Debian Dumps OpenOffice for LibreOffice

Joining the ever-growing list of Linux distributions jumping the sinking OpenOffice.org ship for the safety of LibreOffice is the irreplaceable Debian. LibreOffice has been in testing since March, but as of today it's available for stable 6.0 as well.

The announcement included a quote from Rene Engelhard, Debian's LibreOffice maintainer and member of LibreOffice's Engineering Steering Committee. He said, "I am sure Debian and its users will benefit greatly from this transition; I expect not only an improved collaboration but also quicker development cycles."

It also included the easy instructions. Add deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and perform a apt-get update ; apt-get install -t squeeze-backports libreoffice.

The version of LibreOffice provided by Debian is 3.3.2. Documentation, localization, and desktop specific integration packages are also available. These are available in amd64, armel, i386, ia64, kfreebsd-amd64, kfreebsd-i386, mipsel, and sparc architectures.

Other distributions that provide LibreOffice are Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS (in repos), openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Sabayon, Mageia, and many others.

LibreOffice 3.4.0 was release on June 1 and version 3.4.1 is expected June 29. Stable version 3.3.3 was released June 15.