Roadwarrioring and visiting Freiburg

He asked me if I’d seen a road with so much dust and sand.
And I said, “Listen, I’ve travelled every road in this here land!”
I’ve been everywhere, man.
I’ve been everywhere, man.

I’ve been Everywhere, Johnny Cash

So about a month ago I travelled in one week from Hamburg via Zürich and San Francisco to Oakland and then via San Francisco, Munich and Basel to Freiburg to attend the LibreOffice Hackfest Freiburg 2013 and back to Hamburg. The Freiburg Hackfest is the third and last Hackevent we had in Germany this year (after the Impress Sprint in Dresden and the Hackfest in Hamburg) nicely accompanying the international events like the LibreOffice conference in Milan and our usual presence at FOSDEM.

Bags packed to get back to Europe

I have to admit that I arrived at this event with some travel fatigue and some upcoming Ubuflu, so I was not too productive myself, but its good to see fixes like for example in the kde integration (Jan-Marek), in Calc (Eilidh), for enabling bitcoin donations (Florian), to mail merge (again Jan-Marek), to Math (Marcos), for the build system (Michael and David) happening (or at least be prepared at the event). A big “Thank You” to all the angels of the Chaos Computer Club Freiburg that organized the event — when I learned that I would need to travel to the US right before this, I had some doubts if it would result in “remote-organization-troubles” given this was a first time in Freiburg. This was completely unfounded, the support of our hosts was amazing and they seemed to have made a deal with Eris to take revenge for the original snub somewhere else on this weekend. 😉

So, given that I did not do much coding (just some preparation for the KDevelop integration for LibreOffice, more on that later), what can I offer you? Catcontent was not available (no cats at this Hackfest), so I give you the second best thing: the deputy chairman of the board of the Document Foundation patrolling the premises on a skateboard:

So, whats next? FOSDEM! We will of course be there again, and back-to-back with the event we will have a user experience Hackfest in Bruessels. So come and join us:

Gimme Fuel, Gimme Fire

Take the corner, going to crash
Headlights, head on, headlines
Another junkie lives too fast
Yeah, lives way too fast, fast, fast, woh

— Fuel, Reload, Metallica

So, LibreOffice 4.2.0 alpha1 has been tagged upstream a week ago. It is an alpha release, essentially only a tagged snapshot of the LibreOffice master branch and as such might eat your kitten and kill unsuspecting relatives. On the other hand, if you absolutely are of the type that Metallica roars about in the above quote and therefore you are running the development release of Ubuntu (trusty tahr, which will become Ubuntu 14.04 LTS), you can add the LibreOffice prereleases PPA and try it out and report bugs. Of course, you should not use this in a production environment of any kind!

Im happy to see that this build available again a week earlier than last year, as early testing allows more bugs to be triaged and fixed in time. The more important difference though is that last year, the alpha version was build on the stable and released version of Ubuntu, while this year the version is already build against the early and moving development version of Ubuntu.

LibreOffice 4.2.0 alpha1 and a hint of the new startcenter on Ubuntu Trusty Tahr

Happy testing!