The Open Sourcerer

How to Install OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex [Updated]

I have been using the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) since the Alpha 5 testing version; the same time I built Lobsang.

Apart from a few early glitches with the Nvidia graphics drivers and some printing issues, my overall experience with Ibex has been excellent and as we are now in the beta stage it should only get better. Ibex certainly boots faster than Hardy, the update to Gnome 2.24 is most welcome with new features such as tabing in Nautilus, and a major update to the Network Manager applet. You can read about the main additions here.

One thing I wanted to do today, was upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3.0. Unfortunately, according to a bug on Launchpad, OOo 3.0 will not make it into the final release of Ubuntu 8.10. It may get added later, but personally I think it is a shame if it will not make the release. It’s a major upgrade to OOo and has appeared 2 weeks prior to the 8.10 ship date so I think it would make a good candidate for inclusion. The new Mandriva 2009 release has it and that was released last week…

I think for many the support for Microsoft’s OOXML format on OOo 3.0 will be the major new feature. It certainly gives one a great reason to not have to upgrade, at vast expense, to MS Office 2007.

Anyway, thankfully some bright spark has built the required packages on a PPA (Personal Package Archive) on Lauchpad making install as easy as adding two lines to your package manager’s source list.

Please remember this is for Intrepid Ibex. I don’t have a Hardy (8.04) install to hand any more and so I don’t know if this PPA will work for Hardy users or not. I’d love to hear from anyone if they do try it though.

Begin How To

[UPDATE] I am not sure if this repo is still maintained for Intrepid. I would strongly suggest that users follow John McCreesh’s suggested method he described in the comments below. Here it is for ease of reading:

I just do:

To get rid of the release candidates I’ve installed previously:

sudo aptitude purge ‘~nopenoffice.org3′
sudo aptitude purge ‘~nooobasis3′

download the debs from the OOo site and tar -xvfz them.
cd to the directory containing the debs

sudo dpkg -i o*.deb
sudo dpkg -i desktop_integration/o*.deb

John

John’s method seems quite straightforward and works for me.

The original method (below) also worked for me but I am not using it any more and am still getting lots of hits to this article so I thought I should update the information.

So the following might work but, as they say, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

From the menu choose “System->Administration->Software Sources” and enter your password if asked.

Click on the Third Party Software tab and then click on the “+ Add” button. Cut and paste the following line into the box

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

and then click on the “Add Source” button to save it. Repeat and add this line too:

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

Make sure the two new lines have the checkbox ticked (see screenshot above) and then close the Software Sources application. You should then be asked to reload the package manager database:

To install software and updates from newly added or changed sources, you have to reload the information about available software.

Once I did this, the “Updates Available” star appear in the top panel of Gnome. Running the update manager showed me the updates available, e.g. OpenOffice.org, which it then downloaded (about 95Mb) and installed. It was as simple as that.

If for some reason the update manager star doesn’t appear then just open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

End How To

Behold, OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Intrepid Ibex.

[Update]

This morning the auto updater wouldn’t run because of a conflict with the OOo packages I installed from the PPA. The simplest way I found to rectify this, was to simply turn off the PPA repos by removing the tick from the relevant boxes in the Software Sources manager. Then the update went ahead as it should.

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