LibreOffice - pros & cons with Meerkat

[Jordon Bedwell]

On 1/26/2011 1:49 AM, Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:

> Libreoffice .deb release from the main site installs at /opt, side
> by side with OO, but in my Maverick 64 failed to create shortcuts on
> Aplications/Office.
>
> Libreoffice from the PPA, 1:3.3.0~rc4-1 (the only active repo I
> found for Mav.) indeed demands removal of regular OpenOffice (in
> fact Go-Oo). Nevertheless, once installed it seems to work well.

I believe the reference to Libreoffice in the repo might actually refer
to Natty, which does have it there right now as a testing package:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/libreoffice-core . People who do not
test Libreoffice in Natty testing releases will possibly force Ubuntu to
keep OpenOffice, which is exactly what we don't want as an open
community trying to keep open software open. We can only get packages
put mainstream and replace default packages with more preferred packages
if there is strong testing done by users, developers and contributors
alike.  Even that sometimes doesn't work though, because no matter how
much the community complains about how empathy not being feature rich
and truly ready and lacking the encryption that pidgin does have it
ultimately falls down on what they feel is best for the community as a
default, leaving it open for you to just uninstall it and replace it
with whatever you want.

Why you should remove Openoffice to install Libreoffice though, should
be obviously apparent but for those who wonder why, it's because of
conflicting libraries that do, well...the same thing. If you install
both in /opt/packagename though you should not have a problem as /opt is
usually considered a "sandbox" environment where you compile the entire
thing into /opt like you would into /usr/local (even though /usr/local
is not meant to be there, and it's not segregated by package) so it
would end up as /opt/libreoffice/bin; /opt/libreoffice/lib and so
forth.  This makes it so that if a system wide problem happens from
conflict you can simply just remove /opt/packagename and call it a day
till you have time to address it.