By Nick Peers
Hot on the heels of its first stable release, The Document Foundation has announced the immediate availability of LibreOffice Portable. As the name suggests, it's a repackaged version of The Document Foundation's free open-source application that is designed to run directly from USB -- or even cloud -- drives, allowing the end user to run the program on any Windows-compatible computer, including Macs and Linux running WINE.
LibreOffice is an offshoot of the OpenOffice project, brought into being by The Document Foundation because of concerns of the project's future as an open-source program having come under the ownership of Oracle following its purchase of Sun Microsystems. It contains a free word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentations tool and drawing application.
LibreOffice Portable is based on the brand new 3.3 stable release, which means it contains all the feature improvements and bug fixes found in that version. It's been developed in conjunction with Portableapps.com, and is distributed in the .paf format, which means it can be set up and installed without administrator rights.
LibreOffice Portable requires Windows XP, Vista or 7, or the Wine emulator on Macs, Linux and Unix. It also requires 428MB free drive space on the target drive, plus certain elements -- including the document creation wizards and Base database application -- require the jPortable Java run-time environment.
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