Thursday, July 28, 2011

LibreOffice for CentOS 5 or CentOS 6 install howto

OpenOffice at this point seems to have stalled out with no recent bug fixes. The LibreOffice folks seem to to be be moving forward and fixing issues. This is just a simple install howto for getting LibreOffice onto your otherwise stock CentOS 5 or CentOS 6 desktop system. If you are doing these easy steps, you might as well take the steps to get Thunderbird 5 or FireFox 5 on your system. I have every reason to believe that all of these steps will work just fine for any Scientific Linux 5 or 6. Heck might as well just stall onto the otherwise identical RedHat Enterprise Linux RHEL 5 or RHEL 6.

First download a version of your choice.

UPDATE 05/02/2012: the following code has been updated for the 3.5.3 release of LibreOffice.

wget "http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/3.5.3/rpm/x86/LibO_3.5.3_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz" tar -xzvf LibO_3.5.3_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz cd LibO_3.5.3rc2_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US/RPMS/ mv desktop-integration/libreoffice3.5-freedesktop-menus-3.5.3-2.noarch.rpm ./ yum remove openoffice\* yum install --nogpgcheck lib*

You will likely want to install the helppack rpm
wget "http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/3.5.3/rpm/x86/LibO_3.5.3_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_en-US.tar.gz" tar -xvf LibO_3.5.3_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_en-US.tar.gz
yum install --nogpgcheck LibO_3.5.3rc2_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_en-US/RPMS/libobasis3.5-en-US-help-3.5.3-2.i586.rpm

You can copy line for line or copy paste into a script, but the jist of what needs to be done is easy to figure out above.

Redhat menus install nicely

Startup loading bar is nice

LibreOffice starts fast and looks familiar to existing OpenOffice users, but with more bug fixes

One easy upgrade! Nice job LibreOffice peeps! Enjoy.

13 comments:

  1. Need to tweak the helppack wget for 3.4.4

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  2. Thanks for the heads up on missing that link correctly. Should be fixed now.

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  3. thanks . this tricks works flawlessly. Very helpful post.

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  4. I want to install LibreOffice on my CenTOS, thanks guide download, and install it.

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  5. Works on Open Client, the Internal IBM install of RHEL 5! Thank you very much.

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  6. I get "no suitable windowing system found, exiting."

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  7. At what command do you get "no suitable windowing system found, exiting."? Is it from the "Applications" -> "Office" -> LibreOffice_something selection? What distro are you trying from? Sorry, not enough info to tell what's wrong at this time :(

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  8. Installs perfectly but the programs won't start in CentOS 6.2. I get this error when running from command line: /usr/bin/libreoffice3.4: /opt/libreoffice3.4/program/oosplash.bin: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory
    /usr/bin/libreoffice3.4: line 101: /opt/libreoffice3.4/program/oosplash.bin: Success

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  9. My first guess is that you installed a 32-bit version on a 64-bit only system. You could start with "yum install glibc.i686" and go from there.

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  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  11. You were right. I removed all i586 packages (see this: http://linuxsysadminblog.com/2009/05/rhelcentos-x86_64-and-i386-packages-mess/ )
    and installed the x86_64 bit version with success. Cheers! =]

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  12. Will not start in CentOS 6.1. The boot splash progress bar runs about half way then hangs with eventual failure on "Enabling: Reports Builder".

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  13. After further attempts it appears that none of the plugins will load on startup. I removed the Reports Builder folder only to fail on the next plugin attempting to be enabled, namely "Script provider for BeanShell". Tried changing permissions on /opt/libreoffice3.4 to no avail.

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