LibreOffice 4.0 alpha1 available for testing

Posted on by bmichaelsen

…the Linux philosophy is “laugh in the face of danger”. Oops. Wrong one.

— Linus Torvalds

LibreOffice 4.0 alpha1 has been silently tagged in the LibreOffice repositories three days ago. Yesterday, I uploaded a build of it for Ubuntu Quantal to the libreoffice-prereleases PPA. Its a pre-release, an alpha — essentially just a named daily build — and will kill your dog and eat your children. Also, it will not cleanly install yet without removing your old version of LibreOffice first. But it has lots of nasty new features and tasty new bugs. So if you are a bug hunter and want to help to make the version of LibreOffice in Ubuntu Raring the best ever, this is your chance to test and tease this version and get it the most polished one ever in a Ubuntu release. Happy testing and bug reporting!

P.S.: At just three weeks after the UDS this is likely the earliest date of making available the upcoming LibreOffice version for the upcoming Ubuntu release. I am looking forward for this to pay off in less bugs even more stability of LibreOffice upon Ubuntu release.

17 thoughts on “LibreOffice 4.0 alpha1 available for testing”

  1. Björn, how about a PPA for 3.6 to Precise?
    I asked about it months ago and told me when that it will be available once Quantal released. Well…

    1. I cannot guarantee backports of a different major as the one included in release and never did. But when I do the next microrelease of 3.6 for quantal, I will try to do a backport for precise along the way.

      1. Thanks for your prompt reply.
        I am happy to hear it.

        As Precise is an LTS version, IMHO there are really many people what will benefit of your backport.

  3. What about for the .rpm based distros like opensuse, fedora etc. ? So that more and more people can test it.

    1. You can find daily builds of LibreOffice on http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/ as generic deb/rpm, for OS X and Windows. More details are here:
      http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds
      For Windows, Florian also published some hints on testing:
      http://flosmind.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/test-libreoffice-version-4-with-windows/

      The PPA allows in addition for some first testing of the specific integration with Ubuntu (and is a bit easier to use than manually installing debs).

      2. Thanks Bjoern, I tried LibreOffice (LO) 4.0 β, installing it in parallel with the older version. I had already installed the older version earlier. I did this in Windows 7.
        LO 4.0 β is looking good so far.

        I would like to install the 4.0 β in Linux (Ubuntu). The instructions at this website are very complicated: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Installing_in_parallel

        Please could LO make it easy for users to install different versions parallelly like Opera (Browser) has done with Opera Next in Ubuntu?

        P.S.

        Please could LO allow us to install 2 versions in parallel without us having to uninstall the older one?
        Thanks.

  4. Sir, can you just give a brief about new features in LibreOffice 4.0(alpha). Right now happily using & enjoying 3.6

  5. Thanks for the link Bjoern.

    I have done this in Windows 7 & both versions (Stable & Beta) work great side by side.

    However, all the online help talks of ‘purging’ the previous version in Linux (Ubuntu).

    Your link is very informative: https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/libreoffice-test-marathon-bibisect-4-0-and-ubuntu-packages/

    Unfortunately, this is a bit too complicated for a person like me, non-IT guy, so was hoping that in future if it would be possible to have test packages like Opera Next where one can just double click & install in parallel, side by side in Ubuntu. In other words, the simplicity of testing LO in Windows should be brought to Ubuntu.

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