Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: openoffice (Page 2 of 2)

LibreOffice 4.2.4 came along

May 13, 2014 / / 4 Comments

After I had built the new KDE, I discovered that there is also a new release of LibreOffice. The LibreOffice 4.2.4 announcement (codenamed ‘Fresh’) states that the new release “is suited for early adopters willing to leverage a larger number of innovations. For enterprise deployments and for more conservative users, The Document Foundation suggests the more mature LibreOffice 4.1.6“. Damn… I only have 4.1.5 packages  in my repository under the “14.0”directory – built on Slackware 14.0 and working well on Slackware 14.1 and -current. I will have to build 4.1.6 at some point and make all you conservatives happy.

Back to the 4.2.4 release now:

Packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are ready for download from the usual mirror locations:

Note that if you are on KDE and simply “upgradepkg” the libreoffice package, your application may suddenly look very out of style, having switched to a GTK look & feel. All you need to do is “installpkg” the new libreoffice-kde-integration package (I split the KDE support out of the big LO package and into its own separate package for LO 4.2.3, so it’s possible that you already have it).

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).

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

Newer posts »

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑