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.

Up and Working!

Well, my Acer Aspire One 721 (or AO-721) "Cecil" is now sitting happily in Fedora 14 and fully functional.  I switched to using Unetbootin (rather than Gujin) to make a liveUSB of Gparted Live (I'd been using System Rescue CD) -- that gave me no problem at all about resizing the partitions and adding new ones.  I then used Unetbootin yet again to create a new Fedora 14 live USB, booted it...boing, no problem at all installing!

After setting up some very normal things (turning on tap-to-click, etc.) I discovered something really problematic: it couldn't come out of suspend/hibernate, and once rebooted after such an incident, it couldn't turn wireless on.  After a few days of periodic searching, I found these instructions, which also works in other distros like Linux Mint:

1. As root, edit /boot/grub/grub.conf (mine was .conf, theirs was .cfg) in your favorite text editor.
2. Search for the word "quiet" and add these words after it, then save: 
noacpi apm=on noapic 

However, wireless was still off!  If I held down the function key and hit F3 to turn it back on, it didn't light up, even though all of the other function-F# keys were working just fine.  After some searching and experimenting, I noticed that after hitting Fn-F3, "Enable Wireless" in the NetworkManager tray icon was alternately an option or grayed-out; if I clicked on it when I could, surprise surprise, I was suddenly back online!  Turns out that the bleeping thing is toggling the wifi off & on just as it should, but due to some glitch, the light is only being turned on if NetworkManager also enables it.

If only all of my problems were this easy to fix...