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Installing LibreOffice on Linux

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Notes on Installation

First time installing LibreOffice on Linux?

If you have never installed LibreOffice in GNU/Linux or if you are just trying to install LibreOffice to get a job done or to have a working Office Suite, these instructions are probably not for you.

For normal everyday users we strongly advise to use your Distribution's installation processes, specially those with graphical interfaces. Check your Distributions help for how to do this.

The instructions below are for those who need to install LibreOffice packages directly from our site. This happens if the LibreOffice that comes with your Distribution has some configuration that is undesired, or if you want to run a development or newer version than the available at the Distribution's repositories.

In any case these instructions are void of any liability, and it is strongly advised you do a thorough back up before proceeding.

Should I uninstall the LibreOffice that comes with my Distro?

Yes, we strongly advise users to install these packages in a "clean" environment. It should not be a major problem to have as many versions of LibreOffice as you wish, but there are some reported installation problems and there are theoretical problems with conflicts in these cases. Again, nothing bad should derive from this, but it could be the reason for some unexpected hassle.

If you do have a previous version of LibreOffice already installed, then you will need to un-install it before proceeding further. For instructions on how to do that, please read the section below entitled Un-Installing LibreOffice.

Where to find official installation support?

These instructions are also in the "readme" file included with the downloaded archive files. That official "readme" is maintained by the LibreOffice Documentation Team, and is stored at the following address:

[[Media:

Will I have to be a coder / programmer to install LibreOffice?

In most modern Linux Distros, the Desktop is well integrated with the installation process, so it is very likely that if you have a stock Debian or its derivatives Ubuntu, Sidux, Mint, etc.), Mandriva (or Mageia), openSUSE or other Gnome compliant complete install on your system you could do a full LibreOffice installation without having to type a single line of code.

For those who use KDE, the plot thickens, seems Adept (when present) has some issues, so if you encounter problems please use the Terminal Based Install instructions instead.


Installation of LibreOffice 3.x Linux systems

Find your installation and language packages

Please go to:

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/


Installation packages are available for 32-bit and 64-bit systems, in the “x86” and “x86_64” flavors, respectively, together with language packs for obtaining a LibreOffice 3.3 installation in your preferred international language.


The rest of this document assumes you are installing the base (en-US) package, but if you are also installing a help pack or a language pack all you need to do is after you install the base (en-US) package do the same steps all over again with your these extra packages.


The instructions are for installing LibreOffice in US English (en-US - the basic installation), on a 32-bit system; there will be slight differences in some directory names if you are installing a different version (i.e. 64-bit, international, .deb or .rpm), but the process is basically the same and – hopefully – you will find these instructions easy to follow.


The Download page above hopefully will have determined if you are installing a .deb – for Debian based Distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, *buntu, Sidux, Knoppix, etc...) - or a .rpm for Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, CentOS, Mageia and other .rpm systems, if it doesn't please use the drop down menu.

Graphic Installation (Preferred Way)

We have put a lot of work on LibreOffice being able to be installed by anyone. So if you have a stock (out of the box) installation of most Linux Distros, this section is for you. We are assuming you have already downloaded the appropriate package for your system (if not please read the previous section)

You should be looking at a file called something like:

LibO_3.x.y_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz

- the name can be a bit different if you are running a 64bit system (then it will have a "x86_64" instead of "X86" in the name) or if you are running a RPM based system (then it would have a "-rpm" instead of "-deb" in the name). But the instructions work the same if these variations are present.

We will try to make as much sense as possible, if any of these instructions won´t work for you we have a detailed terminal-based installation that is guaranteed to work, in the next section.

Unpacking the Tarball
Installation of Multiple Packages
$libreoffice


Atention some users have had some problems while trying to select and install multiple packages with the "Package Manager" tool of their distro (specially Ubuntu), please try to use Synaptic for this step if you encounter problems, or go directly to the Terminal Based Install instructions below.


Desktop Integration or Menu Entries

So you have installed LibreOffice, but you don´t want to open a terminal every time you want to start this mind-blowing software, how to proceed?

If you are using RPM packages chances are that the system will give an error message about a "conflicting" package, just cancel the installation of the conflicting package and it should all work out fine, if you can´t restrain yourself, and need to know why this package was included please go to Installing in Other Linuxes.


Terminal Based Install

The following instructions are for Advanced Users or for Users that encountered problems during the Graphical Install. We have tested LibreOffice in every distro out there, it can be installed in all of them, so these instructions work, if they don´t work for you we suggest you follow these steps below:


So here is the detailed Terminal-based way to install LibreOffice:

Unpack the Downloaded Archive via Terminal

In the terminal you could type:

For the .deb:

tar zxvf LibO_3.x.y_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz 

For the .rpm:

 tar zxvf LibO_3.x.y_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz

When you unpack the downloaded archive, you will see that the contents have been decompressed into a directory called something like "LibO_3.x.yrc2_Linux_x86_install-deb(or rpm)_en-US" (remember that the naming may vary depending on the download).

Installing via Terminal

Change to the unpacked directory:

For the .deb

cd LibO_3.x.yrc2_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US/

For the .rpm

cd LibO_3.x.yrc2_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US/


The "LibO_3.x.yrc2_Linux_x86_install-deb(or rpm)_en-US" directory contains a sub-directory called DEBS/ (or /RPMS). Change to this directory

cd DEBS/ 

or

cd RPMS/

Enter the following command (you will be prompted to enter your root user's password before the command will execute):

Debian / Ubuntu
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
Fedora / CentOS
su -c 'yum install *.rpm'
Mandriva / Mageia
su urpmi *.rpm
openSUSE and other RPM based systems
su rpm -Uvh *.rpm
Gentoo

Until LibreOffice will be available in the portage it can be installed from "rion" overlay.

# layman -a rion && emerge libreoffice-bin

Seems LibreOffice 3.3.4 has made it to portage, so this section may need an update - Dec 2011 User:RogerioLuzCoelho


Testing the Installation

The above commands do the first part of the installation process. Make sure we succeeded by calling:

$libreoffice

You should see the LibreOffice splash screen if all went well.


Desktop-integration

To complete the installation process, you also may want to install the desktop integration packages. This is not required to run LibreOffice, specially if you will use it mainly through the terminal.

To do this, go to the desktop-integration directory that is within the DEBS/ or RPMS/ directory, the command is:

cd desktop-integration

Now run the installation command again:

Debian / Ubuntu
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
Fedora / CentOS:
su -c 'yum install libreoffice3.3-redhat-menus-3.3-1.noarch.rpm'
Mandriva / Mageia:
su -c 'urpmi libreoffice3.3-mandriva-menus-3.3-1.noarch.rpm'
openSUSE and other RPM based systems:
su -c 'rpm -Uvh install libreoffice3.3-suse-menus-3.3-1.noarch.rpm' 


The installation process is now completed, and you should have icons for all the LibreOffice applications in your desktop's Applications > Office menu.


Other Distros

It should be easy to install LibreOffice 3.x on other Linux distributions not specifically covered in these installation instructions. Besides the .deb and .rpm we make it possible to download source code tarballs from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

The main aspect for which differences might be encountered is desktop integration.

The desktop-integration directory in the RPMS/ folder also contains a package named

libreoffice3.x-freedesktop-menus-3.3.1.noarch.rpm.

This is a package for all Linux distributions that support the Freedesktop.org specifications/recommendations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedesktop.org), and is provided for the optimal installation of other Linux distributions not covered in these instructions.

Nowadays, most Linux distributions comply with the Freedesktop.org specifications. But, to maintain backward compatibility, we are aware that many distributions used their own methods for making their desktop environments aware of installed/removed applications, and had their own methods for registering MIME types. The Freedesktop.org specifications/proposals standardize this to use some well-known paths and utilities to update that information. Affected are the icon theme specification, the MIME types specification and the desktop files specification (application launcher definitions).

To install the desktop integration on such systems, download the .rpm for your system (X86 or X86_64) and use the following command (root password probably will be asked):

su -c 'rpm -Uvh  libreoffice3.x-freedesktop-menus-3.3.1.noarch.rpm'


Setting Up a Language Pack

After you installed your language pack (follow the same instructions as followed from Installing the main (en-US) pack - note that you will not need to do the Desktop Integration step again) you will need to setup your LibreOffice suite so it will recognize you language.


Start one of the LibreOffice applications – Writer, for instance.
Go to the menu and select Tools >> Options.

In the Options dialog box, click on Language Settings and then click on Languages. Dropdown the User interface list and select the language you just installed. If you want, do the same thing for the Locale setting, the Default currency, and the Default languages for documents.

After adjusting those settings, click on OK. The dialog box will close, and you will see an information message telling you that your changes will only be activated after you exit LibreOffice and start it again (remember to also exit the QuickStarter if it is running).

The next time you start LibreOffice, it will start in the language you just installed. For example if you installed pt-Br (Brazilian Portuguese) when you start your LibreOffice, the splash screen will show the all familiar BrOffice. Nice isn't it?


Un-Installing LibreOffice

Un-installing a previous version when you install an upgraded one helps prevent conflicts. Usually upgrades are dealt with by the same tool that deals with updates but this seldom works for alpha or beta testing pre-release versions.

As seen in the installation process, Linux Distros have come a long way to make un-installing software as easy as possible.

Open your system´s package manager and find the search tool.

Search for libreoffice.

Deselect or select for removal the first package found, the package manager tool will (hopefully) ask if it should remove other packages, as we of LibreOffice packed all we needed in our installation packages, it should be pretty safe to say yes.

Then scroll the list of the search box again to see if all the libreoffice packages are deselected / selected for removal, if you find any of them still not deselected / selected for removal, remove those, and continue to remove them until all are removed (in testing environments it was necessary no more than 3 of these steps).

At some point you will be prompted to un-install packages that start with libobasis3, it is recommended that you un-install these too (if you are not prompted, do a search with the term libobasis3 to see if you find anything)

After you apply these changes the LibreOffice suite should have been removed from your system, to make sure try to find any menu entries, and to be double sure type in a terminal:

libreoffice

If the LibreOffice splash screen appears you can try to find any packages left behind in the package manager, if you made double sure there aren´t any, do a reboot and try the above command again.

After you have un-installed all the packages and the above command returns an error "no such command" (or does nothing), you could try to see if LibreOffice left anything behind: To ensure the cleanest possible removal of a previous installation of LibreOffice, you can optionally also execute the following command in a terminal window, and then manually delete any remaining files discovered:

locate libreoffice | less

or

 find / -name "libreoffice"  -print 2>/dev/nul

Skipping this optional step will not have any serious consequences for your system (not even for a future install or upgrade to LibreOffice). You will just have a small number of obsolete files taking up a very small amount of disk space.


Terminal Based Un-Install

Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt-get purge libreoffice?

or

sudo aptitude purge libreoffice? 
Fedora
su -c 'yum remove libreoffice*'
Mandriva
su -c 'urpme libreoffice*'
openSUSE and other RPM based systems
rpm -ev --allmatches libreoffice


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