Open Source

The first release candidate for LibreOffice 4.1, the free and open source office productivity suite, has been released, according to The H Online.

LibreOffice’s developers have released the RC1 version with release notes listing 61 bugs that have been fixed since the version’s Beta 2 publication a fortnight ago.

This is the first of 3 release candidates scheduled between now and 22 July when the final release of LibreOffice 4.1 should take place.

Due to the integration of libmwaw, LibreOffice 4.1 will also be able to handle legacy Mac formats from pre-Mac OS X applications such as Microsoft Word for Mac 5.1, Write Now 4.0, MacWrite Pro 1.5 and AppleWorks 6.0.

LibreOffice 4.1.0 RC1 is available from the LibreOffice pre-releases downloads page. As with all pre-release builds, the developers do not recommend LibreOffice 4.1.0 RC1 for “mission critical” tasks.

With the migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, public sector organisations in Italy’s mostly German-speaking South Tyrol region are making their first major steps towards using freien software. Over the coming 3 years, will convert 7,000 PC workstations and thus save some €600,000 in licensing fees.

Free software gained entry to Italian public sector organisations just under 20 years ago, but has so far only gained a niche presence. This has now come to an end as all public sector organisations in the South Tyrol shall in future be using the LibreOffice instead of Microsoft’s proprietary paid-for office suite. Over the next 3 years the regional government alone will be converting 7,000 computer workstations to the free software package, in addition to which several thousand more workstations in municipalities and the health sector will also be migrated.

“With the introduction of free software for standard applications, this of course means saving for us, but not just that by a long way: free software also makes us more flexible and flexibility is of major importance in a quickly changing field such as IT”, says Alderman Roberto Bizzo, the member of the regional assembly with responsibility for IT, on the philosophy associated with the change to free software.

Bizzo, Kurt Pöhl, head of the regional government’s IT department, free software expert Patrick Ohnewein of TIS and trade unionist Erwin Pfeifer gave a presentation yesterday the public sector’s new software strategy.

A working group was established in February in which TIS’ experts – in concert with the regional government, municipalities and the health sector – sounded out how free software could be used in all public sector organisations. The result of the consultations is the gradual introduction of free software, starting with LibreOffice. The ODF format has also been defined as the standard public sector document exchange format.

Read the original press release in German or Italian.

LibreOffice developer Fridrich Strba has announced that the second beta of the forthcoming LibreOffice 4.1.0, which is planned for release between 22 and 28 June, is ready for testing.

One new feature now allows users to rotate images in Writer, several translations have been improved and a number of bugs have been fixed. The image rotation feature was implemented by Tomaz Vajngerl, who closed a feature request that had been open since early 2011.

LibreOffice 4.1.0 will include a number of new features, such as embedded fonts. This has been called the “most important feature” in the forthcoming release and allows users to include the fonts used in a document within the document, preventing text being displayed differently on systems where the original fonts are not available. This can happen when non-system or custom fonts are used and they have not been installed on the operating system of the reader.

The change log contains a detailed list of all the bugs which have been fixed in LibreOffice 4.1.0 beta 2.

This latest beta release can be downloaded from LibreOffice for testing on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (deb and RPM packages) platforms.