Who makes the best office suite? You do!

At the tail end of October, LibreOffice is headed to Seattle, WA for SeaGL, “a grassroots technical conference dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about the GNU/Linux community and free/libre/open-source software/hardware.” While we’re hanging out in Washington, we’re planning to have a LibreFest — a community event to bring users, developers, and contributors from the Seattle area together to help LibreOffice by squashing bugs, writing code, and increasing public awareness of this amazing Free Software office suite. The LibreFest will take place on Sunday, October 26th at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At the LibreFest, we’re planning to have two tracks available:

A Bug Triaging Bee — A fun, community exercise for people of all experience levels, from newcomers to experienced QA Engineers

— A fun, community exercise for people of all experience levels, from newcomers to experienced QA Engineers A Hackfest — For developers and programmers interested in eliminating bugs and implementing new features

Testing bugs and writing code takes a lot of concentration, so we’ll have plenty of free food and drink available to keep you fueled up and working at peak efficiency. We’ll also be giving out LibreOffice Contributor T-shirts to all participants, as a thank-you for your hard work!

To Sign Up, send an email to qubit [at] libreoffice.org with your Name and T-Shirt size. Let us know if you’re interested in the Bug Triaging Bee, the Hackfest, or both!

For more information, please see the Seattle LibreFest event page.

Bug Triaging Bee

Back in the day, communities got together to help accomplish big tasks such as logging an area or shucking thousands of ears of corn. These were called “bees“, and would be announced as a Logging Bee or a Corn-husking Bee. Given that LibreOffice has nearly 1000 bugs that need to be confirmed and triaged right now, we figured it was a perfect time to hold a Bug Triaging Bee, invite all of our friends, and get a bunch of work accomplished in a short period of time!

At the start of the day, we’ll have a short introduction to the software and procedures we use to triage bugs in LibreOffice. Bugzilla may seem a little imposing at first, but we’ll have you up and running in no time!

Triaging bugs is one of the easiest ways to get started with LibreOffice QA. Once you’ve got the hang of using Bugzilla and testing out reported problems, we can introduce you to advanced tools like Bibisect, strace, and Valgrind. These powerful tools can help you to identify exactly which commit and which line of code is causing a crash or error.

Hackfest

Hackfest participants will get a crash course in building LibreOffice from source and making their first edits to the source code. The senior LibreOffice developers on hand will be more than happy to help you take your first steps in LibreOffice development.

Why wait? Fire up your GNU/Linux laptop and follow our instructions to build LibreOffice today!

Using a Mac or Windows machine? Getting LibreOffice building natively can be tricky, so we’ve come up with a novel solution for hackfests. We’ve created a set of Virtual Machines running LibreOffice in the cloud. Participants can connect to these VMs with VNC and build and test LibreOffice as if they were sitting at a GNU/Linux box themselves!