Tag: openoffice.org

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:

• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ or
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

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

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:

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (fast mirror)

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

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