At the end of January, The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 6.0, a new major release for their office suite that includes so many new and interesting features:

• Support for OpenPGP to digitally sign documents
• Better interoperability on OOXML formats
• New ePUB export and QuarkXPress import support
• New online HELP system
• Default slide size has been switched to 16:9
• New template for Impress
• New form menu to create PDF forms
• Enhanced find toolbar
• More 1.2 ODF-compliant functions
• Cell range export to PNG/JPG
• Better NotebookBar
• Improved MailMerge functions
• New splash screen

For more detailed changes, please refer to the Release Notes or watch the video:

At this moment, i have pushed the changes for SBo and it will be part of the next public update, which will be this weekend.

Shortly after the big change, some users spotted some problem when using the newly generated ISO based on  the latest update. Pat quickly released a fix, including introducing 2 new packages: lilo-24.1 and util-linux-2.26 which should have better functionality and also fixed some problems with date time in Slackware as mentioned in several threads in LQ (part 1, part 2, and part 3).

If you are KDE fans, you might be delighted that Eric has pushed his latest KDE 5 updates to his KTown repository. It's tagged 5_15.02 and it consists of KDE Frameworks 5.7.0, KDE Applications 14.12.2, and Plasma 5.2.0. He also pushed some updates in extragears. Please read the README for instructions on how to install and upgrade to this version. It requires some spesific steps for this version, so please take some time to read it before blindly upgrading your systems. Remember that this packages are meant for Slackware-Current users only.

Not only KDE 5, Eric also managed to push LibreOffice 4.4.0 update as well. This is a major version and it includes lots of new goodies. For complete reference, please refer to the Release Notes.

I have been quite busy lately, especially during this week, so sorry for the delay of the article and i'll just make a recap of it.

Eric Hameleers has completed building LibreOffice 4.3.5 package for Slackware-Current (and 14.1) users and upload it on his repository which is mirrored through several mirror sites. This version fixes 70 bugs compared to the previous version.

As always, you can grab the source and binary packages on this mirror sites:

• http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-libreoffice/
• http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

 A little note on this:

Reminder to all of you who also have my KDE 5 packages installed: do not use the updated harfbuzz from my ‘ktown‘ repository because it will break LibreOffice. If you are using Mario’s slackpkg+ extension to slackpkg then you can configure it so that Slackware’s own harfbuzz package is preferred over the version which accompanies my KDE 5 packages. See this LQ thread for the details.

You can also use LibreOffice from SBo repository along with it's helppack and langpack which uses a different ways of creating the binary output. It uses RPM binaries from upstream developers, while Eric build it from source.

After upgrading to the latest XOrg updates, i got some problem when using LibreOffice Impress. It won't start the slide show. More precisely, it displays a transparent slide show, so you see the main application on your screen instead of your presentation showed in full screen

After searching for some bug reports, it seems that the new cairo is probably the culprit. Until the problem has been fixed, you can fix it by using this simple step:
Tools->options->LibreOffice->view, uncheck "Use hardware acceleration"

LibreOffice 3.6.5, the latest release for 3.x branch has been officially released by The Document Foundation. This release fixed like 50 bugs mentioned on their Release Notes.

Since it's a maintenance release, no new feature are neing implemented. Those new features will be implemented in the next major release of LibreOffice, LibreOffice 4.0, which is now being developed and planned to be released in early February.

We still don't have LibreOffice package for Slackware as Eric is still regaining his strength again, but i believe he will make the package soon enough after he has recovered.

For those who wanted a stable application should stick to LibreOffice 3.6.5 and for those who wanted to try new features, you can start migrating to LibreOffice 4.0 when it's released. Enterprise users are suggested to wait until LibreOffice 4.0.2 before attempting to migrate to version 4.0.

Update : Eric has recovered, and uploaded his build of LibreOffice. Go get them on the usuall repository

OpenOffice is now owned by Oracle. The development team of previous OpenOffice reformed and developed LibreOffice for the replacement. You can use LibreOffice as the alternative. LibreOffice is faster and more powerful.



Be keep in mind that OpenOffice will be uninstalled automatically when you install LibreOffice.



Step 1 :



sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa



sudo apt-get update



Step 2 :



sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gtk libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-pdfimport libreoffice-officebean libreoffice-ogltrans libreoffice-wiki-publisher libreoffice-core libreoffice-mysql-connector libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-style-andromeda libreoffice-calc libreoffice-draw libreoffice-impress libreoffice-writer libreoffice-math libreoffice-common libreoffice-emailmerge libreoffice-l10n-common libreoffice-dtd-officedocument1.0 libreoffice-report-builder-bin libreoffice-style-hicontrast libreoffice-base libreoffice-java-common libreoffice-style-galaxy libreoffice-report-builder ttf-opensymbol libreoffice-presentation-minimizer libreoffice-style-crystal libreoffice-style-oxygen libreoffice-filter-mobiledev mozilla-libreoffice libreoffice-style-human libreoffice-style-tango python-uno ure uno-libs3 libreoffice-help-en-us



Step 3 : (Optional)



The following will install Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.



sudo apt-get install libreoffice-l10n-zh-cn libreoffice-l10n-zh-tw libreoffice-help-zh-cn libreoffice-help-zh-tw



Step 4 : (Optional)



If you are using Kubuntu, install the following instead of libreoffice-gnome and libreoffice-gtk.



sudo apt-get install libreoffice-kde



That's all! See you.