[NTLUG:Discuss] OpenOffice 2.0.3 upgrade - Debian

[Terry Henderson]

As a new Debain user, I have marveled at the ease with which I've
installed and upgraded applications - UNTIL, I upgraded OpenOffice
1.1.3 to 2.0.3

Not only did I have to manually enter a line in /etc/apt/sources.list
to use backports.org but ended up adding "contrib non-free" to all
lines that began with "deb ftp://...."  and "deb http://...." (this
was to solve uninstallable dependency  for java).  I should note that
the "contrib non-free" additions need to be removed afterward for
apt-get to work properly for future updates and new application
installs.

It took several days for me to figure all this out and get
OpenOffice.org updated.  I would have saved a lot of time by just
installing manually but was determined to use the package manager,
(for everything).

Part of the problem is that I had to cross version lines to get this
one application upgraded, (OpenOffice 1.1.3 is in sarge/stable while
OpenOffice 2.0.3 is in testing/unstable).

And the second problem was OpenOffice's requirement for java, and not
sure why that was such a problem, but I assume it is because can not
be kept in the normal repositories and can not be part of OpenOffice,
(because it belongs to Sun).  If it hadn't been for that, things would
have been much easier I'm sure.

There may have been an easier way of doing what I just did, and being
new to Debian and it's idiosyncrasies was mostly what confounded me
and caused me to take so long to get the job done and maybe someone
else can shed some light on this subject so as to make it a bit easier
for the next new user that encounters this delima.

As far as I can tell, just upgrading OpenOffice manually is the best
or easiest route.

-- 
Registered Linux User 188099
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