How to install LibreOffice in a directory (in Linux)?

So you want to grab the latest version of LibreOffice or the bleeding-edge beta of LibreOffice?

How do you install these if you want to test them first, or just try out the pre-release/beta?

There is a helpful how-to on how to run different versions of OpenOffice.org, which applies to LibreOffice.

Here is how we do it.

  1. Suppose we want to try out a LibreOffice pre-release. We select the Linux .deb packages (either 32-bit or 64-bit, depending on our Linux distribution), and download the relevant LibO_3.4.0beta1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar file.
  2. Then, we uncompress with
    • tar xvfz LibO_3.4.0beta1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
  3. We create a new directory, which will be the directory of our new LibreOffice. We can then move it to the final location such as under /opt
    • mkdir libreoffice-prerelease
    • cd libreoffice-prereleaseLibO_3.4.0beta1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US/DEBS/
  4. We run the command that extracts all files from the DEB archives, (a similar command exists for RPM files)
    • for i in ../LibO_3.4.0beta1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US/DEBS/*deb; do dpkg-deb -x $i . ; done
  5. We can now run our extracted LibreOffice using the command
    • opt/libreoffice/program/soffice

We can move around the opt/libreoffice directory to a more permanent location, if we wish to. That’s it!

 

 

Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/how-to-install-libreoffice-in-a-directory-in-linux/

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