LibreOffice Is Now Integrated in Unity for Ubuntu 11.04

Bjoern Michaelsen from the Canonical's development team managed to integrate Ubuntu's 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) default office suite, LibreOffice 3.3, with Unity's global menubar.

The Document Foundation write a post on their blog a couple of days ago, welcoming Canonical‘s contributions to the LibreOffice development. In particular they are welcoming Bjoern Michaelsen's LibreOffice improvements.

As you know, the next version of the Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu 11.04, will have a completely revamped desktop, powered by Unity, which has a global menubar for all the applications installed in Ubuntu.

Software such as Mozilla Firefox 4 or Mozilla Thunderbird 3 are already integrated with the global menubar, and until now, LibreOffice's menus were not displayed on Unity's Application Menubar. Thanks to Bjoern Michaelsen we now have LibreOffice's menus shown on the global menubar...

LibreOffice integration with Unity - Image courtesy of Bjoern Michaelsen

"I just rolled the first release. It has plenty of bugs and memory leaks, and kenvandine just told me it crashes on 64bits, but it's a start and the basic info publishing and command dispatching is there."

"I expect to get it into shape in the upcoming weeks. I'm focusing on avoiding memory leaks and covering some corner cases with window handling at this point. Then I'll take care of shortcuts and getting some missing information of each item." - said Bjoern Michaelsen on his blog.

LibreOffice 3.3 is only one of the nice features prepared by Canonical for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 release. Natty Narwhal will be powered by Linux kernel 2.6.38 and it will be built on top of GNOME 3.

Don't forget to visit our website on March 3rd, when the third and last Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system will be available for testing and more features will be unveiled.

LibreOffice 3.3.1 has been released today. Download it now from Softpedia.