Ports update: KDE 4.6, OpenOffice and LibreOffice

KDE 4.6

A new update for KDE came out recently: KDE 4.6. Miwi, one of the guys porting KDE to FreeBSD, mentioned on his blog that a FreeBSD port of KDE 4.6 will come out after FreeBSD 8.2 has been released.

The FreeBSD KDE Team is happy to let you know that KDE SC 4.6.0 has been released a few Days ago, and the Release is ready for a public test. Before you ask, no, we do not want to put KDE 4.6.0 in the ports tree before FreeBSD 8.2/7.4 is released.

4.6 comes with a lot of bugfixes, is faster and more responsive. If you can’t wait for the official port, go over to the post (KDE SC 4.6 for FreeBSD) for update instructions.

LibreOffice

As most of you will be aware there was a rift between Oracle and OpenOffice developers, so a number of ex-OpenOffice developers forked OpenOffice and set up LibreOffice, with support from Google, Redhat, Ubuntu etc.

What is the exact difference between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? At the moment, LibreOffice 3.3 is based on OpenOffice 3.3 with some additions, tweaks and improvements, but it is expected that the projects will grow further apart in the future. These are two links comparing OpenOffice and LibreOffice:

• OpenOffice.org vs. LibreOffice (earthweb.com)
• LibreOffice vs OpenOffice (unixmen.com)

LibreOffice 3.3 was released and is now available as FreeBSD port: /usr/ports/editors/libreoffice/. OpenOffice 3.3. can be installed from /usr/ports/editors/openoffice.org-3

LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base.

Oracle doesn’t have a good track record with regards to supporting open source projects (MySQL, OpenOffice, it’s not clear what’s going to happen to VirtualBox (paid extensions?) etc). Personally I think we should support LibreOffice. What do you think?