Open Office and / or Libre Office

[Avi Greenbury]

LinuxIsOne wrote:
> But since I had some issues with OO so I just followed the post and
> installed LO. I thought that OO comes by default (in integration of
> installation LTS) but LO I had installed. Ok, if this is the case I
> would uninstall one, preferably OO (to be uninstalled) and LO to be
> retained.

Ah, good - if you don't need to keep both that makes things a good
deal simpler :)

> 
> > I'm not sure why you ended up being advised to install the package
> > from Sun/Oracle, though. The Libre Office packaging team for Ubunu
> > maintain a PPA you can use to install it as you would any other
> > software on ubuntu:
> >
> > https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ppa<https://launchpad.net/%7Elibreoffice/+archive/ppa>
> >
> > Personally, I'd advise uninstalling the Libre Office you just
> > installed, and the OpenOffice.org that the distro came with, and
> > just follow the instructions on that PPA page.
> >
> 
> Okay, I really didn't know this. In fact, I am coming directly from
> XP, so I just (always) follow the posts here. Okay I install from
> this PPA (whatever be the method and the link suggests, in that way).

Personally, I would. There's a trade-off, though. When a new version of
LibreOffice is released, it's possible to go and download that directly
from their site. This is also the time at which the PPA team get to it.
They then perform their changes to it to package it appropriately for
Ubuntu, and perhaps apply patches to it as they deem fit.

The PPA version, therefore, lags behind the 'normal' release version a
bit. I don't know for that particular PPA, but it's usually of the
order of a few weeks. This will matter to you if what you want is only
available in some version that is not yet in the PPA, but otherwise,
generally, it's easiest to use PPAs and let the computer deal with
upgrades for you :)

> 
> > PPAs are basically specific-case repositories, where packages that
> > aren't suitable for general distribution go - they're outside the
> > supported core of Ubuntu, but they do conform with all of Ubuntus
> > standards normally, and they have straightforward installation and
> > uninstallation. They can be created by anybody, though, so they're
> > not a lot safer that downloading any other installer from the net,
> > though that particular one is from the people who package
> > LibreOffice for Ubuntu, so you've already implicitly entrusted them
> > by installing OpenOffice.org :)
> >
> 
> Oh I see.

They are brilliantly useful, but sadly somewhat under-advertised I
think. Frequently the first impression is that it's easier to just
install from the vendor rather than find and configure the appropriate
PPA but, even when it is quicker to get that first bit done, the fact
that the PPA means it all carries on being upgraded automatically saves
a good deal of time in the long run. Of course, not everything has a
PPA, but there's generally one for any GUI application in Ubuntu to
allow you to have a newer version of the app in an older version of
Ubuntu.

> Okay but for uninstallation, I must do from Synaptic Package Manager
> and then reinstall through PPA. I do that now. And for this first
> uninstallation of LO from Synaptic the process I guess is this: just
> typing LO in the search field and removing for complete all those
> which matches the search query?

Well, perhaps ideally you would:

1) uninstall OpenOffice.org in Synaptic
2) uninstall Libre Office by whichever means it provides
3) install Libre office through the PPA & Synaptic.

But there's no great reason to do 2 & 3 if you're happy with the Libre
Office installation you've already got. You cannot uninstall Libre
Office in synaptic because it wasn't installed through synaptic. If
you want to uninstall it, you should check the documentation from Oracle
about how to uninstall it - it will be specific to the method you used
to install it, and probably contained in the notes in the archive you
downloaded.

-- 
Avi