Document Foundation announces second LibreOffice 3.4 beta

Just one week after the first beta arrived, the Document Foundation has announced the release of a second beta for version 3.4 of its open source LibreOffice office suite. Pending a third beta and multiple release candidates, the final version of LibreOffice 3.4 is scheduled to be released on 2 May 2011.

According to the change log, the second beta for LibreOffice 3.4 includes a number of fixes for the Calc spreadsheet program and the Writer word processor, as well as updates to libs-gui, the LibreOffice GUI Libraries, that address crashing bugs and various changes to libs-core, the LibreOffice Core Libraries. As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More information, including links to a list of known issues and details on how to help with funding the Foundation, can be found in a post on the Document Foundation blog by Florian Effenberger, a member of the Foundation's Steering Committee. LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 2 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the project's QA builds download page. The latest stable release of LibreOffice is version 3.3.2, a maintenance and bug fix update from late March.

LibreOffice forked from the OpenOffice.org office suite following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the original copyright holders of the name and main sponsors of the project. LibreOffice source code is licensed under the LGPL version 3.

See also:

• Document Foundation restates LibreOffice goals, a report from The H.
• Oracle: OpenOffice.org to become "a Community-based Project", a report from The H.
• OpenOffice.org 3.4 Beta released, a report from The H.

(crve)