Debian moves to LibreOffice

June 23rd, 2011

The Debian project is proud to announce that the transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice has now been completed. LibreOffice has already been available for testing and unstable since March and has now been backported to Debian 6.0 Squeeze , too.

Rene Engelhard, Debian's LibreOffice maintainer and member of LibreOffice's Engineering Steering Committee, says: I am sure Debian and its users will benefit greatly from this transition; I expect not only an improved collaboration but also quicker development cycles.

Installation of LibreOffice

Interested users of the current stable release Debian 6.0 Squeeze may add the following line in their /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main

After adding this, perform an update and install the package libreoffice from the squeeze-backports suite using the package management software of your choice (e.g. apt-get update ; apt-get install -t squeeze-backports libreoffice ). Previously installed OpenOffice.org packages should be uninstalled automatically. Depending on the used desktop environment, you might also have to install the libreoffice-gtk , libreoffice-gnome or libreoffice-kde packages.

More information on backports can be found on the backports.debian.org webpage.

About LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free software office suite developed by The Document Foundation as a fork of OpenOffice.org.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system .

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.