Libreoffice 4 problems

[toothandnail]

Shouldn't do this when I'm half asleep, I guess....

This morning, I let an upgrade go through without looking at it very carefully. Amongst other things, it has updated Libreoffice to 4.0.0.3. However, there seems to be a bit of a problem there.

Looking at the applications menu, I've got two dead entries - LibreOffice 3.6 Calc and LibreOffice 3.6 Writer. Neither has an icon, and neither works. Other parts of the suite seem to be working, but Calc and Writer are the bits I use most.

I've looked at the repo, and there seems to be a single LibreOffice package, so it doesn't look as if the upgrade missed picking up sections of the package. The only other entries for LibreOffice are locale specific packages.

Is anyone else seeing this problem? I've had a look at both the forum and the Wiki, but don't see anything useful, so I'm wondering what I've missed.

Paul.

[Akuna]

No such problem on my 64 bit system here.

[toothandnail]

No such problem on my 64 bit system here.

I've done a bit of checking - the package itself is fine. Seems to be a problem with the menu entries, though I've not yet worked out what is wrong with the /usr/share/applications/ desktop files. Hopefully I'll eventually sort it out....

Paul.

[gaucho]

Hi, toothandnail,

I'm using the 32-bit version of Salix 14.0 Xfce and I applied the LibreOffice 4.0.0 update today (via the Gslapt package manager). Maybe I was just lucky, but it went fine and in my Office menu category, everything is appearing with the correct version name (i.e., "LibreOffice 4.0 Writer" etc.).

I'd like to offer a few options for you to go about correcting/editing your menu entries ... These are listed in increasing order of difficulty (from easiest to hardest, IMHO [which is worth $0.02's]):

Using the lxmed (LXMenuEditor) graphical tool:

It's not available in either Gslapt or Sourcery, so you will need to manually install it (it's easy ... don't worry). First, make sure that you have Java (jre) installed on your system -- it's probably already installed by default. Then go to lxmed's website:

http://lxmed.sourceforge.net/index.html

I extracted lxmed in my /home directory and followed the brief instructions to install it. (You'll notice that it has a subdirectory called "content" which contains a file named "LXMenuEditor.jar"). Although it created a menu entry under Salix > Settings > Main Menu Editor, I got an error message when I tried to call the program from the menu entry. After some trial and error, I discovered that it can be successfully launched from the Terminal:

Code: Select all

david[~]$ java -jar ~/lxmed/content/LXMenuEditor.jar

(Note: Apparently the previous tool of choice for this was alacarte, but some web posts seem to indicate that it is a dead/dying project. It isn't available via Gslapt or Sourcery. So I think that lxmed is a safer bet, even though it was originally intended for the LXDE desktop environment).

I didn't try actually editing anything with lxmed, but it looks easier than editing desktop files, as described below.

Editing the desktop files:

http://wiki.xfce.org/howto/customize-menu#
"Customize the Xfce menu."

http://linuxlibrary.org/xfce-4-desktop- ... omization/
Rice, David. "Xfce 4 desktop menu configuration." 26 Feb. 2012.

I hope this will help clarify things rather than just muddying the waters. Good luck!

< Edit:

This isn't necessarily a good alternative, but I'll mention it for the sake of completeness. (It occurred to me while I was walking my dog in the park this evening).

This would not update the LibreOffice 3.6 entries in your Main menu, but I think it should make it possible to start up LO 4.0 via a launcher on your panel/taskbar. The first step would be to add a Launcher for Writer and Calc on your panel.

Although these would link to the (non-functional) LO 3.6, you could edit/update the launchers themselves to point to LO 4.0:

Right-click on the launcher and select Properties. This will open a window:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/10 ... rpree.png/

Click on the icon labelled "Edit the currently selected item".

Another window will open, allowing you to make changes to the launcher's configuration:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/13 ... rpree.png/

Here, you can change the Name to "LibreOffice 4.0 Calc" (or "4.0 Writer," as the case may be), and the Command to "libreoffice4.0 [etc.]".

Clicking on the "No icon" button should bring up a window containing application icons, and LO 4.0 modules should appear:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/83 ... ricon.png/

Click on the "Save" button to finalize your changes and then try starting up LO 4.0 with the new launcher(s). >

[NL_Derek]

I have solved the error reported by gaucho. Java is not in root's PATH, the easiest thing is to edit (as root) /usr/bin/lxmed. Look for the line (near the end) containing "java -jar" and insert the full path of java (on my 32-bit Salix 14.0 it's /usr/lib/java/jre/bin/java). You can also remove the --message part since lxmed doesn't run in user mode.

--- Derek