Twitter’s flooding with LibreOffice 5’s arrival. Oh! Flooding? Well, only if you’re following the *nix geeks :)

LibreOffice 5 was released today. Those who are used to only hear about the Microsoft Suite, well there exist other productivity suites out in the wild. LibreOffice is among them. It was forked from OpenOffice in 2010. Since then several Linux distributions bundled the LibreOffice Suite in their default install. LibreOffice is written in C++, Java and Python, and is available in 114 languages.

The LibreOffice 5 official package should be rolled out for the stable distros in the coming weeks, if not months. As for the curious who’d like to get hands dirty, just follow the article for a LibreOffice 5 installation. One thing, I’ve kept in the title openSUSE, Fedora and CentOS but the installation would cater for any RPM-based distribution. I haven’t tested the DEB archive but I guess it should be somewhat similar.

LibreOffice 5 installation

The tarball can be either downloaded by visiting the download page at libreoffice.org or from this mirror. Torrent links are available too. Once you have obtained the package LibreOffice_5.0.0_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz you uncompress it as follows:

tar zxvf LibreOffice_5.0.0_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz

The extracted files & folders include an installation script licensed under MPL v2. You may peek into if you’d want to know what it does.

Enter the directory that contains the install script and launch the installation as follows:

./install RPMS .

The second dot implies that it should be installed at the current path. Hit enter and the progress will be shown.

####################################################################


Installation of the found packages

####################################################################

Path to the database:        /home/ish/Downloads/LibreOffice_5.0.0.5_Linux_x86-64_rpm/.RPM_OFFICE_DATABASE
Path to the packages:        RPMS
Path to the installation:    .

Installing the RPMs
Preparing…                          ################################# [100%]
Updating / installing…
   1:libreoffice5.0-ure-5.0.0.5-5     ################################# [  2%]
   2:libobasis5.0-core-5.0.0.5-5      ################################# [  4%]
   3:libobasis5.0-en-US-5.0.0.5-5     ################################# [  7%]
   4:libobasis5.0-writer-5.0.0.5-5    ################################# [  9%]
   5:libobasis5.0-base-5.0.0.5-5      ################################# [ 11%]
   6:libobasis5.0-impress-5.0.0.5-5   ################################# [ 13%]
   7:libobasis5.0-en-US-calc-5.0.0.5-5################################# [ 16%]
   8:libobasis5.0-en-US-writer-5.0.0.5################################# [ 18%]
   9:libobasis5.0-en-US-res-5.0.0.5-5 ################################# [ 20%]
  10:libobasis5.0-en-US-math-5.0.0.5-5################################# [ 22%]
  11:libobasis5.0-en-US-base-5.0.0.5-5################################# [ 24%]
  12:libobasis5.0-images-5.0.0.5-5    ################################# [ 27%]
  13:libreoffice5.0-5.0.0.5-5         ################################# [ 29%]
  14:libobasis5.0-math-5.0.0.5-5      ################################# [ 31%]
  15:libobasis5.0-draw-5.0.0.5-5      ################################# [ 33%]
  16:libobasis5.0-calc-5.0.0.5-5      ################################# [ 36%]
  17:libobasis5.0-pyuno-5.0.0.5-5     ################################# [ 38%]
  18:libobasis5.0-librelogo-5.0.0.5-5 ################################# [ 40%]
  19:libreoffice5.0-calc-5.0.0.5-5    ################################# [ 42%]
  20:libreoffice5.0-draw-5.0.0.5-5    ################################# [ 44%]
  21:libreoffice5.0-math-5.0.0.5-5    ################################# [ 47%]
  22:libreoffice5.0-dict-en-5.0.0.5-5 ################################# [ 49%]
  23:libreoffice5.0-impress-5.0.0.5-5 ################################# [ 51%]
  24:libreoffice5.0-base-5.0.0.5-5    ################################# [ 53%]
  25:libreoffice5.0-en-US-5.0.0.5-5   ################################# [ 56%]
  26:libreoffice5.0-dict-es-5.0.0.5-5 ################################# [ 58%]
  27:libreoffice5.0-dict-fr-5.0.0.5-5 ################################# [ 60%]
  28:libreoffice5.0-writer-5.0.0.5-5  ################################# [ 62%]
  29:libobasis5.0-ogltrans-5.0.0.5-5  ################################# [ 64%]
  30:libobasis5.0-postgresql-sdbc-5.0.################################# [ 67%]
  31:libobasis5.0-onlineupdate-5.0.0.5################################# [ 69%]
  32:libobasis5.0-ooofonts-5.0.0.5-5  ################################# [ 71%]
  33:libobasis5.0-filter-data-5.0.0.5-################################# [ 73%]
  34:libobasis5.0-kde-integration-5.0.################################# [ 76%]
  35:libobasis5.0-extension-javascript################################# [ 78%]
  36:libobasis5.0-xsltfilter-5.0.0.5-5################################# [ 80%]
  37:libobasis5.0-python-script-provid################################# [ 82%]
  38:libobasis5.0-ooolinguistic-5.0.0.################################# [ 84%]
  39:libobasis5.0-extension-report-bui################################# [ 87%]
  40:libobasis5.0-graphicfilter-5.0.0.################################# [ 89%]
  41:libobasis5.0-extension-mediawiki-################################# [ 91%]
  42:libobasis5.0-extension-beanshell-################################# [ 93%]
  43:libobasis5.0-extension-nlpsolver-################################# [ 96%]
  44:libobasis5.0-extension-pdf-import################################# [ 98%]
  45:libobasis5.0-gnome-integration-5.################################# [100%]

Installation done …

If no errors occurred you should find a folder named opt created. This makes it easy if you want to move your LibreOffice 5 instance to the traditional /opt path. However, from the current path you can launch LibreOffice Writer as follows:

./opt/libreoffice5.0/program/swriter

You will get LibreOffice Writer, Calc, Base, Draw, Math and Impress with the following commands:

./opt/libreoffice5.0/program/swriter
./opt/libreoffice5.0/program/scalc
./opt/libreoffice5.0/program/sbase
./opt/libreoffice5.0/program/sdraw
./opt/libreoffice5.0/program/smath
./opt/libreoffice5.0/program/simpress

Otherwise, just shoot ./opt/libreoffice5.0/program/soffice and you get the LibreOffice 5 welcome screen with shortcuts to each application.

---

To have a clean setup, you could move the libreoffice5.0 folder to /opt and have some sweet symlinks. Let’s do it; stay on the current path and shoot:

sudo mv opt/libreoffice5.0 /opt
ln -s /opt/libreoffice5.0/program/swriter /usr/local/bin/writer

You could do for the rest, right? Now, press Alt + F2, type writer and hit the return button. LibreOffice Writer shoots up!

To my fellow non-Linux friendly folks, the free software community makes LibreOffice available for Windows and Mac OS X as well and installation is painless :)