LibreOffice 3.4.1 is Released! - How to Install it in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

The true GNU licensed office productivity software suite which was introduced not that long ago called LibreOffice is certainly gaining some momentum (when considering the frequent update "cycle" :D). For those of you who doesn't know much about this open source office suite, (GNU actually) it was created as a result of Oracle clashing with the formally known OpenOffice suite community after purchasing it from Sun Microsystem (well, Oracle actually own it!) sometime ago.

Since then the developers have been quite busy creating and fixing bugs in their attempt to making this the dominating cross-platform, true open source office suite, hopefully ;-). Few weeks ago LibreOffice released the version 3.4 which did bring some major changes (such as Unity menu support by default, etc) and yesterday they even released the latest version, 3.4.1.

Although this won't bring major features when comparing with the already existing 3.4 version but it does come with bug fixes thus LibreOffice developers advice the users to make the upgrade.

They also said that the next update would come around July by saying...

"It is safely for production need by most users - LibreOffice 3.4.2, available by the end of July, will target enterprise deployments."

According to their Fixes page it comes with some bug fixes such as added support for Oxygen icons, GTK system tray icon related bug fix, Keyboard navigation related issues, few .doc and .docx importing issues + a lot of other bug fixes as usual.

The Unity appindicator menu didn't work as expected with the previos 3.4 version... so let's hope that at least this time it'll work for most of us...

You can install LibreOffice 3.4.1 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal by first removing the already installed one first.

To do that, open your Terminal and enter the below command.

sudo apt-get purge libreoffice-core

Although the next command may be optional depending on how you installed the existing the LibreOffice suite (you know whether you have the default installation - 3.3.x version that comes with the Ubuntu LiveCD or have already installed it manually, etc) ... but please do enter it, just in case ;-).

sudo apt-get purge libreoffice

Now download the archive file from here get the 64-bit version from here.

Now extract the content to somewhere (say your desktop). Then open that folder in your GNU/Linux Terminal and then you'll see a folder called "DEBS". Change (cd) directory to that "DEBS" folder in your Terminal and enter the below command.

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Now we have to make sure the office suite integrates well with your desktop (making the shortcuts, etc). To do that use the below two commands.

cd desktop-integration

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Yep that is. Now you've installed this amazing (and free :D) office productivity suite in Ubuntu Linux 11.04. Although the installation is much more easier with the PPA but they don't update it often enough... so you'll be better off with this manual method instead.