How to Install LibreOffice 4.0 in Ubuntu 12.04

Hi there! I don't know if you've heard about it but this week we had some great news for the open source community and Linux: LibreOffice 4.0 has just been released. :) I'm not going to describe all the new features and improvements since you'll get a better glance at them by visiting the release notes. I'll just point out four of them which I think to be the most significant:

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

1. Better interoperability - Interoperability with other file formats is a very important feature for any user and a critical one for enterprise users;
2. Remote control Android app for presentations - a month ago I was just discussing with my brother how this would be cool to do and gladly the LibreOffice development team made it a reality. Now you can control and view the presentations simultaneously in your Android phone or tablet;
3. Preetier User Interface - it now supports Firefox Themes. Now you can customize the looks of your Libreoffice instalation;
4. Better Performance - faster, faster and... did I already say faster?

Before installing LibreOffice 4.0 you'll have to remove any previous instalation of LibreOffice. To do that open Synaptic and remove all packages with "libreoffice" in their name. After that, let's see how to install this great achievement of the open source community:

1. The first thing to do is to go here and choose your system's architecture. My laptop has Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit installed so I chose the "Linux (deb) x86_64" option. After that, choose your language and then version 4.0.0. 
2. Now you should be seeing three green boxes that you can click to download three different files. Download the three files.
3. When the downloads are completed, extract all of them. Don't worry about the location of the extracted files since you'll be able to delete them once the instalation is complete.
4. Open a terminal and enter the folder of the main installer and then enter the DEBS folder. Once you're there enter the following command:

   sudo dpkg -i *.deb

5. The next thing to do is to enter the folder named desktop_integration and run the same command:

   sudo dpkg -i *.deb

6. Now it's time to install the translated user interface package. Using the terminal go to the folder with the extracted files, enter the DEBS folder and run the previous command again:

   sudo dpkg -i *.deb

7. Finally, we'll install the LibreOffice built-in help. Using the terminal go to the folder with the extracted files, enter the DEBS folder and... run the same command one last time:

   sudo dpkg -i *.deb

8. And that's it! You should now have LibreOffice 4.0 installed in your system! :)

Take care!

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