental” or “unstable”.

It looks from what I saw in the #libreoffice IRC channel that it we will have to wait at least until 3.4.2 to see a “stable” release in the 3.4 series. So there you have it… my libreoffice-3.3.3 packages, built on Slackware 13.1 but they should work on Slackware 13.37 too. If you run into compatibility issues on Slackware 13.37 please let me know!

Get them at any of the following sites (and look in the “13.1” directories, not the “13.37” directories!):

If you feel adventurous and are running Slackware 13.37, you could use my libreoffice-3.4.0 packages. I heard about some crashes of 3.4.0 (mainly in calc) which possibly relate to the cached extensions in your ~/.libreoffice directory. If you experience bad behaviour of LibreOffice, try removing the “tmp” directory below “~/.libreoffice/3/user/extensions/” and if that is not doing it, also remove the “shared” and “bundled” directories you find there.

Eric

Libreoffice 3.4.0

June 5, 2011 / / 22 Comments

As I already announced in my previous article, I have been building LibreOffice packages for Slackware 13.37 (I have been running beta versions on my own laptop for a while which I never released) and they are finally available for download now!

Check out this URL: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

Otherwise (and because they have bigger download speeds to offer), use one of the mirrors like:

and grab those packages (the mirrors may take a little while to get updated).

The release’s announcement page states that “The first release of the 3.4 series, LibreOffice 3.4.0, is targeted to community members and power users, and should not be implemented in a corporate environment“. That does not mean a lot to folk like us – we are the power users. Try it out, you can always revert to my 3.3.x packages. My stance on the “stable versions” is that I will keep compiling LibreOffice 3.3.x packages for a while, but on Slackware 13.1. That should keep a lot of people happy if they require a stable version of this office suite.

Have fun!
Eric

What’s cooking?

June 3, 2011 / / 71 Comments

Hi Folks

You surely noticed a bit of silence on this blog. Well, there was not much to say – I am not the twittering kind of guy who updates his readers where he’ll go out every night… I think I can lift the lid a little anyway.

I have been working on several larger packaging projects during the past weeks. LibreOffice is the one that took most of my time unfortunately. The new release 3.4.0 has been announced today, and that means I can finally test my revised SlackBuild script when building Slackware packages for you. My old way of compiling LibreOffice no longer works! It has been “deprecated” by the developers, which is a shame because it forces me to do a lot more work. Anyway, expect packages for Slackware 13.37 sometime this weekend.

I will probably not create Slackware 13.1 packages for this new LibreOffice release. What I do consider is to build the upcoming maintenance release for LibreOffice 3.3 (which will be 3.3.3) for Slackware 13.1.

KDE. How to begin? There are some stirrings in the KDE camp.

We are nearing the end of the KDE 4.6 series. Two more updates will see the light: 4.6.4 should be available in a few days and 4.6.5 is the final update, expected in early july. But considering the fact that the previous 4.6.3 experienced delays, it may take a little longer before I can start on packaging 4.6.4.

The new series 4.7.x proves to be a bigger challenge for Slackware. We saw that the 4.6. series moved away from HAL and instead requires udisks/upower (which was the reason for sticking with 4.5.5 in Slackware 13.37). The KDE developers have now finalized their move from CVS to GIT as the source control and version management system. The result is less than optimally arranged for packagers. The old “monolithic” source tarballs are now being split into many additional tarballs for individual applications. This means we have rewrite our scripts and possibly add a lot of packages. While this may be advantageous for some other distros with dedicated packaging teams, for us Slackware people it is a time for decisions.

After talking to Pat Volkerding, I announced on the KDE packager mailing list that we are considering the same solution as was chosen for GNOME in the past: remove KDE from Slackware if it proves to become a maintenance burden. I can not yet say anything final about this. For the time being, I have decided not to create Slackware packages for the KDE Software Compilation 4.7.x.

And then VLC…I have been waiting for a 1.2 release for so long that I almost do not believe it will ever arrive. I have a SlackBuild for it, but I will likely wait a bit longer before releasing a package for ths development version of VLC media player. It appears like there is a 1.1.10 release around the corner which is what I’ll build for Slackware 13.1 as well as 13.37.

Looking ahead, I think that creating VLC versions for Android is going to be considered more important. There is a whole new audience there, and I may very well be one of its users. There is also the fact that the developer team is almost always short of smart and motivated people. This showed last year when it was almost impossible to release a MS Windows version. Jean-Baptiste Kempf feels responsible for this so he made it happen, but I doubt that it is making him very happy.

And finally, Calibre E-book Management. This piece of software is indispensible if you are in the possession of an E-reader. Calibre manages your e-book collection, converts e-books between various formats (interesting for you Kindle users out there!) and allows you to upload books to your E-reader device. Calibre usually works a lot better than the software you get with your E-reader. And  since I am buying a Sony PRS650 for my wife I needed to have a working verison of Calibre for my Slackware box.

I have a Slackware package for Calibre in my repository but I have not been able to update it for a while, because it requires python 2.7. Unfortunately, Slackware 13.37 is still at python version 2.6.6. So I spent a lot of time to find a way around this and decided to take the same approach as with VLC and FFMPEG: that is, to compile all the requirements into the package itself and not depend on Slackware. I think I have succeeded in this, and am currently testing the results. Stay tuned…

Happy hacking! Eric

New libreoffice, vlc packages for your Slackware

March 24, 2011 / / 21 Comments

Yummy food for your hungry Slackware boxen!

* VLC 1.1.8 available

Another minor release in the 1.1 series, version 1.1.8 saw the light yesterday. Bugfixes and updates for the translations are its main features, but several small enhancements were made to the codec modules.

New encoders for dirac video (now using the schroedinger implementation) and webm /vp8 were added but to be honest, I have not looked at those since I rarely encode audio or video. Feedback welcome of course!

Noteworthy is the fact that VideoLAN celebrated its 10th birthday of going open source this february – the software was initially developed as a french student project under a closed-source license. Hilarious promotional video there… typical french humour?

Get the Slackware packages here (built on Slackware 13.1, will work on later versions too):

The “US restrictions” are ludricous crap, but there you go… otherwise I would not be able to host the packages on the slackware.com server. Of course, mp3 and aac decoding is not a problem at all.

And for you KDE 4.6 users, remember having this problem with the “Media > Open” file browser dialog box taking 30 seconds to appear, that issue has been resolved. The fix was applied on the KDE side (it was gone with KDE 4.6.1) but I thought I’d mention it here regardless because it was a nuisance. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260719 for a nice discussion between KDE and VLC developers. Interesting to read on https://bugs.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/+bug/708527 is, that while we do not have this bug anymore in Slackware’s KDE 4.6.1 (well, my own KDE 4.6.1 for Slackware 13.37 to be precise), it appears that Kubuntu’s KDE 4.6.1 still suffers from it…

* LibreOffice 3.3.2 … wow that was fast!

The LibreOffice development really shows the power of collaboration. Little over a month after their previous “micro release” 3.3.1, here we have 3.3.2 already. It shows plainly that LibreOffice is diverging fast from its origin OpenOffice.org. How is that possible? Well, the most obvious reason is the growth in numbers of developers. What was impossible while SUN and later Oracle held the reigns, is now showing its worth: people are contributing code, and with more people starting to dig at the deeper levels of code, this momentum of development will only accelerate.

Specific highlights for the 3.3.2 release are the code cleanups: german-only comments have been replaced and no longer used code has been removed. If the schedule is not slipping we’ll see the big release 3.4.0 in May. This is supposedly the release that is going to make the large step away from OpenOffice.org.

I created some Slackware packages for you (built on Slackware 13.1, works on Slackware 13.37 too). Using the new LibreOffice menu icons instead of the old OpenOffice seagull logos, its looking prettier even! I added a dictionary to the italian language pack, but other than that I did not diverge from the way I built the previous 3.3.1 packages.

One word about the dictionaries (which I included for en-GB, en-US, es, fr, it, nl language packs): they are installed as “shared dictionaries” i.e. they will show up in your extension manager as locked and unchangeable. You can still install your own dictionary on top of that, if you find one that is more advanced or better suited to your work. This personal version will be installed into your ~/.ooo3 user directory and will have preference over the shared version.

Get packages here:

Enjoy!  And tell me if you like these packages (or if you see room for improvement).

Eric

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