Install LibreOffice In Ubuntu From A Launchpad PPA Repository

LibreOffice finally got an Ubuntu PPA so it's now a lot easier to install and stay up to date with the latest LibreOffice versions.

While the LibreOffice website does offer .deb files for download, it's usually better to use a PPA for this since you'll always get the latest LibreOffice version automatically, like any other update. Further more, the LibreOffice packages in this official LibreOffice Ubuntu PPA are backported from Natty so they come with all the patches/optimizations applied to LibreOffice for Ubuntu.

Important notice: to install LibreOffice you must remove OpenOffice so you cannot have both in the same time!

To remove OpenOffice, add the LibreOffice Ubuntu PPA and install it in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and 11.04 Natty Narwhal, use the following commands:

sudo apt-get remove openoffice*.*
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libreoffice

The LibreOffice PPA currently provides LibreOffice 3.3.1 for Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04.

Please note that it takes a while until the latest LibreOffice versions are added to the LibreOffice PPA but they eventually are uploaded so please be patient - it takes a while to update the patches for Ubuntu and so on.

To integrate Libreoffice with your desktop environment, also install the following package:

- GNOME:

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gnome

- KDE:

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-kde

When removing OpenOffice, the spellchecker and the language support package are also removed. Get these packages back to use with LibreOffice by installing the following package (thanks to Paul for the tip!):

sudo apt-get install language-support-en

You can replace "-en" with your language in the above command.

Thanks to red-blue.it for the LibreOffice PPA and instructions