Installation Instructions in Getting Started.

[John_Paton]

Hi, this is a response to some discussion about Installation
Instructions in the Getting Started Guide. This was a few weeks ago but
I have been on holiday in the interim.

I have been 'lurking' on this list for some time now, having
thought that I might be able to contribute to the documentation, but
having been overwhelmed by the size of the task.

As an ordinary user of LO I thought that I might make a point relating
to the Installation info in the Getting Started book.

I suspect that the vast majority of ordinary users like me, who use
Linux as their OS, simply install LO from their distribution's
repositories, if it is not already installed as part of the base install
of their distribution. (As a side comment this will often be an older
version of LO - my version is 4.2 for instance in the latest Linux Mint
17.1 install). Distributions aimed at non technical users in particular
tend not to include even the most up to date 'stable' version.

This requires no knowledge of the Installation process since the Package
Manager for the distribution handles the whole thing seamlessly.

In those circumstances the ordinary user may certainly find a 'Getting
Started Guide' useful but will have no use for installation
instructions, which might frighten them anyway.

I accept that Users on Windows and OSX may have different needs but I
have no idea what the 'market penetration' of LO is on these platforms.
LO or one of the forks is almost the default Office suite in mainstream
Linux distributions.

I know that this post hardly helps move the documentation forward but I
felt that the view of an ordinary user may be of interest.

John

[Kevin_O_Brien]

I want to respond to the idea that helping is "overwhelming". It is
work, no doubt about it. But as someone who definitely doe not know
everything (people on the users list can confirm that I regularly post
questions there) I still find I can make a contribution. For example,
yesterday I did a draft of the update of Chapter 6, Impress, to the
5.0 level. I happened to have the day off from work, so I applied my
butt to the chair, and went through the chapter one page at a time
with Impress 5.0 open and checked everything the documentation said. I
discovered that some menu choices had changed, that some terminology
had changed, and updated the documentation to reflect that. Then I put
in new screenshots because what I saw was somewhat different from the
old screenshots. It took me most of the day to do my first draft, I
posted a couple of questions to the list, and I used comments on the
draft to explain some of the changes I made. So it was definitely a
time commitment, but I wanted to make a contribution. I expect doing
an hour a day for a week would accomplish the same thing for anyone
who didn't want to do it in one day, but what it requires mostly is
being careful about checking everything.

If you or anyone else wants to ask me about my work process on this I
am happy to answer any questions.

Regards,

[RobertG]

Hello John,

I suspect that the vast majority of ordinary users like me, who
use Linux as their OS, simply install LO from their distribution's
repositories, if it is not already installed as part of the base
install of their distribution. (As a side comment this will often
be an older version of LO - my version is 4.2 for instance in the
latest Linux Mint 17.1 install). Distributions aimed at non
technical users in particular tend not to include even the most up
to date 'stable' version.

The installation of the distribution is different to the installation
you get when downloading the packages from LO-website.
There are bugs reported for LO on Ubuntu, for LO on OpenSUSE - and
nobody could see this buggy behavior by using the original packages of
LO and other way around.
Two examples, both from Base:
Ubuntu-users reported bugs for the old report-generator. This
report-generator your could not start to generate a new report, if you
have installed packages of LO directly. It seems to be the default
Ubuntu installs. You could only stard already created reports for this
old generator.
Best connection for MySQL/Maria-databases is the direct connection.
There is an extension downloadable for MySQL/Maria-databases on the
website of LO. OpenSUSE offers the extension directly with the first
install of LO. If you open OpenSUSE-LO you could see the extension of
the MySQL-driver is locked. Normal user couldn't delete this extension
- - and the extension OpenSUSE offers doesn't work.

I am able to install many versions here when using the
install-instructions of GettingStarted. With all this versions I could
connect to MariaDB directly and could start the Report-Builder.

Everybody, who want to install the LO-version directly from LO has to
know how to install it - and this isn't the version Ubunto or OpenSUSE
supports.

Regards

Robert

[John_Paton]

I was merely expressing my opinion. I don't want to turn this into a
war but I would refer to the LO website and in particular the
'Installation Instructions for Gnu/Linux'.

I quote :

"As a general rule, you are advised to install LibreOffice via the
installation methods recommended by your particular Linux distribution
(such as the Ubuntu Software Center, in the case of Ubuntu Linux).
This is because it is usually the simplest way to obtain an
installation that is optimally integrated into your system."

I fully accept the points of information my original post has
generated. Thank you for those.

Regards to all

John