Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: OOo (Page 10 of 11)

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

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

Get it: LibreOffice 3.3.0

January 26, 2011 / / 12 Comments

This was an intense ride.

Ever since the community around OpenOffice.org decided to free this productivity suite from its new guardian Oracle, it was clear that working together is the true driving force behind innovation. The continued development of the same software but with a new name “LibreOffice” took several leaps and bounds by incorporating the enhancements developed independently under the name of “go-oo” and other offshoots. The addition of these enhancements had been withheld for a long time by its previous guardian SUN.

Don’t forget: this software has a long and fruitful history. Being open sourced by Sun was the highly appreciated move that gave “us”, free software lovers, an office suite that could match (or at least aspired to match) with the dominant Microsoft Office. At that time, it felt like an arrow driven right into the heart of Microsoft. Their own Office suite is (was?) their cash cow, it’s what drives their profit. I can do nothing else but applaud Sun for assimilating and then freeing StarOffice. Alas… Sun is gone… but their legacy lives on.

So what is worth mentioning in this first stable release of the LibreOffice productivity suite?

I think the basic support for OOXML document format (Microsoft’s sort-of ISO standard which they pitched against the truely open OpenDocument Format ODF) is what will draw a lot of people to LibreOffice, because it is able to write to this document format – a feature that is not supported by OpenOffice.Org (it supports reading/converting this format only). So, LibreOffice might be better equipped to let you deal with friends, collegues and customers who want to share their Microsoft Office (version 2007, not the newer 2010 OOXML format) documents with you. LibreOffice does not have difficulties with VBA script in your documents either. The older Microsoft Office, Lotus WordPro and Microft Works file formats are supported as well. Even PDF import is built-in.

LibreOffice Draw can import and edit SVG files. That is a feature I still have to test, since I am used to Karbon14.

What can I say? It is a professional productivity suite that I would recommend to anyone.

Now, you want to install this LibreOffice on your Slackware box, right?

Just a wee bit of patience then: I would like to add that the “stable release” 3.3.0 is bit-for-bit identical to the last (fourth) release candidate that was published a few days earlier. The source taballs have remained the same, and still bear the old version number 3.3.0.4. The official binaries have been renamed, is all.

But I have recompiled the Slackware package nevertheless, because I intended to add some extra language packs: cs (Czech), el (Greek), en_GB (UK English), he (Hebrew), hr (Croatian), pa (Punjabi), uk (Ukrainian), ur (Urdu) and zh_TW (Traditional Chinese?). What I did not do, even though I mentioned I wanted to, is to add dictionaries (spell-checkers) for some of the major world languages. It took too long to figure out how to package and install them properly so I reserve that as an exercise for later.

Go get the packages!

There is an rsync access as well:

  • rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

Be productive!

Eric

Release Candidate Four of LibreOffice 3.3.0

January 22, 2011 / / 19 Comments

It looks like Oracle is trying to rush their OpenOffice 3.3.0 ahead of the LibreOffice fork. Yesterday I thought there was actually going to be a stable release but no, it was only their tenth release candidate. Do we really care?

Anyway, there is a fourth release candidate available now of LibreOffice. Obviously I built some cool packages for Slackware. An official  LibreOffice 3.3.0 is not far off, and what we already have in this Release Candidate looks really good.

I want to stress again: my packages have been compiled from source, as opposed to repackaging the official RPM files. My packages are native Slackware stuff. Language packs for a lot of non-english locales are available – anyone miss their own language here?

Get a dictionary for your language at http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/dictionaries . I would like to have feedback about including dictionaries for some of the major languages in the build.

My Slackware LibreOffice package and language packs – and associated build scripts – can be downloaded from the usual locations (it may take a little while for the UK mirror to be updated):

There is an rsync access as well:

  • rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

I am running LibreOffice on Slackware 13.1 as well as -current without issues. Read my older blog posts for my experiences with LibreOffice, and tips on compiling it from source.

Have fun, 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).
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