LibreOffice 4.0 tested
Happy Birthday
LibreOffice celebrates its birthday with the release of the first version with a 4 in front of the dot. All modules offer substantial improvements and the kinds of changes that warrant a major version. We look at some features worth celebrating.
In early February, the LibreOffice developers released version 4.0 of the free office package [1]. As early as this year's Fosdem, users who visited the LibreOffice booth or the various keynotes got a pre-release peek at the new functions and features. The office suite's increase in speed is the result of a thorough source code cleanup. How this works in a major project was the subject of a Fosdem 2013 talk by Michael Meeks [2].
In the meantime, the project has released the first improved and bug-fixed version 4.0.1. I installed version 4.0.1 from March 5, 2013, on two lab machines running Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). To do this, I first followed the recommendation and removed the version of the office suite provided with the distribution and then manually installed the LibreOffice packages.
Preparations for the Party
The developers ditched some of the legacy Java ballast and implemented the fax and letter wizard in Python. They replaced their own search model with a faster and smaller one for regular expressions by ICU (International Components for Unicode) [3]. ODS, XLSX, and RTF documents now load faster, particularly presentations that contain slides with many catch lines.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.