OOo 3.1.1 Released, No More Manual Fix

OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 has been released and it is now being distributed to the mirror site around the world. It's just a matter of time before it will be officially announced and the download link is displayed on the download page.

As usual, on every OOo release, i would post a simple HOWTO to upgrade to the latest OOo. First of all, download the OpenOffice.org binary code (OOo_3.1.1_LinuxIntel_install_en-US.tar.gz). Next, extract using tar -xzvf OOo_3.1.1_LinuxIntel_install_en-US.tar.gz. Go to the RPMS directory and use rpm2tgz to convert the RPMs into tgz packages.

When you are done, remove the old packages by issuing this command:
cd /var/log/packages
removepkg ooobasis-* openoffice.org*

Next, go back to the RPMS directory and then install it using rpm2tgz. In the past, i had to manually fix the application due to truncation caused by the old version of tar used by rpm2tgz. Thanks to Pat, the rpm2tgz has been changed to use makepkg instead of tar on -Current

a/rpm2tgz-1.1-i486-1.txz: Upgraded. Make .tgz with makepkg, not tar.

This has fixed the truncation issues, so my post on the previous post is no longer needed. You can now enjoy OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 on Slackware

New features in OpenOffice.org 3.1

OpenOffice.org rocks! Big time. The OpenOffice.org office suite which comes bundled with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex which I am running on my machine, is version 2.4 even though version 3.0 has been released for some time now. But supposedly big things are happening in the yet to be officially released OpenOffice.org 3.1.

Some of the visual enhancements being - Antialiasing of images making them smooth, improvements in charts, grammar checking and hyperlinks management, just to name a few. Will OpenOffice.org 3.1 be a Microsoft Office 2007 killer ? May be not. But it is closing the gap by leaps and bounds passing each (minor) version release. More over, it can be obtained by one and all at an unbeatable price - Free.

Learn more about the new features being introduced in OpenOffice.org 3.1 which is due to be officially released 63 days hence.