Comment 73 for bug 54776

OpenOffice.org 2.1 has now been formally released. I upgraded this morning, and now my fonts look beautiful -- see the screenshot. If you want to do the same, please read to the end of this message before starting work, or you'll lose the icons in your K menu (if you use KDE) and, I imagine, the equivalent menu in Gnome.

1) In Synaptic, I purged every package that had 'openoffice.org' in its name, including those with 'openoffice.org2'.

2) I went to the openoffice.org Web site and downloaded the Linux installer. I downloaded the long installation guide for 2.0 (which is a PDF) and found the section on Ubuntu. I checked that my version of alien was newer than 8.50. (A fully updated Edgy has v8.64.). I followed the rest of the instructions. One wrinkle: there are no *menu*.deb packages to delete. (The installation guide hasn't yet been updated for 2.1.)

3) At this point, OpenOffice.org was installed, but there were no menu entries for it and no programs in the path. One little catch is that the programs installed by the vanilla installer are called 'swriter' (etc.) rather than 'oowriter' (etc.). This made them a little harder to find. I brought the programs into my path like this:

msl@edward:~$ cd /usr/bin
msl@edward:/usr/bin$ A=/opt/openoffice.org2.1/program
msl@edward:/usr/bin$ sudo ln -s $A/sbase oobase
Password:
msl@edward:/usr/bin$ sudo ln -s $A/scalc oocalc
msl@edward:/usr/bin$ sudo ln -s $A/sdraw oodraw
msl@edward:/usr/bin$ sudo ln -s $A/simpress ooimpress
msl@edward:/usr/bin$ sudo ln -s $A/smath oomath
msl@edward:/usr/bin$ sudo ln -s $A/soffice
msl@edward:/usr/bin$ sudo ln -s $A/swriter oowriter
msl@edward:/usr/bin$

4) I tried to use kmenuedit to add entries for the various programs to my K menu. I found that, in uninstalling all the Kubuntu openoffice.org packages, I'd deleted the icons I needed. I fixed that by copying

/usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/ooo*.png
/usr/share/icons/mono/scalable/apps/ooo*.svgz
/usr/share/icons/mono/scalable/apps/staroffice.svgz

from another Edgy machine. Then I restarted kmenuedit, and it found the icons. If you have only one machine, of course, you can copy the necessary files to a safe place before starting work.

5) My file associations were also gone: if I clicked on a .ods file in Konqueror, for example, I'd be asked which program I wanted to open. Konqueror makes it easy to set up file associations on the fly: just select the right program, click 'remember', and you're done.