Libreoffice 5.0 was finally released last week with a host of improvements and bug fixes which makes it the best ever iteration of the software and certainly the best free Office Suite out there.
New Features and Improvements
Some of the new features and under-the-hood fixes contained in this release of LibreOffice include:
- Improvements to menu and sidebar
- Better management of screen space
- Cleaner user interface and new icons
- Enterprise-ready Calc with new functions, complex formulae, image cropping, table addressing. better conditional formatting and more
- Better HiDPI support
- Time-stamping of PDF documents generated with LibreOffice
- Better filters for dcouments
- Better integration of Microsoft Office and Apple iWork documents
- Over 25,000 bug fixes
For more information: see the official release announcement.
Requirements
Before you attempt this installation, please make sure your system passes the following requirements:
- At least 1.55GB hard disk space available
- Linux Kernel 2.6.18 or higher
- 256MB of RAM (recommended minimum should be 512MB)
- glibc2 2.10 or higher
- gtk 2.10 or higher
Also, if you have an older version of libreoffice, you need to uninstall it before installing this lastest version.
Just run the following command to do so:
sudo apt-get remove libreoffice
Installation
Here’s how to install LibreOffice 5.0 in Debian, Ubuntu 15.04/14.04/12.04 and derivatives (e.g. Elementary OS Freya/Luna, Linux Mint).
For 32-bit systems
Download the packages.
wget http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/5.0.0/deb/x86/LibreOffice_5.0.0_Linux_x86_deb.tar.gz
Extract the packages.
tar -xvf LibreOffice_5.0.0_Linux_x86_deb.tar.gz
Change directory to the newly created LibreOffice folder.
cd LibreOffice_5.0.0.5_Linux_x86_deb
Installing the packages:
run the following command from the LibreOffice directory:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
For 64-bit systems
Download the packages.
wget http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/5.0.0/deb/x86_64/LibreOffice_5.0.0_Linux_x86-64_deb.tar.gz
Extract the packages.
tar -xvf LibreOffice_5.0.0_Linux_x86-64_deb.tar.gz
Change directory to the newly created LibreOffice folder.
cd LibreOffice_5.0.0.5_Linux_x86-64_deb
Installing the packages:
run the following command from the LibreOffice directory:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
Install LibreOffice 5.0 Via PPA
You can also install LibreOffice 5.0 via PPA if you prefer. Just run the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-5-0 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Once installation is complete, you should be able to find the new icons in your applications menu. Alternatively, you can launch LibreOffice 5.0 from the terminal with the following command:
libreoffice5.0
Conclusion
Most distro are pretty fast in updating the software in their repositories to the latest version. However, if you are not patient enough to wait for your Linux distro update, the above instructions should help you to install LibreOffice 5 in your Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based distro.
Ayo Isaiah is a freelance writer from Lagos who loves everything technology with a particular interest in open-source software. Follow him on Twitter.
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