Here’s the conundrum: to load slides into BlackBoard Collaborate (the Open Universiteit’s online teaching environment), I need Apache OpenOffice (AOO). To collaborate with people who work in MS Office (most of my colleages, most of the students), Apache OpenOffice is not good enough. Libreoffice (LO) is.
So I need the two side-by-side on Ubuntu. Which isn’t easy.
1. Getting Apache OpenOffice to work with Collaborate
- sudo apt-get purge libreoffice\*
- Download openoffice and dpkg -i the necessary files (don’t forget the desktop-integration subdir!)
If you install AOO before removing LO, then the install isn’t complete. Even though you can use AOO, Collaborate cannot. So purge your LibreOffice :s
2. Getting LibreOffice back on your system without destroying things
DO NOT INSTALL LibreOffice FROM THE OFFICIAL REPOSITORIES!
It fails and leaves your package database in an inconsistent state. I had to manually solve the problem by using
- dpkg -l | grep libreoffice to check which packages there were, and
- removing these with dpkg --purge.
The convenient command ended up being:
dpkg -l | grep libreoffice | cut -f 3 -d ' ' | xargs sudo dpkg --purge
That wasn’t quite enough to fix the database — there was a remnant of another package in the way. Removing that one (dpkg --purge python3-uno) addressed that, and then apt-get was happy with me again.
So what to do? Here’s how: download the latest LibreOffice, and install LO from the downloaded DEB files (tar -zxvf $downloadedfile; cd $LOdir/DEBS; sudo dpkg -i *deb). That works, and you now have the two side by side :)