Tuesday 9 November 2010

Trying out the LibreOffice build

In case you haven't heard, there was a little fork of the OpenOffice project not too long ago. They can explain the reasons for it a whole lot better than I can, so I'm not going to. Normally, I never built OpenOffice on Gentoo because I knew it would take a darn long time, and the pre-built 32-bit binaries worked well enough. With the fork, I decided to try it out anyway.

It's somewhat easier to do with the instructions for LibreOffice. Download a bootstrapping tarball, and run a few commands. It's not as easy as the usual ./configure; make; make install, but pretty close.

First step is to configure and download all the dependencies. I tried to make it use as many system libraries as I could so as to limit the build size/time. The largest one left was Firefox/xulrunner which seemingly isn't built with the correct flags on Fedora. So that all took up about 2-3GB. Then a "quick" make later, and voila:

It only 4 hours 20 minutes to build. After building, it all took up a mere 7GB or so. It turns out that the install instructions on the Get Involved page are incorrect, but the wiki How to Build page is. So I used make dev-install and everything ends up in ./build/install/. Unlike what it says in the wiki, the makefile does not print the location of the final install. Fortunately, it wasn't too hard to find, in ./build/install/program. Run cd ./build/install/program; . ./ooenv; ./soffice.bin -writer and there you go:

Now I just have to figure out something to contribute.

1 comment:

kayabuki said...
This comment has been removed by the author.