The next major LibreOffice version, 3.4, means some work for (Linux distribution, and other) packagers, as the build repo is now deprecated and packagers are suggested to use the bootstrap repo directly, which is a different build system.

On one hand, this is a nice cleanup - there is now a single configure script. OTOH this needs major rework of distro build scripts.

The interesting part here is that the official binary installers are not using the make DESTDIR=/some/path install method to install the compiled binaries, so it was discovered quite late that it wasn’t working properly. First Hanno and Petr worked on this, then I fixed a minor, but blocking glitch.

As a result 3.4 beta4 will be something packagers (even the ones not using the split build) can offer to distro users for testing without patching. Binaries for Frugalware users here (i686-only at the moment).

I just got the mail about my LibreOffice proposal got accepted to Google Summer of Code 2011. I’m looking forward to an exciting summer. :)

LibreOffice 3.4 will have a new feature, if you edit styles in Writer, then you can test your style changes without manually closing and opening the style edit dialog again.

Do you like this feature? There are still similar remaining dialogs to improve like this, send in a patch!

We recently merged KDE 4.6 in Frugalware -current and since now it uses upower, it catches the sleep button of my netbook. The problem is that it tried to suspend instead of hibernation - what I wanted.

The trick is easy, but not really obvious. First, I disabled suspend/hibernate in /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.upower.policy so that I can play with this without actually hibernating/suspending the system.

Second, I went to System Settings → Input actions → Global, selected "KDE services" and there you can see Suspend and Hibernate as well. Go to Hibernate, and set a custom shortcut: it will ask if you want to remove the sleep button from Suspend - the answer is obviously yes.

Done!

I got a report about two problems which got fixed in master now.

The first error is triggered, if you have special (in RTF terms, so for example { or }) characters in style names. The result was not so friendly when you opened such a document:

After applying the first fix, the document was imported but the original Тест text was replaced by something non-unicode:

The second fix addresses this, and now the result is the expected one:

There was a thread about this topic already, but just refusing to commit new files without documentation sounded too aggressive. So the current code just prints a warning.

It was also requested to show some good/bad examples. Lubos volunteered to add detailed instructions in the wiki, so I’m just describing in short what did I test so far.

A good example:

A bad example:

Example output when a warning is emitted:

Yesterday I enabled udev support in our LVM package, and that means LVM volumes under systemd not work as expected. Thanks to Lennart for the quick answer. :)

Just a FYI:

I’ve got a report which turned out to be two separate issues. One is a regression from Go-OO 3.2.x, this post is about this part. The other part is about the improvement of both the import/export RTF filter, the bug has some detail on that part as well.

So the problem was that wrapped images (when the image is a frame and not a character) had some extremely small height. I did not notice this bug in LO as an LO-specific extension hides that value, but in Word you can see it:

The fix is to use the height of the containing frame instead of the height of the picture itself, then it’ll look fine:

Yesterday I bought a HP LaserJet Pro P1566 printer. The device itself is nice, supported by foo2zjs, though of course that support is unofficial. I was curious what do they offer a "Linux support" on their website, since the case of the printer mentions Linux support. And I had to use the above picture to select my country.