I dumped my openoffice.org installation in an attempt to correct a self-inflicted font problem in the user interface. This procedure was a simple matter of going to System | Administration | Synaptic Package Manager and creating a search to find all the installed openoffice.org packages. I chose the packages, Marked them for Removal and clicked Apply. Done!
However, I couldn’t re-install the packages without synaptic wanting to download them all again. Broadband is CO$TLY in South Africa and the vast majority of private users do not enjoy the luxury of more than 500 Mb up/down traffic per month (each 1 MB above this costs us sentech users R 1).
Having just upgraded to “Gutsy” using the alternate downloaded CD, I thought: “By Jove old boy, why not just re-intall the packages from there?”. Trying to open the .deb packages from the CD folder resulted in red dependency errors. “So maybe I need to find some way to get Synaptic to get it from there?”. Trying to rebuild the Repositories in Synaptic using the Edit | Add CD-ROM option seemed at first to work since the CD now showed up as a valid package source when you hit the “Origin” button, BUT not ALL the packages on the CD were indexed for some unknown reason and there were NO openoffice.org packages to select from the CD. “Drat it!”
After some research and visiting Ubuntu’s community documentation pages (here) as well as Simon Gray’s very good tutorial on “How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu” I tried the following:
PS. use at own risk as what worked for me might go horribly wrong for you, what do I know, I’m still a newbie myself)
I examined the CD-ROM (Ubuntu 7.10 i386) and found that there were package lists in the /dists folder. In each sub-folder a plain text document called Packages and an accompanying gzip file called Packages.gz were found. Scanning through these using the text editor I spotted one which contained the openoffice.org application lists. These showed up as references to:
* openoffice.org-writer: Word processor
* openoffice.org-calc: Spreadsheet
* openoffice.org-impress: Presentation
* openoffice.org-draw: Drawing
* openoffice.org-base: Database
I then copied the entire /dists folder into my /home directory. The /dists folder was only 5.7 MB as it was essentially just a “catalogue” pointing to the actual packages which were elsewhere on the CD.
Then I had to tell Synaptic to go there to get these lists. Synaptic uses a file called sources.list which sits in the /etc/apt folder to identify repositories. The contents of this file look like:
# Automatically generated sources.list
# http://www.ubuntu-nl.org/source-o-matic/
#
# If you get GPG errors with this sources.list, locate the GPG key in this file
# and run these commands (where KEY is replaced with that key)
#
# gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys KEY
# gpg --export --armor KEY | sudo apt-key add -
#
# If you don't know what to do with this file, read
# https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/CommandLine
# Ubuntu supported packages
# GPG key: 437D05B5
deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 7.10 _Gutsy Gibbon_ - Release i386 (20071016.1)]/ gutsy main restricted
deb http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy main restricted
deb http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-updates main restricted
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-security main restricted
# Ubuntu community supported packages
# GPG key: 437D05B5
deb http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy universe multiverse
deb http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-updates universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-security universe multiverse
I opened the sources.list file in the gnome text editor using sudo since the file is protected and can only be modified by Root.
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
I studied the original CD-ROM entry in the file for clues on the syntax used:
deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 7.10 _Gutsy Gibbon_ - Release i386 (20071016.1)]/ gutsy main restricted
I noticed that the folder /dists was never mentioned and that the gutsy and main sub-folders on the CD were just listed as names separated by a space i.e. no “/”.
I then concocted my own reference to my “offline” repository to the bottom of the sources.list file:
deb file://home gutsy main
I clicked Reload in Synaptic to rebuild it’s database of packages from the listed repositories and went back to the Origin filter and there all the openoffice.org packages were now listed and available to be installed from the CD-ROM.
My re-installation of openoffice.org went smoothly but sadly my font problem wasn’t solved.