LibreOffice 3.3.2 compiled from source for Slackware 13.0

I’ve just completed the compilation for LibreOffice 3.3.2 using the SlackBuild from Alien Bob (source). The box used for this task is running Slackware 13.0 and is a rather powerful machine with a Core i3 CPU and 2 GB of RAM. Still, it takes 5 hours of time and requires 9 GB of space to complete.

Strangely, the package from RPM binary only occupies ~370 MB of disk space after installed while the package compiled from source takes up to ~425 MB.

The additional languages I built alongside the default US English are: German, UK English, Esperanto, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese.

Anyone interested in using this package, leave a comment here.

JDBC Commnunications link failure

This is a post about how to install the JDBC driver for MySQL and how I resolved the error "CommunicationsException: Communications link failure".

To create a Java program that make use of a MySQL database, first you have to install Connector/J — JDBC driver for MySQL.

After download the file mysql-connector-java-5.1.16.tar.gz (5.1.16 is the version as of this writing) from http://www.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/, extract it and copy the file mysql-connector-java-5.1.16-bin.jar to /usr/lib/java/jre/lib/ext/

You can pick any simple Java app using Google. The following is the full Java error from the commandline (the Java app was compiled successfully):

Exception in thread "main" com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.CommunicationsException: Communications link failure

The last packet sent successfully to the server was 0 milliseconds ago. The driver has not received any packets from the server.
	at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
	at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
	at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
	at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.Util.handleNewInstance(Util.java:411)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.SQLError.createCommunicationsException(SQLError.java:1116)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.(MysqlIO.java:344)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.coreConnect(ConnectionImpl.java:2333)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.connectOneTryOnly(ConnectionImpl.java:2370)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.createNewIO(ConnectionImpl.java:2154)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.(ConnectionImpl.java:792)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.JDBC4Connection.(JDBC4Connection.java:47)
	at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
	at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
	at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
	at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.Util.handleNewInstance(Util.java:411)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.getInstance(ConnectionImpl.java:381)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.NonRegisteringDriver.connect(NonRegisteringDriver.java:305)
	at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:582)
	at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:207)
	at de.vogella.mysql.first.MySQLAccess.readDataBase(MySQLAccess.java:22)
	at de.vogella.mysql.first.test.Main.main(Main.java:8)
Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused
	at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
	at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:333)
	at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:195)
	at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:182)
	at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:366)
	at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:529)
	at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:478)
	at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:375)
	at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:218)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.StandardSocketFactory.connect(StandardSocketFactory.java:257)
	at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.(MysqlIO.java:294)
	... 16 more

There’s load of solutions floating on the Internet and these two provide me a good understanding and also a solution to the issue:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2983248/jdbc-with-mysql
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=721345

Briefly said, the error was due to mysqld was started with the option "--skip-networking", so outside connections to the database were disabled.

On my Slackware box, although this option is commented out in /etc/my.cnf

grep 'skip-networking' /etc/my.cnf
#skip-networking

this is also an option in /etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld. So we have to comment out the following line in that file:

SKIP="--skip-networking"

Now JDBC with MySQL works beautifully.

Of course this is specific to Slackware. On other distributions, I believe there’s a similar way to disable the option "--skip-networking".