14 DAY TRIAL // The Document Foundation has announced that the first Release Candidate version for LibreOffice 4.2.3 is now available for all platforms and is ready for testing.
The developers from The Document Foundation have been rather busy these days and released two different versions, a stable one, 4.2.2, and a new Release Candidate for the 4.2.3 branch.
Even if the stable version has been pushed out the door, that doesn't mean that the developers don't have anything to implement in the next point release. For example, embedding images into HTML files that would enable people to send mails with images in HTML format is a feature that's currently being improved.
Also, as it was to be expected, numerous significant improvements have been implemented for the interoperability with Microsoft Word's DOCX format, the Calc application has also received quite a few improvements, the Statistics function is now working a lot better, and the formula engine has been improved.
Other important changes include a negative error bar range export fix, an improved printer list, better handling of base64 images, a fix for a crash that occurred when importing unsupported macro content, a correct command for the “show grid” command, a new SVG header that is used when exporting via MTF, a fix for the timing of slide transitions, better loose selection, and a number of performance improvements across the board.
If you are running an Ubuntu-based system, you will be able to get the new version of LibreOffice from the official PPA. This being said, you need to be careful because you can't have a stable and a development release installed and running at the same time. This means that you will need to purge the previous installation before getting the new version.
It's quite possible that the PPA hasn't been updated yet with the new version, but it should be available soon.
Open a terminal and enter the following commands (keep in mind that you will have to remove LibreOffice-core and you will need root access):
sudo apt-get purge libreoffice-core sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-prereleases sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libreoffice The Document Foundation also provides the sources if you want to compile your own version, but as usual, we have to caution you about doing so. It has a lot of dependencies and something is usually bound to go wrong. You would be better off installing from a repository or waiting for a stable version.
Download LibreOffice 4.2.3 RC1 for Linux Download LibreOffice 4.2.3 RC1 for Windows Download LibreOffice 4.2.3 RC1 for Mac OS X
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.