Saturday, February 18, 2012

Installing the latest free 3.5rc3 libreoffice productivity tools

The problem with the built-in package system in Ubuntu is that the softwares in the repositories may be one or two or even three versions behind! My old version of libreoffice was at 3.4. It is now at Version 3.5. But the disadvantage of manually installing the latest version is that there will be NO automatic updates!

  1. Download the compressed installer
  2. Visit http://www.libreoffice.org/download/ and choose http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/3.5.0/deb/x86_64/LibO_3.5.0_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz for 64 bit systems. Of course, if your system is 32 bit, choose http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/3.5.0/deb/x86/LibO_3.5.0_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
  3. Uncompressed the downloaded file
  4. For Ubuntu, the file will be saved in ~/home/Downloads/ subdirectory. cd to that in the terminal and issue tar xzvvf LibO_3.5.0_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz. This will create a subdirectory LibO_3.5.0rc3_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US/. cd to that directory.
  5. Remove old traces of LibreOffice
  6. Now remove any trace of old versions of LibreOffice. If you have installed the old version using synaptic or the software installer of Ubuntu, you can try sudo apt-get remove libreoffice. Then issue sudo apt-get purge. To ensure there are no remaining traces of the old installation, try using locate libreoffice. The directories containing old versions are usually /opt/libreoffice, /opt/libreoffice3.4, /var/libreoffice and some others.
  7. Install the downloaded file
  8. Simpy type on the terminal sudo dpkg -i *.deb in the uncompressed directory.
  9. Install the desktop integration.
  10. In the same decompressed directory issue
    cd desktop-intergration
    sudo dpkg -i *.deb
    
Your new LibreOffice installation should now be able to run from the Destkop GUI Applications.

Congratulations on having a free alternative to Microsoft Windows Office Applications in Linux Operating sytem.