LibreOffice

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/LibreOffice-a-community-fork-for-OpenOffice-org-1097443.html

I think it's good news!

 

They should rethink the whole OpenOffice concept, instead of continue developing the perennial second-best MS Office.

 

I just hope the fork is not going to fragment the skills and focuses of developers, on the other side having a super partes organism like FSF taking control of Open Office project is a good new!

 

I'm sorry to say this but again I see here another comedy branded Open Source.

 

LibreOffice RC1 arrives

PortableApps.com is also working on a release

 

LibreOffice RC2 is available.

I downloaded the Windows version from the Document Foundation last night. It weighed in at ~210 MB and after installation takes up ~438 MB.

One issue is that the "Record Macro" option is grayed out. If someone uses that a lot, it's better to wait! Fortunately, it accepted the macros already existing in my OpenOffice.org 3.2 Calc spreadsheet though I had to assign shortcut keys again (because I had associated the macros with the document and not with the program).

Overall, it is not much different from OpenOffice.org though its "chrome" looks slightly less polished, IMO, but that's a triviality.

 

Does anyone at all use this?
The English section over here is pretty dead.

I don't know of any other forum dedicated to LibreOffice as yet.

Anyway, I brought down the post-install size from ~438 MB to ~286 MB since I have no intention of being a translator for the UN. I tossed a bunch of languages, dictionaries, and sounds, among other things. I wish this was possible at the time of download.

 

Well, I do. Anyway, I wonder, why they do not join GoOO project, since it includes patches, that have been refused by Sun Microsystems, it has the same idea like LO, no?!

EDIT: Nevermind, I just visited their webpage and look, what I have found:

 

LibreOffice portable is here!
http://portableapps.com/news/2011-01-27_-_libreoffice_portable_3.3_released

And the link is hard to get right now! Will try after things calm down. I've already downloaded the non-portable variety but will switch when the next significant update comes along. The non-portable dumped a ton of fonts in the Windows fonts folder and there are many registry entries, all of which can be avoided by going portable.

 

The portable apps version is available at two locations currently:

http://www.libreofficeportable.org/

and

http://portableapps.com/LibreOfficePortable

but both give the same error so are they really different sites?

 

Thanks for the info and links.

 

Thank you!

I got those from a post by Florian Effenberger to the tdf-announce list.

 

JR, your link is very interesting. The download size is shown as:
Size: 118M (123947264 bytes).

The non-portable is ~210 MB!!!

One more reason for going the portableapps.com route. It would be interesting to know what magic went into cutting the size down! Any idea?

It also gives the nearest mirror. To my mind, this is a better link than the portableapps.com which used to point to SourceForgenet (a site that doesn't like me and my download manager )

 

Thanks! I was busy downloading the portable version. Good read.

I had seen the notice about the Fx portable being difficult due to issues with the host. So in a way it's good that the same site is not required to download LO.

 

You've convinced me Vasa!

My Belnea laptop has an ancient version of Open Office (I use the up to date one on my desktop) so I thought I would have a look at Libre Office.

It looks OK.

 

After 24h with Libre I am back on OpenOffice. When you set the memory to 256MB it's very fast.

why:
the dependency on java was killing me [delays in the menu even though java was turned off]

 

PortableApps.com has something called App Compactor. I must check it out. John Haller had mentioned it in the context of shrinking the post-install LibreOffice folder.

Of course, there are a few caveats ... back-up first and not all files are amenable. Compacting some .exes breaks them.

Certainly worth playing with

 

For further enlightenment, Mrk has tested LibreOffice at Dedoimedo-LibreOffice
Not sure whether he first uninstalled OpenOffice (in Ubuntu).

It is necessary to first uninstall OpenOffice afaik.

 

I don't know about *nix, but I think you can have both on a Windows system (with a little confusion thrown in). Michael Meeks had sent round a post that seemed to address this issue. I'll see if I can untrash it for a quote.

Here's the mail:

(I don't know if this is relevant to Ocky's comment.)

 

Hi, vasa1,

Well, in *nix you need to uninstall OpenOffice first. I don't know about Windows, but from your research it seems a good idea to avoid possible conflicts ..

 

I have LibreOffice & an old version of Open Office (2.4.2) on my laptop & I can have a choice to open a document in either. Although LO does seem to be the preferred one, which is fine with me.

Oh yeah, I forgot ... LO has a BRITISH English version 3.3 already! (Unlike some other open source word processors LOL)