[Solved] Install side-by-side AOO & LiO on Ubuntu 12.04.3

[Hagar Delest]

Greetings, folks --

I am reading plenty of advice that is the opposite of what I'm
intending, so I figured I'd better ask here first before proceeding.

Background: I would like to do some performance-testing on AOO and LiO.
There is plenty of disk space available, so installing side-by-side is
the most straightforward way to accomplish this. However, it seems this
is not necessarily easy, or even possible, to accomplish. Previously:

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=55886&p=247348&hilit=libreoffice+side#p247348
Sep'12 advice on how to get Aoo3 installed side-by-side with Lo3.
Is this still good advice, when installing Aoo401 side-by-side w/ Lo357?

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=63222&p=280613&hilit=apt+get#p280566
Jul'13 problem where installing Aoo400 ended up breaking Lo3xx (and dpkg)
Is this still a problem, if one's distro is Ubuntu 12.04.3 or 12.04.2 ?

Advice from a moderator's answer: From experience, before I install
OpenOffice (all versions), I remove libreoffice-core using Synaptic at
then use it again to check that there are no libreoffice components
left. Then I install OO using dpkg. The problem of the silent
substitution of LibreOffice for OpenOffice is currently undergoing
consideration on the OpenOffice developers list; the ideal view is
that one would wish users to have a definite choice not a silent
substitution, but that is another day's work. [later] The silent
substitution of LibO for an OpenOffice request happens in many Linux
distros and has happened since the fork some years ago. OpenOffice dev
group are endeavouring to find an amicable resolution to this. At
present, to install OpenOffice on most linux distros it is necessary
to make a separate download of the Apache OpenOffice files and install
them using other than the inbuilt distro updater. Whether one _needs_
to remove or adjust any preinstalled LibO depends on the exact distro.
...[when testing another office suite], I would install it to a spare
machine rather than run in parallel on a production machine.

Finally, with background out of the way, we come to my actual question:
what steps should I follow, preferably specific to ubuntu 12.04.3 since
it seems extra tricksy, if I want to have the following configuration:

1st: Lio357
2nd: Aoo401

That's enough for my needs today. In the long run, though,
what I will probably be aiming for is something like this:

1st: Lio357
2nd: Aoo401
3rd: Aoo330
4th: Lio412

When testing on a windows box, I would add msftOfc as the 5th.

[Hagar Delest]

If you install both suites with the .debs downloaded from their website (and not from your distro repositories), then you should be able to install them side by side. That's what I used to do under ubuntu in the past. Now that I don't install LibO anymore, I can't say for sure but I doubt it would not be possible.

Please add '[Solved]' at the beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

[The_Letter_J]

@Hagar, thanks for the reply. It seems plenty of people on the forums here are very leery of doing side-by-side installs. I could always use a virtual machine, but that's hardly ideal for testing performance. What could work, and would be pretty reasonable for performance-testing, is to install a bunch of partitions, and multiboot. That makes automated testing a bit difficult, of course, but it would be safest in terms of keeping my main system working.

So, if I promise not to blame you if things go poorly, would you recommend that I take the plunge and try to install all four options side-by-side? Or am I really better off playing it safe, and making some partitions (and maybe some VMs for convenience-testing to complement the exact-testing of the bare-metal-bootable environments).

Are you currently running Aoo3x and Aoo4x side-by-side?

[Hagar Delest]

I were you, I would just try (side by side).
I've run once 3.4 and 4.0 together but it was a developer version. And I've run LibO and AOO in parallel for sure.
But I don't see why it should not work since both suites can run together and that the profile are different. And anyway, you cannot break your system with such install.

[The_Letter_J]

I installed Aoo401 from the 64-bit DEB available at sourceforge, leaving Lio357 in place. There was an error-message about /usr/bin/soffice, which on ubuntu 12.04 already points to Lio357, but otherwise it went well. Both can run properly from cmdln or from the unity-taskbar. /opt/openoffice4/program/soffice is the correct incantation, if you accept the default install-location. Thanks for your help, Hagar.

p.s. Do we know when Aoo4 will become an official ubuntu/fedora/centos/slackware/arch/gentoo/etc package, so that I don't have to manually install the app, and manually watch for security patches thereto?

p.p.s. Do we know whether the LiO and AOO devs are working out how to co-exist cleanly on the same system? They're both trying to hog the SOFFICE shortcut, which is silly. If they cannot agree which project 'owns' that ancient circa-1999 binary executable name, then maybe they can compromise by both standardizing on their own new binary-names? I suggest AOFFICE and LOFFICE, but that's certainly up for discussion.

[Hagar Delest]

There is a discussion with the Ubuntu team to include the package.
But there is indeed some talks needed with the LibO team too.
I've not seen recent developments I think. If you don't find it on the mailing list (there are web interfaces), I can provide a link.