Ubuntu
openoffice.org package

Checkboxes and other dialog features missing after OO3 upgrade on Kubuntu Intrepid

Asked by Brad Templeton

Did an upgrade to OpenOffice 3 on Kubuntu Intreprid IA32 using the Launchpad repository. Unfortunately encountered the KDE4 bug where the program always goes into recovery mode when you try to start it. With no fix obvious at the time, I thought the simplest thing to do would be to purge out the new OO3, remove launchpad from the repositories and re-install OO2.4 from the standard kubuntu repositories.

While that worked, the OO2.4 started having problems. In particular, checkboxes were missing from the UI of various dialogs. For example in oocalc, go to "Format Cells" and the Alignment tab, and under Properties the listed properties would show no checkboxes. Text there, boxes not.

Ah well, I said, let me see if I can get OO3 working, so purged OO2.4, installed OO3 and found my way past the recovery bug.

But there, the problem is present and it's even worse. now look in that Format cells/Alignment and there is nothing displayed at all, no checkboxes, and no names for the checkboxes beside them. Other dialogs are clearly missing whole sections. Purged .openoffice* directories and no joy there either.

So I can't go forward and can't go back, and open office is now unusable and my gf is now ready to move back to Windows and Excel. We don't want that to happen, do we? Of course a reinstall of kubuntu would work but is far too drastic a step.

Any thoughts on how to get this going, or at least how to get OO2.4 back to life? As noted, I did a purge, not just remove, of the prior OO, and all java packages as well. Anything else I need to purge or reinstall?

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IItiaII (r-mattia) said : 		#1

Probably some packages have gone missing or damaged during the first purge, and aptitude isn't able to detect them.
You could try to manually mark for reinstallation all the packages of Openoffice you already have (use synaptic, and mark for reinstallation every package with a name beginning with openoffice -- again, just the ones already installed, of course!). This should fix any package damaged by the purge.

Hope it works..

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Brad Templeton (launch-pad) said : 		#2

Sorry, no joy on the reinstall of all openoffice* packages (3.0). Perhaps I have to purge something even deeper? What libraries are involved with the drawing of these segments of the dialog boxes? I attach a screen shot of the cell format dialbox to give an example of what is being seen.

(OO3 is working for me fine on my hardy/amd64/kde3 system but it never had the kde4/oo recover bug requiring uninstall.)

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Brad Templeton (launch-pad) said : 		#3

Sorry, no ability to attach screenshot here, I copied it to http://www.templetons.com/etc/appbug2.jpg

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Buz Cory (buzco) said : 		#4

Look under "Tools -> Customize" for things you can fix. This will apparently let you add/remove items for *every* menu/toolbar in OO. You may very well find that things have gotten disabled there during your switching versions.

If that doesn't help, try using *aptitude* to purge everything about open-office, including dependencies, relating to openoffice. Then do "% locate -i openoffice" to find anything that the apt-* software missed. I keep finding residue from broken packages that I supposedly "purged". The command line is your friend!

That done, try doing a re-install of the OO stuff. If you had no real reason to upgrade to 3.0 I suggest you stick w/ 2.4. **Always** use the *_stable_* pool if possible!

If OO3 is connected to KDE4, you might have to purge all the KDE stuff, also.

If all the above fails, of course the last resort is to save everything in /home and /usr/local that relates to real users and do a complete re-install.

BTW, you might remind ur gf that similar problems are (or at least were) much more common w/ M$ than w/ most Linux distros. (RedHat & Suse may be exceptions).

Hope this is some help. These are the same steps that I would take if I ever had to deal w/ a similar problem.

-- Buz :)

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Brad Templeton (launch-pad) said : 		#5

Unfortunately, the prime example shown (Format-Cells) isn't even one of the things you can customize with Tools-Customize, so it is not there.

However, I have gotten some, but not complete improvement by knocking my .openoffice.org directory out of the way.

A purge as you describe (of kd4 and many other things) would be quite drastic.

I had thought OO3 was considered stable, it just didn't make it into Intrepid due to timing.

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Brad Templeton (launch-pad) said : 		#6

Whoops, my error -- purging .openoffice.org did not fix anything, I was looking in the wrong place. And at this point, reverting to 2.4 does not solve the problem, it also has bad dialog boxes, unfortunately.

What time is estimated for the next release of OO3, particularly one tested on kubuntu intrepid?

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Buz Cory (buzco) said : 		#7

'Lo Brad,

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You said "Unfortunately, the prime example shown (Format-Cells) isn't even one of the things you can customize with Tools-Customize, so it is not there."

OK, I never looked thru all the things available in Tools→Customize, nor do I expect to. I «thought» there «might be» something useful there, but not necessarily obvious.

Also, "A purge as you describe (of kd4 and many other things) would be quite drastic." Sure it would. I gave it as the last resort short of a complete re-install, to give OOO-2.4 as clean a start as possible to get back to the last point where all the installed stuff works (right). What I do know is that packages *do* interact in sometimes very surprising ways (the law of the unintended consequence :). And you seem to have already tried all the simple, obvious things.

"I had thought OO3 was considered stable ..." and perhaps it is, by its developers. That doesn't mean that it is up to the Debian/Ubuntu standards, nor that the configuration stuff added to complete a .deb are finished and tested.

"What time is estimated for the next release of OO3, particularly one tested on kubuntu intrepid?" I have no idea, ask the owners of the package that failed. What I do know is that programmers are still making assumptions that are true for 32-bit machines but are not true in the bright new 64-bit world. Fixing that kind of stuff can be a long, tedious job.

I still can't think of anything better to offer at this point than a progressively more rigorous elimination of *anything* that *might* be affecting the failing software. :(
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-- Buz.

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