Removing Open Office Without Removing the Ubuntu Desktop?

Stephen Ryan taketwoaspirin at gmail.com
Wed Feb 2 17:55:48 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 08:30:44 +0100 (CET), Brian Durant
<linuxnewbiedk at yahoo.dk> wrote:
> Sounds good. Anywhere I can get more info about how to
> generate an equivalent dummy packeage? Newbie alert
> :-)

I can try.  To start, you'll need the equivs program installed, either
from Synaptic or by apt-get at the command line.
$ sudo apt-get install equivs

Equivs can be used to make dummy packages for a number of different
reasons; for your purposes, you need to pretend that the
openoffice.org packages are installed, so the dummy package should
look like one of the real openoffice.org packages.  To do this, equivs
needs a control file listing the appropriate packages that it should
be substituting for.

=====
Section: editors
Package: oo-dummy
Provides: openoffice.org, openoffice.org-help-en,
openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-gb, openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-us,
openoffice.org-mimelnk
Description: Dummy package for openoffice.org
  This dummy package satisfies dependencies for openoffice.org, so
  you can use a locally installed copy of StarOffice instead, for example.
=====

Save this as "oo-dummy.control".  Now run equivs-build to actually
create the package.
Open a terminal window and type:
$ equivs-build oo-dummy.control

This prints out a bunch of stuff, which ends in a message about it
creating a package file named oo-dummy_1.0_all.deb in the current
directory.  Install this package; since it isn't part of the Ubuntu
repository, you'll have to install it by hand.

$ sudo dpkg -i oo-dummy_1.0_all.deb

You should now be free to remove the openoffice.org packages without
affecting ubuntu-desktop.  Fair warning: while I did try removing one
of the hyphenation packages, I didn't try a full openoffice.org
removal.  Also, if there is anything that actually depends on
openoffice.org for functionality (as opposed to ubuntu-desktop, where
the dependency is solely to make installations and upgrades easier),
the dummy package won't help.  I've put a copy of the control file and
a copy of the resulting oo-dummy_1.0_all.deb on my website at
http://sryan.stearns.org/~sryan/ if that helps you any.




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