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LibreOffice.org RPMs in a yum friendly format

26th April 2012
As a result of my recent work on LibreOffice RPMs for EL6 and several discussions on the CentOS mailing list I decided to set up a yum repository with the RPM packages officially released by The Document Foundation.
Why? Because sometimes the people, even the EL kind, want the latest and greatest[1]. Plus, this one should really be easy to mantain as all the hard work is done by the Document Foundation, I just do some untarring and createrepo.
What I do basically is download all their tarballs, decompress, put all the RPMs in a nice repository for 32 and 64 bit arches then call them all nicely from a "meta-package" I entitled libreoffice.org, after the source web site. I also create meta-packages for the localisation RPMs, so everyone can have LibreOffice in their native language only a "yum install" away.
This should also be great with keeping up to date as newer packages will be installed when "yum update" runs and if we manage to get delta rpms working then updates will also be in the megabytes, not hundred of megabytes.

Trade-offs? Yes, some:
1. No Selinux integration. This doesn't seem a problem just yet, but could become in the future.
2. These packages do not play nicely with the stock ones, so the one from the distribution need to be removed... but this only is needed once.

To use this repo do the following:
- uninstall the stock packages: yum remove openoffice* libreoffice*
- install the repo: rpm -ivh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/libreoffice.org-rpms/el6/x86_64/nux-libreoffice.org-rpms-release-0-1.el6.nux.noarch.rpm
- install the software: yum install libreoffice.org

If you need to install additional localised support do it like this:
yum install libreoffice.org-ro
or
yum install libreoffice.org-en-GB ... and so on; you can run "yum info libreoffice.org-*" to see all the packages.


This should work on RHEL, CentOS, ScientificLinux, Fedora and other distros based on those.

If you run into issues or have suggestions get in touch at rpm at li.nux.ro.



[1] - For the more patient of you RHEL 6.3 will bring LibreOffice 3.4.5 which should satisfy many people.
Tags: libreoffice, libreoffice.org, repo, rpm, yum. | No comments