Community Member Monday: Saikeo Kavhanxay

For our final Community Member Monday of 2019, we talk to Saikeo Kavhanxay, who is helping with the Lao language localisation of LibreOffice…

First, tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Vientiane, Laos. I am working as a full-time network engineer. My hobbys are reading books, surfing the internet and learning how to code. I also dedicate my free time to the open source community and I have contributed to other open source projects as well.

You can find me on social media – Twitter and my blog.

What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment?

Currently I am contributing to LibreOffice localization for my locale. In the future I also plan to contribute to other parts of the project as well, like filing bugs, development and assisting people in my community who have questions about using LibreOffice.

How did you get involved in the project?

I’ve been using LibreOffice for a long time, and then I realised that I want to contribute something back, so I decided to contact my locale and the LibreOffice localization community. After that, I got an opportunity to contribute to LibreOffice. I think is quite easy to get involved in the project – you can reach to your locale or the LibreOffice localization team and then they will get back to you shortly.

What do you think LibreOffice needs in the future?

To avoid license issues, and due to limited budgets, some organisations in my country use LibreOffice. So, I think the LibreOffice community in Southeast Asia needs to expand more, and work on LibreOffice Online.

Thanks to Saikeo and the Lao localisation team for their great work! Everyone is welcome to join our friendly community and give us a hand with design, documentation, QA, and many other aspects of the software. It’s a great way to build up experience, meet new people and have fun!

10/20: LibreOffice 10th anniversary in 2020, a year long celebration

LibreOffice was announced on September 28, 2010, with a positive feedback from tech and business media all over the world (above, two significant titles from eWeek and Linux Gizmos). To celebrate the event, The Document Foundation has organized a year long anniversary project, starting at FOSDEM in Brussels on February 1/2 and ending at POSS in Paris in early December 2020.

LibreOffice community members will attend as many FOSS events as possible, carrying stickers and swag with the anniversary logo. The author is Rania Amina from Indonesia, a member of the LibreOffice community who has already contributed with logos and 2D animations to the success of LibreOffice Indonesia Conference in 2018.

Rania Amina will attend FOSDEM in Brussels, and will also talk about the LibreOffice Theme Changer at the Open Document Editors DevRoom.

So far, in addition to FOSDEM and POSS, events have been confirmed in Nigeria (Open Source Africa), Kosovo (FLOSSK), Croatia (DORS/CLUC), Albania (OSCAL), France (Libre Graphics Meeting and OW2con), Taiwan (COSCUP and LibreOffice Asia Conference), India (Open Source India), Germany (Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, FrOSCon and the LibreOffice Conference), US (All Things Open) and Serbia (PSSOH), but several other are being currently discussed and will be announced as soon as possible.

Stay tuned !!! 2020 will be an exciting time for the LibreOffice community !!!

According to TechRepublic, LibreOffice is one of the best open source innovations of the last decade

According to TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen, LibreOffice is one of the best open source innovations of the last decade, with Docker, Kubernetes, GNOME 3, the cloud, Chrome OS, Internet of Things (IoT) and Firefox Quantum: “We head back to the desktop with LibreOffice. Although OpenOffice (which was originally StarOffice) was one of the first full-blown open source office suites, it wound up falling far enough behind as to become irrelevant. That’s when on January 25, 2011 LibreOffice came into being to offer up an open source office suite that could hang with the best of them and innovate quickly and reliably. Although, even if LibreOffice went away, there would still be plenty of options remaining (such as KOffice), but there wouldn’t be one that held so true to the ethos of open source, while still being a viable option for the world of business. Without LibreOffice, Linux users would be relegated to Google Docs and Office 365 for business collaboration.”

Second Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.4 – join in!

LibreOffice 6.4 is being developed by our worldwide community and certified developers, and is due to be released at the end of January 2020 – see the release notes describing the new features here.

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the second Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.4 on Monday December 23, 2019.

Tests will be performed on the first Release Candidate version, which will be available on the pre-releases server the same day of the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM) with GTK3 and KDE5 support, macOS and Windows. (Note that it will replace your current installation.)

Mentors will be available from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa and the Telegram QA Channel. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Release Candidate (LibreOffice 6.4.0 RC1) will be available until mid January, 2020, when LibreOffice 6.4 RC2 will be released. Check the Release Plan.

All details regarding the bug hunting session are available on the wiki. We look forward to – and appreciate – your help!

Help our community with social media in various languages and locations!

Love LibreOffice? Want to help spread the word? And do you speak another language than English? Then we’d appreciate your help! We have lots of community-created LibreOffice accounts on Facebook and Twitter, but some haven’t been updated for a while. The full list is below, with the date the account was last active – if you’re interested in helping to maintain one, join our marketing list and let us know!

(To join: send a blank email to marketing+subscribe@global.libreoffice.org and follow the instructions. Then you can post to the list.)

Or if you’re interested in creating a new account on another social media platform, such as Mastodon, that’s awesome too! This is a great way to help the LibreOffice community, and build up experience with managing a social media channel – who knows, it could land you a job somewhere one day…

Facebook

Twitter

Thanks in advance for any help 🙂

LibreOffice 6.3.4 available for download

Berlin, December 12, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.4, the 4th minor release of the LibreOffice 6.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, who are invited to update their current version. LibreOffice 6.3.4 includes over 120 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.

LibreOffice 6.3.4’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.3.4/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.3.4/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice in business

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

Also, support for migrations and trainings should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.3.4

LibreOffice 6.3.4 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements are specified on the download page. TDF builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server-based platform, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

All versions of LibreOffice are built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Support LibreOffice

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.