One of many
advantages of open source projects is for sure the eternal transition
and evolutionary progress. This keeps people like my self busy just
following the changes.
Last week I was
asked to help a large organization prepare their LibreOffice install
package for Windows and I thought “Cool – that gonna take about
half an hour”. -Wrong!
The Windows
installation parameters has been changed and as always it takes quite
some time to find the documentation. You can find some documentation
here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Deployment_and_Migration
But have ind mind that parameters has changed over time so you can't
trust all of it.
The idea of
installing all modules ( ADDLOCAL=ALL) and the remove individual
modules ( REMOVE=gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Fr, ….) is still valid. But
choosing language for the GUI is a little easier than before
(UI_LANGS=en_US,da). Earlier you had to add all the language codes to
the string and then choose your choice for each (… IS1030=1
IS1031=0 …).
Below is an example
that installs LibreOffice in Danish and US English with some but not
all dictionaries:
msiexec /qn /i
C:\[path_to_install]\LibreOffice_4.3.2.2_Win_x86.msi
/l* C:\[path_to_logs]\libreoffice_install_log.txt UI_LANGS=en_US,da
CREATEDESKTOPLINK=1 ALLUSERS=1 RebootYesNo=No ADDLOCAL=ALL
ISCHECKFORPRODUCTUPDATES=0 QUICKSTART=0
REMOVE=gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Fr,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Es,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Sr,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Pt_Br,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_It,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Af,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_An,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Ar,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Be,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Bg,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Bn,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Br,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Bs,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Pt_Pt,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Ca,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Cs,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_De,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Nl,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Et,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Gd,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Gl,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Gu,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_He,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Hi,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Hu,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Ru,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Lt,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Lv,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Ne,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_No,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Is,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Oc,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Pl,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Ro,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Si,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Lo,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Sk,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Sl,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_El,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Hr,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Sv,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Te,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Th,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Uk,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Vi,gm_r_ex_Dictionary_Zu
Some other things
that has been improved dramatically is the new way of handling
settings. In earlier versions settings could be manipulated by
installing an extension with some XML-files. Nice but not perfect as
you had to distribute files to each and every computer.
From LibreOffice 4.2
its possible to change settings through the Windows Registry and this
can be managed through one or more Group Policies in the Active
Directory or similar adminsitration system.
Read more about that
here:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.2#Windows_Registry_changes. You can find some more detailed examples here: http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/29537/42-registry-configuration-backend-not-applying-all-settings/.
I needed to make two
small changes:
-
Set “Warn alien format” to “false” and lock the setting.
-
Set “Macro security level” to “High” and lock the settings
All I needed to do
was to create two new keys in the Windows Registry and push this
through a new Group Policy to the machines:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\LibreOffice\org.openoffice.Office.Common\Save\Document\WarnAlienFormat] "Value"="false" "Final"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\LibreOffice\org.openoffice.Office.Common\Security\Scripting\MacroSecurityLevel] "Value"="2" "Final"=dword:00000001
I must say this is a much easier approach than the extension method
and it makes the whole setup much more flexible since we don't need
to handle extensions on each computer anymore.
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