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Tag: libreoffice (Page 19 of 20)

LibreOffice 3.3.1 packages

March 2, 2011 / / 9 Comments

Right…

So I finally built my Slackware packages for LibreOffice 3.3.1. It took way too long, but I hope you like the result. A lot of additional language packs are available this time.

One thing I had overlooked was that the new LibreOffice branded icons were not installed by default, so my package is still using the old OpenOffice.org branded icons. Next time, the old icons will have been replaced with appropriate new icons, I promise! Thanks to David for noticing and reporting that omission.

Get the packages here:

For completeness’ sake: my own packages are built from source, on a Slackware computer. There is another way to get LibreOffice installed and that is to take the official pre-compiled binaries (unfortunately only available as RPM packages) and use the SlackBuild script at http://slackbuilds.org/ to extract the goodies from these RPMs and create useful Slackware packages out of them. Which of the packages you use is a matter of preference. The RPMs are not built on a Slackware box but they are guaranteed to work… probably on older versions than Slackware 13.1 too.

Cheers, Eric

Compiling libreoffice, a bumpy ride

March 1, 2011 / / 7 Comments

A new version of LibreOffice was released last week: 3.3.1. This is the first release where divergence from the old OpenOffice.org may become apparent.

Of course I wanted to build Slackware packages for it but being audacious, I decided to make some expansions to the SlackBuild script in order to achieve the following:

  • include more extensions by default
  • include dictionaries for some of the major world languages (US and UK english, french, german, spanish, dutch)
  • add more language packs!

I just did not think it would cost me 6 days of work to get the bugger to compile correctly… I needed to hunt down several patches, and find out how to apply patches at all in the build phase of LibreOffice. At this moment I have the 64bit packages ready and installed on my desktop machine, and that runs smoothly… but the 32bit build keeps throwing errors at me. Go figure.

I think I finally found how to fix this, unfortunately it takes 5 hours of compiling in my virtual machine to experience the error… or not. Hence the large delay in producing working packages.

One side effect of fixing the build process is that the new package again wants to use ~/.ooo3 as the preferences directory, instead of using ~/.libreoffice like my previous version of the LibreOffice package.  People that get fed up with the alternating use of these two directories can just remove the ~/.ooo3 directory and instead create a symlink to ~/.libreoffice/3 in your homedirectory (or the other way round of course, depending on what directory you like more):

$ ln -sf .libreoffice/3 .ooo3

I do hope and anticipate that I can present a complete set of LibreOffice 3.3.1 packages for your Slackware powered computer tomorrow… keep your fingers crossed.

Cheers, Eric

Libre Office 3.3.0-rc3

January 15, 2011 / / 13 Comments

Here they are: packages for the third release candidate of the upcoming LibreOffice 3.3.0.

They have been compiled from source, as opposed to repackaging RPM files. These packages are native Slackware stuff. If you are running Slackware with a non-english localization, you can additionally install an appropriate language pack. No dictionaries are included, get a dictionary for your language at http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/dictionaries .

You can find the Slackware LibreOffice package and language packs – and associated build scripts – at the usual locations:

The package has no further dependencies – a full Slackware 13.1 install (or -current) is all.

Search for the previous posts that I wrote on this blog about LibreOffice if you are interested in building these from the sources yourself… it is not a trivial task.

Eric

Update 15-jan-2011:

  • If your extension manager refuses to start, or the list of installed extensions is empty, and you are unable to install any new extensions, then try removing the (likely corrupted) extensions database – they will be re-created when you start a Libreoffice application the next time:

$ rm -r ~/.libreoffice/3/user/extensions

  • If you notice that your LibreOffice menu entries no longer work and you are even missing the LibreOffice Writer menu entry, then you should upgrade to my re-built packages for version 3.3.0.3 (they have “2alien” as the build number). The menu entries in the first build were broken because the LibreOffice program names have changed between RC2 and RC3 (“oowriter” has been renamed to “lowriter” and so on).

Libreoffice second release candidate for 3.3.0

December 28, 2010 / / 11 Comments

It took me a while (Christmas was getting in the way) but here are the packages I created for libreoffice-3.3.0.2; which is the second Release Candidate for LibreOffice in preparation for an official 3.3.0 version.

Grab my packages from the usual locations:

The package has no further dependencies – a full Slackware 13.1 install (or -current) will do fine.

Building from source:

If you want to use the accompanying SlackBuild script to rebuild these packages yourself, be prepared and have a lot of free diskspace (20 GB available free space would be a safe bet), as well as a lot of patience… Also, remove Slackware’s jre, seamonkey and seamonkey-solibs packages and install Slackware’s jdk package and (mine or anyone else’s) apache-ant, perl-archive-zip and xulrunner packages. These are needed for compiling, not for running libreoffice. Note: after installing the jdk and xulrunner packages, your root user has to logoff and login again in order to pick up the changed environment. If you forget this, the compilation will fail.

Observations:

I have been testing alternating re-installs of the binary RPMs of the Document Foundation (using Niels Horn’s SlackBuild from slackbuilds.org to create a nice Slackware package out of those RPMs) and my own self-built package and I noticed that the first time you run a LibreOffice program after you install my package, something crashes… but everything is OK on all following runs of LibreOffice.

I also noticed that installing extensions is not always working out too well. This holds true for the official binaries as well, so it may well be that the published extensions need to be rebuilt for the new LibreOffice.

Unfortunately in the end, I had to delete the extensions cache and further directories (below ~/.libreoffice/3/user/extensions) because at first, the bundled extensions stopped showing up in the Extension Manager, then the Extension Manager refused to start, and ultimately the Writer application itself would crash after complaining about corrupted extension databases. After deleting the extension cache and data, Writer behaved normally again.

Eric

First release candidate for LibreOffice

December 8, 2010 / / 10 Comments

Those developers at the Document Foundation are coding like madmen!

The first release candidate of the Libre Office suite of programs has seen the light of day. And of course I put my computer to work, and the result is a series of Slackware 13.1 packages for 32-bit and 64-bit LibreOffice, including a bunch of language packs. Please tell me if your language is missing.

Get the packages here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ or from one of my mirrors: http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ and http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ . Both mirrors have rsync access.

Please note:

If you want to use my libreoffice.SlackBuild to compile these packages yourself, the script will first download an additional 200 MB of external source tarballs before commencing with the compilation. I decided not to store all these sources in my own build directory, in order to minimize the load on the server.

Enjoy, Eric

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