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Author: Italo Vignoli

LibreOffice Munich Hack-fest

File:MucHackfest2012.png

The intense pace of development work on LibreOffice as we approach our 4.0 release has rather delayed an update on our recent extremely successful LibreOffice hack-fest. To give an idea of the work going on, instead of the around 1500 commits per month we normally get, we had nearly a month’s worth of commits in the last two weeks before our feature freeze, with lots of bug fixing ever since; things have been busy.

Some portion of this work was done by the more than thirty LibreOffice developers that arrived to augment the existing Munich Limux developers – who kindly hosted us. Munich is a forward looking enterprise who have deployed Linux to their fifteen-thousand users, and have committed to moving to LibreOffice.  First of all – many thanks to our friendly hosts who provided a great venue, helped feed us, so we could continue coding late into the night, and tidied up the detritus afterwards: your contribution is greatly appreciated.

It was also nice to meet a number of the Debian guys – who had a separate room for a parallel bug squashing party some of whom took an interest in and did a little LibreOffice work too. We had over thirty participants for LibreOffice alone, with other new people we’d never met before showing up and getting involved over the weekend which was particularly encouraging.

So what did we get done ?

(more…)

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.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6.4

Berlin, December 5, 2012 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.4, for Windows, MacOS and Linux. This new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability for any kind of deployment, on personal desktops or inside organizations and companies of any size.

LibreOffice 3.6.4 arrives a couple of weeks after the successful LiMux HackFest, where more than 30 developers have gathered to hack LibreOffice code and work on features and patches. One result is this video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gIqOOajdYQ&hd=1 – by Peter Baumgarten and Christian Lohmeier, showing how easy it is to build LibreOffice on your own to get involved in the project.

Additional results can be found on the wiki: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Munich2012#Achievements.

LibreOffice hacker community will gather again at FOSDEM 2013, in a focused DevRoom – http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Events/Fosdem2013 – dedicated to attracting new hackers around the code of the best free office suite ever. Call for papers ends on December 23, 2012.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. There is a donation page – with many options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org, to support the fundraising campaign for 2013.

LibreOffice 3.6.4 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

Change logs are available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-6-4-release-3.6.4.1.log (fixed in 3.6.4.1) and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-tag-libreoffice-3.6.4.3-release-3.6.4.3.log (fixed in 3.6.4.3).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gIqOOajdYQ&w=560&h=315]

The Document Foundation announces the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers

Berlin & Barcelona, November 7, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers, who are recognized for their ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users. They are: Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical), Caolan McNamara (RedHat), Cedric Bosdonnat (SUSE), Christian Lohmaier (Volunteer), David Tardon (RedHat), Eike Rathke (RedHat), Eilidh McAdam (Lanedo), Fridrich Strba (SUSE), Jan Holesovsky (SUSE), Kohei Yoshida (SUSE), Lionel Elie Mamane (Volunteer), Lubos Lunak (SUSE), Markus Mohrhard (Volunteer), Michael Meeks (SUSE), Michael Stahl (RedHat), Petr Mladek (SUSE), Rene Engelhard (Volunteer), Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Thorsten Behrens (SUSE), Timár András (SUSE) and Tor Lillqvist (SUSE).

Certification is a key milestone for building LibreOffice ecosystem, and increase the number of organizations capable of adding value around the best free office suite ever (and, hopefully, help to spread the adoption over proprietary and open source office suites). LibreOffice Certified Developers have been peer reviewed by the Engineering Steering Committee, which has appointed Bjoern Michaelsen, Jan Holesovsky and Stephan Bergmann to manage the certification process for developers.

Certified developers extend the reach of the community to the corporate world, and offer CIOs and IT managers a professional recognition in line with corporate requests for added value development and support services. TDF will soon extend certification to Migration Professionals and Training Professionals, starting from early 2013.

The LibreOffice Certification Program is outlined on the project website at the following address: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/. There is also a specific mailing list – certification@global.libreoffice.org – dedicated to the certification project, which is reaching all the members of the Certification Committee. Requests for information and applications should be addressed to this mailing list.

FOSDEM 2013 Call 4 Papers

FOSDEM 2013, Brussels, February 2/3, 2013

FOSDEM has been the first public appearance of The Document Foundation, after the release of LibreOffice 3.3 at the end of January 2011. The conference has been instrumental, so far, for the extraordinary growth of LibreOffice hackers community. FOSDEM 2013 should escalate what we have been able to achieve in 2011 and 2012!

FOSDEM 2013 will be your next chance ever for a talk about LibreOffice at the largest European gathering of free software developers and advocates.

Do you want to share your experience in starting to hack the code, or tell about the tweaks in your build environment, or talk about the code changes you have done or those that you have been preparing, or share some insight on your QA work? Or maybe what you plan for translation or infrastructure?

Please submit your speech proposal on this page, by adding the information on a copy of the table. We really like you to share in the way that fits you best, be it 5, 15 or up to 30 minutes.

We might have to choose between the various proposals, as time is limited. So please give a clear description of your talk, including goals and target audience.

The deadline is December 23, 2012. This will allow the DevRoom managers to spend most of their holiday time by putting together the schedule, which will be published in early January 2013 in order to allow early booking of flights and accommodations.

FOSDEM is a free conference to attend, and we will try to seek sponsorship. But funding is limited, so please only request it if you cannot attend otherwise, and we will try to do our best to support you.

LibreOffice DevRoom

Come and hear about the growth and success of LibreOffice and how you can get involved in this exciting project at the cutting edge of Free Software. Hear from many of the core developers, work out how best to get your most annoying problems fixed, and find how best to get plugged into the team. Co-ordinate with your co-developers, get caught up with the latest developments all over the project, meet friends you’ve hacked with on-line, all this and more. If you’re just a user and want to go deeper, to help improve things we’ll have something for you too.

When and where?

On Sunday, February 3rd, 2013, from 09:00 onwards. We have to leave the room by 17:30 at the latest.

More Info

Wiki Page: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Events/Fosdem2013

Email for Questions: info@documentfoundation.org

Discussions with developers and code hackers take place on libreoffice@lists.freedesktop.org

Discussions with marketers for the organization of the DevRoom take place on marketing@global.libreoffice.org

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6.3

Berlin, November 1, 2012 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.3, for Windows, MacOS and Linux. This new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability for any kind of deployment, on personal desktops or inside organizations and companies of any size.

LibreOffice has quickly become the de facto standard for migrations to free office suites, thanks to the growing feature set and the improved interoperability with proprietary software. Instrumental for the overall progress is the growing developer base, which has just reached the number of 550 since the launch of the project, making LibreOffice one of the fastest growing free software projects of the decade.

After the City of Munich and the French Government, which are migrating from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice, it is now the turn of several provinces in Italy, including the largest one in term of inhabitants. In addition, there are many private companies switching to LO, like the largest furniture manufacturer and retailer in Romania, with 1,000 Windows and GNU/Linux desktops.

LibreOffice hackers community will gather in Munich for the second LiMux HackFest (http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Munich2012) between November 23 and 25. As usual, there will be code, but also beer and pasta, in the true spirit of a free software project.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support the efforts the development and the advocacy efforts of The Document Foundation with a donation – with many options, including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice 3.6.3 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

Change logs are available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-6-3-release-3.6.3.1.log (fixed in 3.6.3.1) and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-6-3-release-3.6.3.2.log (fixed in 3.6.3.2).

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