My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: OOo (Page 9 of 11)

LibreOffice 3.6.7 (last in series) packaged for Slackware 13.37

I thought that with 3.6.6 the LibreOffice developers had released the last update in the 3.6 series. However, there is yet another release. and it looks like 3.6.7 is really going to be the final incremental release. LibreOffice 3.6.7 is a bugfix release (changes in 3.6.7.1 and 3.6.7.2) which was added to the release schedule in a late stage. This means end-of-life for the 3.6 series and everybody is encouraged to migrate to the stable 4.0 series.

These LibreOffice 3.6.7 packages which I am making available have been built on Slackware 13.37. They can be installed on Slackware 14 as well, but of course I have LibreOffice 4.0.4 packages (32bit, 64bit) in my repository for Slackware 14 and -current. Perhaps it is time for you to upgrade your Slackware along with LibreOffice in a little while, if you are still running 13.37? The new Slackware 14.1 should not be too far off.

The LibreOffice 3.6.7 packages are available here:

Eric

LibreOffice 3.5.5 released – just before 3.6.0

I realize that LibreOffice 3.6.0 is almost upon us, but I think that a stable office suite is more important than the latest release. So, I uploaded a set of LibreOffice packages (targeting Slackware 13.37 and newer). The new maintenance release of LibreOffice is characterized with “improvements in … compatibility to third-party formats” apart from the usual bux fixes of course.

As usual, there is the main (big) libreoffice package accompanied by a lot of language packs and the libreoffice-mozplugin for embedding documents in your mozilla-compatible webbrowser.

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:

Good luck with the packages! I will not do a 3.6.0 version but wait for the first bugfix release of that new cycle.

Cheers, Eric

LibreOffice 3.5.3

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

Fixes for LibreOffice in KDE

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

 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

 

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