Raspberry Pi A, User Manual, Page: 155 / 314

C H A P T E R 9
T H E P I A S A P R O D U C T I V I T Y M A C H I N E
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With Chromium installed, using a cloud-based office suite is as simple as visiting the site,
signing up for an account—providing your credit card details in the case of premium services
like Microsoft Office 365—and logging in. If you find performance slow, changing the mem-
ory partitioning to give the ARM processor a larger share can help. Chapter 6, “The Raspberry
Pi Software Configuration Tool”, has full instructions for how to do this.
Using LibreOffice
If you would prefer not to use a cloud-based service, the alternative is to install LibreOffice.
Designed as an open-source, cross-platform alternative to the popular Microsoft Office suite
and based on the OpenOffice.org project, LibreOffice is powerful and offers just as much
functionality as its closed-source inspiration.
That functionality comes at a cost, however. The LibreOffice package is large, taking up nearly
400 MB of space on the Pi’s SD card once all the dependencies are included. That can be a
problem: in its default setup, the recommended Raspbian distribution has less free space
available on the SD card than LibreOffice requires. (For more information on the partition
layout of the Raspbian distribution, see the “File System Layout” section in Chapter 3, “Linux
System Administration”.)
If you want to install LibreOffice, you’ll need a 4 GB or larger SD card. You’ll also need to
resize the root filesystem to make use of the SD card’s free space. For instructions on doing
this, see Chapter 6, “The Raspberry Pi Software Configuration Tool”. Make sure you perform
this task before continuing with this chapter, or you’ll find your Pi’s SD card running out of
space before you can use LibreOffice.
With enough free space on the SD card, installing LibreOffice is no more complex than
installing any other package. Although it comes bundled with a great deal of additional pack-
ages, a single
metapackage takes care of everything and installs the software with a single
command. Open a terminal window and type the following:
sudo apt-get install libreoffice
TIP
If you receive error messages saying files are missing when you’re installing software like
LibreOffice, the package cache is likely out of date. Run the command
sudo apt-get update
to refresh the cache, and then try again. (See Chapter 3, “Linux System Administration” , for
more details.)