Showing posts with label OpenOffice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OpenOffice. Show all posts

When In Doubt, Switch Distros

So, rebooted Cecil back into Fedora in hope that OpenSuSE 11.3 turning on wifi would fix it...nope.  However, screwing around in the terminal, while iwconfig couldn't get the stupid thing to connnect, dhclient did.

Note I say "connected", not "working".  NetworkManager still insists it's not connected, and all attempts to ping fail.  I know there's a not-impossible way to fix that in the terminal, and since NetworkManager might work once I degrade it to the old version, I guess I have to look into it...

Okay, no, after another hour or so, I got sick of fighting with Fedora and ended up trying out the OpenSuSE-meets-E17 spin Petite Linux. Its creator hasn't quite finished the 11.4 version, so it's running from 11.3 right now -- but it got me online and came with a fully-functional version of OpenOffice.org 3.x.  This also neatly solves the problem of what environment I was going to use since GNOME's moving towards total suckdom.

A Fedora/RPM LibreOffice repo exists!

My other tiny triumph of the day concerned LibreOffice.  Thanks to Fedora's insistence on excising a tool I rely on from their copy of OpenOffice I spent too many hours Saturday trying to install either LO 3.3.1 or an unmolested OO 3.3.  If I followed the instructions and installed the damn things from RPMs, the program segfaulted after the registration screen with the oh-so-useful error $sd_prog/$sd_binary. (I found jackall useful about that online...) Copying a chunk of files from the RPMs on top of an existing Fedora-mangled install basically got me nowhere aside from several yards closer to dumping Fedora.


Meanwhile, I intermittently searched the web (and various RPM/app sites) aggressively for a RPM repository, but all I found were repos for other distros, and the knowledge that LibreOffice will be available in Fedora 15 (which doesn't help me now).  Finally, Sunday night I discovered a Fedora-based repository with LibreOffice, courtesy of an intriguing distro I've never heard of before called Kororaa.

Their repo file didn't work right away (package managers kept telling me the repository was inaccessible), but a lucky guess let me figure out how to fix it.  Open a terminal/console and do "su" so you become root, then download their .repo file per their instructions:
wget http://kororaa.org/repos/kororaa.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/kororaa.repo
Once you've grabbed it, while still root, open the little bugger with your favorite text editor (I like nano):
nano /etc/yum.repos.d/kororaa.repo
On the "baseurl" line, change the part bolded here from the original:
http://kororaa.org/repos/kororaa/$releasever/$basearch
over to a more useful (as of right now; the number will change):
http://kororaa.org/repos/kororaa/14/$basearch/
(I'm not using Fedora 14 on this machine, but it doesn't seem to matter.)

All you should have to do from there is use your preferred package manager to remove any old copies of OpenOffice/LibreOffice and install the properly-functioning one from Kororaa.  I recommend also trying their distro out because it seems like a very good way to have your cake with Fedora and eat it too.