Building LibreOffice easily, killing an urban myth

When I first came here, this was all swamp.

Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them.

It sank into the swamp.

So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.

So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.

But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

— King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

LibreOffice has a — by now mostly undeserved — reputation to be hard to build. To kill that urban myth, Peter Baumgarten made a playterm session showing what needs to be done to get a build of LibreOffice started on Ubuntu 12.10, but the same should work on all Debian derivatives. So if you once used gentoo and miss that transcendental feeling of compile commands flying by, watch this (since it is running in a small single core VM, you can even read the stuff as it scrolls by): LibreOffice Build Demo.

Or you can do the commands along, and have your first shiny new build with that!

You can also download the recorded session from bug fdo#41291 and replay it with ttyrec. Awesome work, Peter!

UPDATE:

Now also on youtube: