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?
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.
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!
The Document Foundation wiki contains a dedicated help page for installing multiple versions of LibreOffice:
I understand that "link-only" answers are frowned upon, but better to point to that documentation (which will be refreshed), than provide a dubious copy/paste here (which could readily go stale).
Another imo simpler way of having different versions of Libreoffice installed alongside, is to install one version using apt and the other one using snap. Whit this approach I have now LO 6.4.6 vía apt and LO 7.0.4.2 via snap.
lucas@lucas:~$ apt list libreoffice -a
Listing... Done
libreoffice/focal-updates,now 1:6.4.6-0ubuntu0.20.04.1 amd64 [installed]
libreoffice/focal 1:6.4.2-0ubuntu3 amd64
lucas@lucas:~$ snap list | grep libreoffice
libreoffice 7.0.4.2 204 latest/stable canonical* -
It does not look like the LibreOffice packages natively support multiple versions installed concurrently. It may sound like overkill, but the simplest, most maintainable option is probably to install the 4.x version inside a VirtualBox guest Ubuntu system. That way you would have access to both versions without having to worry about compiling and re-compiling as new 4.x versions are released.
