LibreOffice runs on the Raspberry Pi

The full fledged free office suite is available on the credit card sized single-board computer developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation

Cambridge (UK) and Berlin (Germany), December 17, 2012 – The Raspberry Pi Foundation (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) and The Document Foundation (http://www.documentfoundation.org/) announce the availability of the full fledged version of LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/) on the Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized computer created with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is a little PC which plugs into a TV and a keyboard and can be used for many of the things that most desktop PC can do, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games.

LibreOffice is the first comprehensive office suite to run on a 40 dollar credit card sized PC, without any compromise on features and performances. LibreOffice has been ported to ARM by multiple contributors from Canonical, Debian and RedHat, and was packaged for the Raspberry Pi by Rene Engelhard as a part of his work as the Debian maintainer for LibreOffice.

“The availability of LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever, on the Raspberry Pi – the most affordable PC ever, targeted to hardware and software enthusiasts, and schools – is extremely important for The Document Foundation, because it will contribute to the growth of the brand awareness in key market segments”, comments Bjoern Michaelsen, a Canonical developer and a deputy member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation.

“I’m very impressed that the LibreOffice team didn’t have to make any changes to the code in order for it to compile and smoothly run on Raspberry Pi”, said Eben Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. “It’s also great to have a comprehensive office suite available in the Pi Store at launch, making people even more aware of the potential of this device”.

LibreOffice is available from the Raspberry Pi Store (http://store.raspberrypi.com/projects/libreoffice), which is described here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2768 (including instructions on how to install it). Raspberry Pi Foundation announcement press release is here: http://blog.indiecity.com/?page_id=2269.

About the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer, designed to fit in a pocket, and cheap enough to be bought with pocket money. It was developed by the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation in Cambridge to help children engage with computer programming, and has won dozens of awards in its first year of release. Additional information at http://www.raspberrypi.org.

About The Document Foundation (TDF)

The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and warmly welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community. As of November 30, 2012, TDF has over 150 members and over 2.000 volunteers and contributors worldwide.