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Hi :)
I think John Sowdon is suggesting that it might be a good idea to have
simple instructions on the official website and make them easily accessible
to noobs.  This would be something for the Website's Team to discuss.

The current page is under the "Get Help" 'tab'-type thing at the top of the
official website;
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/install-howto/linux/
It specifically mentions Ubuntu.  It also states that the version in the
distro's repository (=repo) is good enough and probably better than a more
up-to-date version because the one in the repo has usually been
tweaked/tuned to fit better with existing packages in whichever distro.

I'm not blaming the websites team here.  It is tough to get the UI right
and at a guess the team is desperately short of people to help with both
that and other work they need to do.  So i think they are doing a great job
and it's not easy (or even not possible usually) to get everything to be
perfect!

To get to those instructions on our official website you have about 3
clicks and a bit of reading so according to recommendations about website
design it is beyond the reach of most first-timers.  I think current
estimates are that most people would leave a site after about 3 seconds and
1 click if they hadn't found something interesting/relevant by then.  So
our instructions miss being noticed by several seconds and a couple of
clicks.  From the official website's home-page it'd be;
1.  click on the "Get Help" 'tab' (if you can see the black against
dark-green writing)
2.  about halfway down the list click on "Installation instructions"
3.  figure out which button is relevant (not very tough but does involve
reading - perhaps logos/mascots might make this clearer?)


Our official wiki also has quite decent instructions imo.  It might be good
to compare against Andreas' and see if they can be improved using some/all
of what his email gave.  Our official wiki-page is here;
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Install/Linux

Again not so easy to find so people probably find it safer and easier to
try googling it (or duck-duck-going it) rather than hunting around our
wiki.  I think most people involved in writing or editing anything on our
wiki agree that it's a bit disorganised but can't agree on how to tidy it.
The whole wiki grew very fast and had to capture or build-up a LOT of
information very quickly.  Also some quite advanced functionality was
available and very different ways of using wiki's and other types of
web-pages/facilities and the whole Cloud thing was just becoming more
mainstream.  There wasn't time for people to settle down, get together and
plan name conventions, position of pages or even overall structure.

For example it initially made sense for the;
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation
to be instructions on how to join the Documentation Team.  Hindsight is
fantastic though because now it seems not such a good idea at all!  Once
documentation started appearing it was suddenly obvious that those chapters
and books should actually be the first thing people see when arriving at
that page.  So for a year or so that page was quite a mess until the
separate things got put onto their own sub-pages and that landing page got
used as a disambiguation menu (thanks Sophie!).  Meanwhile someone had
translated a very involved FAQ from the French wiki and placed it here;
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq
outside of the Documentation part of the wiki.  So there is a lingering
question about whether to move all those pages into;
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Faq
but that would mean leaving forwarding pages at all the currently used
pages which would make even more of a confusing mess than already exists.

Individual page-name vary between using spaces between words, and then
those spaces get replaced by "%20" which makes the names incoherent to most
people.  So some pages use "-" between words and others use _ .
Unfortunately when giving people links the whole name usually gets turned
to blue and underlined so then it's not easy to see if there is a space or
an underline.  If you are happy to just click on links then that's fine but
it's a know security issue because it's so easy to use html to redirect a
link that appears to go somewhere innocuous.  Other people use CamelCase to
avoid having any spaces or other weird characters/codes in the Url.

So while the whole wiki is generally agreed to be a bit of a mess it's
difficult to move or rename resources which people probably have their own
links to, or have become familiar navigating too and might be taken aback
if it suddenly looked as different as a spam/spoofed-site.

I hope this clarifies why there may be problems with our documentation and
instructions etc and maybe, hopefully show a way of dealing with the
immediate issue and/or how to set-up a strategy for helping fix what we
have!


Meanwhile the Documentation Team could really use help with just
proof-reading some freshly done chapters.  It's a good way in to learning
about how the team works.  It's something best done by someone who doesn't
know much about how to use LibreOffice.  Inevitably as you proof-read you
learn quite a lot about how to use LibreOffice and so the valuable noobs in
the team tend to quickly become a lot less useful for proof-reading and
more useful for "reviewing" to check the instructions really do what is
required.  So if you have no idea how to use a part of LibreOffice then
please try to join the Documentation Team as a proof-reader.  If you
already have some technical expertise with it then joining as a Reviewer
would be fantastic too.

The "Base Handbook" is the one currently most in need of proof-reading.
Reviewing has effectively been done already but a fresh set of eyes for
another review would always be welcome.

Good luck and many regards from
Tom :)




On 9 October 2015 at 10:58, Andreas Säger <villeroy@t-online.de> wrote:

Am 09.10.2015 um 07:33 schrieb Евгений:
I think fresh PPA is -
https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

There are instaructions on how to add ppa in your distro (see "Read
about installing").
After that you can use any way to install libreoffice.
I am using fresh ppa on 12.04 and have no problems with dependencies.

If you can not do something - post what you do and what happens or what
errors you get.



And this is the non-PPA way of installing an archive of Debian packages
downloaded from libreoffice.org as described and supported on all
OpenOffice support forums since the days of OpenOffice2:

cd ~/Downloads


If you downloaded the md5 checksum file as well, you can check the
integrity of your downloaded archive:

md5sum --check <text file with check sums>

Extract the downloaded archive:

tar -xvzf downloaded_package.tar.gz

or use your graphical file manager to unpack the archive. I don't know
any way to do the following with a graphical tool:

go to the extracted directory of debian packages which depends on the
langauge version. In case of en-US:

cd en-US/DEBS

Install the packages as root:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb


This installs/updates the whole suite to /opt and you can start the
fully featured program by calling the executable file
/opt/libreofficeX.Y/program/soffice

For any "desktop integration" you can install an additional package go
to subdir of en-US/DEBS:

cd desktop-integration

and start a simulated installation

sudo dpkg -i --simulate *.deb


This simulation _may_ fail due to a conflict with /usr/bin/soffice which
is a symlink pointing to the executable and belonging to the
installation package of some other ODF suite.
If no such error is reported, re-run the command without the --simulate
switch. In case of conflict, it is safe to overwrite this single symlink
file /usr/bin/soffice:

sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite *.deb


Now you have LibreOffice and its components in your Ubuntu dash and/or
menues. ODF files will be opened by default with your new suite.

As far as I know, "desktop integration" can be installed for one version
of OpenOffice and LibreOffice in parallel. There were times when I had 5
different versions of both suites in parallel but only one Open and one
Libre Office can have the "desktop integration" and only one particular
suite can own the /usr/bin/soffice symlink.
You are free to modify this symlink as needed but your package managers
is very picky about the ownership of every single system file outside
your home directory. Every single file installed remotely via apt or
locally via dpkg belongs to exactly one software package.
As long as this symlink is the only conflict, I think it is perfectly OK
to use the --force-overwrite switch.

Any additional language and help packages can be installed in the same
simple way:
0. run md5sum -check <text file> to check the integrity
1. extract .tar.gz  with tar -xzvf ... or the graphical way
2. change to the extracted directory, subdir DEBS
3. sudo dpkg -i *deb
They refuse to install if their version does not match with any
installed office suite.


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