Install LibreOffice on Fedora and Ubuntu

You've probably already heard the news. OpenOffice has officially forked into LibreOffice. This fork is thanks to the way Oracle has botched nearly everything it has touched and the OpenOffice community wants to protect the flagship product. So now, there is a fully open office suite that, in my opinion, will actually be able to rise to newer and higher heights than it ever could under the firm thumb of Oracle and Sun.

Now, if you already have OpenOffice you can still install LibreOffice. And if you are using Windows you simply have to download the installation file from the LibreOffice download page. If you are using Fedora Linux you can download the GNU Linux file which, once unpacked, will contain all the rpm files you need. If you want to install in Ubuntu, you have to first create debs from the rpms. I am going to show you how to do just that in this article (along with showing you how to install LibreOffice in Fedora).

Installing in Fedora

As stated earlier, you need to download the package from the download site. When you do you will have a file ~/Downloads/LO_3.3.0-beta1_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz. NOTE: File name may vary depending upon location and when you download. Once you have that file downloaded open up a terminal window and follow these steps:

1. Change into the ~/Downloads directory.
2. Unpack the file with the command tar xvzf LO_3.3.0-beta1_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz which will create a new directory ~/Downloads/en-US. NOTE: The newly created directory will be based on your location and language.
3. Change into the newly created directory.
4. Change into the RPMS subfolder.
5. Su to the root user and issue the command rpm -ivh *rpm to install the main packages.
6. Now change into the sub-directory desktop-integration.
7. Issue the command rpm -ivh *rpm to install the LibreOffice menu entries.

That's it. LibreOffice is now installed on your Fedora machine.

Ubuntu

In order to install on Ubuntu you have to create .deb files out of the .rpm files included with the downloaded packages. To do this you first have to install the application Alien. To install Alien do the following:

1. Open up a terminal.
2. Issue the command sudo apt-get install alien.
3. Type your sudo password and hit Enter.
4. Accept any dependencies.

Once Alien is installed, change into the directory containing the LibreOffice rpm files and issue the command:

alien -k *rpm

When this finishes (it will take a while), issue the command:

sudo dpkg -i *deb

The above command will install the newly created .deb packages. Now you need to do the same thing with the desktop-integration files. So change into that sub-folder and issue the command:

alien -k *rpm

followed by the command:

sudo dpkg -i *deb

Now you will see LibreOffice in your Applications > Office menu. You can open it up and use it exactly as you would have used OpenOffice.

Final thoughts

One thing to note is that LibreOffice, as of this writing, is still in beta. But it is still very reliable and will improve at a far greater rate than OpenOffice ever did. I'm actually happy to see this happen. I believe that Oracle was going to bury OpenOffice and let it gather dust.

Advertisement