Jan 4, 2011 14:51 GMT  ·  By

Matthias Klose announced yesterday, January 3rd, some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release.

As we've announced a few months ago, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, said that future versions of the Ubuntu operating system will ship with the new LibreOffice open source office suite. Therefore, the Ubuntu developers started the transition of the outdated OpenOffice.org packages to the new LibreOffice ones.

"The OOo packaging is only available for version 3.2.1, there doesn't exist any packaging for 3.3 based on our ooo-build packaging. ooo-build is now used in LO, and the packaging is converted to use LO. The uno framework is one of the basic things which is shared with the OOo packaging, and I don't see any easy way how to make the two uno frameworks from both source packages available."

"The consequence is that the old OOo packages are removed/replaced with the installation of the LO packages. As long as we want to update to *O 3.3 there currently is no other way than to go with LO." - said Matthias Klose in the announcement.

In October 2010 a number of OpenOffice developers created the Document Foundation group, based around OpenOffice.org, which would oversee the development of the LibreOffice open source office suite, an OpenOffice.org fork.

Matthias Klose also added: "The OOo packaging did accumulate a lot of changes, hacks and workarounds, which I didn't apply to the LO packaging, plus some Ubuntu specific changes are not yet ported to LO 3.3. As long as there is no LibreOffice package in Ubuntu, these issues are tracked in Launchpad. If you report new issues, please tag these issues with `lo33'."

Don't forget to visit our website on February 2nd, when the second Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system will be available for testing.

Ubuntu 11.04 will feature Mozilla Firefox 4 and Linux kernel 2.6.38.