How to install multiple versions of LibreOffice?

Because of a problem reported here, possibly a bug, I have to use LibreOffice 3.5.

But I would like to keep an eye on the latest version, which might even solve that problem.

I would like to use the latest 4.x version beside 3.5. (not in a virtual box or in wine)

That is: I have already installed 3.5 from a deb package. How to install now the 4.x version without conflicts? I imagine I could uninstall 3.5 and put 4.0 in place and then try to install 3.5 separately. But how?

Solution 1:

This is based on this tutorial, recommended by Glutanimate in a comment to the question for making a 'local' installation of a specific version.

I will consider only the case of the deb files package (there are multiple such files archived in a package).

• To get the latest versions go here.

• To get other versions go here. (I found about this address from here.)

• Unpack the archive. You'll get a folder, and in it another called 'DEBS' with many deb files.

• Create a folder called 'install' (optional name) inside the 'DEBS' folder.

• Open a terminal window inside the 'install' folder. In that terminal, run:

for i in ../*.deb; do dpkg-deb -x $i . ; done

A new folder named "opt" is thus created there with several other folders and files that contain the entire LibreOffice installation.

If you don't want your existing LO configuration to be affected by the parallel installation you will have to change the user profile location of the new install.

To do so open up the bootstraprc file located at ./install/opt/libreoffice/program/ in a text editor. You might have to change the file permissions first to be able to read and write to the file (right click on file → Properties → Permissions). Then change the UserInstallation entry to:

UserInstallation=$ORIGIN/..

To run Writer find and execute something like DEBS/install/opt/libreoffice4.0/program/swriter. The others (sdraw, smath, scalc, simpress etc) are in the same directory.

In this way, multiple versions of LibreOffice can be used in parallel, even opened at the same time.

Solution 2:

For that to work i suggest you compile it by hand. That way you can use the stable 3.5 version and the bleeding-edge 4.x version. So you install the stable version with using apt and the new one using the repo.

Take a look at this guide.

Just be sure to checkout the right tag of libreoffice-core for the version you want to build.

It is important to add the --prefix=<some-folder> argument to the autogen.sh command, to prevent conflicts with the current installation. For example :

./autogen.sh --prefix=/home/username/my_progs

Good luck!