[SOLVED] libreoffice not working on latest ktown on sw64-current; how to roll back to 4.10.5?

michaelslack · 12-05-2014, 05:38 AM

Dear slackers,

I have recently (for the first time) tried out AlienBOB's latest ktown, on 64-bit current. It has been chugging along without incident, until I went to open libreoffice, which didn't open in fact.

I searched Alien Pastures and found this comment on http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/libr...chromium-news/:

Quote:

If there is anyone who has a solution for LibreOffice being incapable to ignore the system harfbuzz library and use an internal version instead… please let me know. It annoys the hell out of me that I can not use the updated harfbuzz in my ‘ktown‘ repository without breaking LibreOffice.

...so I guess this is a known issue.

My 6 year old daughter has started using Microsoft Word at school and I'd really love to be able to get her just as excited using libreoffice at home on this machine (calligra words is too different-looking...I'm hoping libreoffice is not..).

So does anyone know

if there is a known fix for libreoffice in this situation (i.e. in latest ktown on 64-bit current) or
if there is a quick summary of how to roll back from ktown to the version of KDE in sw64-current?

Ideally I would prefer the first option but this may not be possible at present.

I could probably reverse engineer the second option by carefully going through AlienBOB's README for upgrading to ktown, but there is a very good chance I might miss a step or some other package; if someone has worked it out already though that would be cool.

Thanks in advance,

Michael

PS I've got libreoffice-4.3.4-x86_64-1alien installed.

bassmadrigal · 12-05-2014, 06:49 AM

Probably the easiest way to roll back in with slackpkg. It can put all your upgraded system packages back to stock -current. Just make sure that the kde/alien/ktown builds aren't blacklisted.

Alien Bob · 12-05-2014, 07:25 AM

Your issues will be resolved if you just go back to the harfbuzz package that comes with Slackware itself.

Code:

# wget http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64/l/harfbuzz-0.9.16-x86_64-1.txz
# upgradepkg harfbuzz-0.9.16-x86_64-1.txz

Nothing in the new KDE seems to break as a result of that downgrade. At least , I found nothing yet.

Eric

michaelslack · 12-05-2014, 05:06 PM

Thanks very much Eric, it is now working. I appreciate your quick response (I understand you are very busy).

As a quick followup, now of course slackpkg wants to upgrade harfbuzz to the ktown version . My slackpkgplus.conf is as follows:

Code:

REPOPLUS=( slackpkgplus alienbobcurrent alienbob ktown4 ktown5)

PKGS_PRIORITY=( ktown5:.* ktown4:.* )

MIRRORPLUS['alienbob']=http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/sbrepos/14.1/x86_64/
MIRRORPLUS['alienbobcurrent']=http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/sbrepos/current/x86_64/
MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=http://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+/
MIRRORPLUS['ktown4']=http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/latest/x86_64/
MIRRORPLUS['ktown5']=http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86_64/

I'm guessing I need to replace

Code:

ktown5:.*

with

Code:

ktown5:<regexp indicating everything except harfbuzz>

(and similarly for ktown4). However my knowledge of regexps is next-to-nothing (there were no precise mentions of doing something like this in the slackpkg+ README). I tried looking through e.g. http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual but to no avail.

Am I on the right track here and if so do you (or anyone else) know what this regexp should be? Or is there an easier/different solution?

Cheers,

Michael

PS. Blacklisting harfbuzz in /etc/slackpkg/blacklist won't do either since then it will miss the next -current upgrade, right?

EDIT I'll mark this as solved and then ask a separate question about slackpkg+.

Thanks again,

Michael