Open Office Will Not Install

[Misterfixit]

Welcome beginner. Please answer all of the questions below which may provide information necessary to answer your question.
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Which version of OpenOffice.org are you using? 1.1

What Operating System (version) are you using? Ubuntu 8.04

What is your question or comment?

I attempted to upgrae the OO package using Synaptic; and that evidently broke the package, since OO would not open. It would show the initial flash image and then a window would open stating that OO could not find the correct language and could not start.

After a few hours of that mess, I downloaded the version 2 0 suite by by selecting the "deb" version on the Sun web site. After the download of some 150+ MB, there is an icon on the desktop. The icon is one that is used to denote a "package" I went to the icon and attempted to open it with the Debian installer, but the package had been .tz'd and gz'd. So, I went to each package and used the archive --- expecting that the debian package installer would take over and install the entire OO suite. I recall from several months ago, that after downloading OO, I would run it as a script ( ./ oo.sh ) or something like that. This time is looks as if I am supposed to do a complete install from scratch. I am somehow missing the automatic install which was available previous to the 2.4 package of OO

I moved all of the new OO packages to a DVD and cleaned out all openoffice references on my system (like I used to have to do with Windows) and then used synaptic to do an install of oo from the synaptic repository. After that I was able to open OO but the appearance of the OO gui was colored the same as an application running under wine -- that sort of flat dingy grey. Also, there were no icons present on the top of the composition window.

Now of course, I am writing this on a Sunday evening and tomorrow morning I have a huge report due to my boss. Bad timing on my part, I know.

I've managed to save the report by taking it to my office where we use Windows XP, opened it in MS Word, and have thus been able to print out the report. Thank God that the default extension for anything I do in OO is a Windows file since I have never been able to get one of the OO unique extensions to open at the office.

Would someone please tell me what is going on here? I have checked all permissions, locations of all respositories, files and so forth. I did a complete cold reboot of the system (like we do with Windows), but that didn't help. I really don't want to have to completely delete and reinstall Ubuntu from scratch, as I have everything working pretty good.

Gnome Version 2.22.2
Linux Version

[ccornell]

I think you were n the right track, but missing a few bits of information in how you manage an Ubuntu install. This might help you with the install problems [Tutorial] Installing OOo on Ubuntu, Debian and Co. and hopefully it'll explain a little more background for you so you can better understand how it all fits together. If you're still having problems, come back and let us know what happened and we can try something else.

The beauty of Linux is that you rarely ever (never in my experience) have to reinstall from scratch to fix a misbehaving program. Windows on the other hand... that seems to be the solution far too often.

If you have permission to install software on your computer at work, you could install the
Sun ODF Plugin for MS Office. It will fix MS Office so it can open ODF documents.