LibreOffice and Mountain Lion (MacOS X 10.8)

LibreOffice 3.5 and LibreOffice 3.6 – still to be released – work like a charm with Mountain Lion, although you need to tweak your security settings in order to get along with GateKeeper.

The Document Foundation will provide a signed version of LibreOffice which will avoid the workaround, but this will happen sometimes in the future (and we will make sure to make all users aware). In fact, LibreOffice binaries are signed to protect users from any kind of malware, but the procedure is not the same adopted by Apple.

Today, in order to run LibreOffice with Mountain Lion you should do the following:

1. Open System Preferences, and select Security and Privacy.

2. Select “allow applications downloaded from MacApp Store and identified developers”.

3. Launch LibreOffice from the Application folder while keeping pressed the Control key, and selectiong Open from the pop-up menu.

LibreOffice will launch without problems, and the system will remember your preference (no need to repeat the procedure a second time).

In a few instances, LibreOffice might still clash with Mountain Lion security settings (the reason why has still to be identified, as the problem might happen on a Mac and not on another one configured in the same way).

In this case, you will be presented with this scary message.

There is nothing to be worried about (I got the message myself, and after a short search I have found the solution).

1. Open System Preferences, and select Security and Privacy.

2. Select “allow applications downloaded from anywhere”.

3. Launch LibreOffice by double clicking on the program’s icon, and wait until it has completed the process and opened an empty document. Then, close the program by selecting Quit from the LibreOffice menu (remember, you are on a Mac).

4. Open System Preferences, and select Security and Privacy.

5. Select “allow applications downloaded from MacApp Store and identified developers”.

6. Launch LibreOffice by double clicking on the program’s icon and enjoy the best free office suite ever (LibreOffice 3.6 is even better than the best).

While you have selected “allow applications downloaded from anywhere”, do not launch any other application than LibreOffice as you might face security problems.