[ale] openoffice

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Fri 2007-09-21 07:29:34 -0400, Paul Cartwright wrote:

> I downloaded and installed openoffice 2.3, using aptitude -i *.deb

You don't mention what specific files you downloaded.  There are a lot
of openoffice packages floating around out there.  Can you provide the
link you used?  Your aptitude invocation also seems unlikely to me.
man aptitude says this about the -i option:

       -i
           Displays a download preview when the program starts (equivalent to
           starting the program and immediately pressing "g"). You cannot use
           this option and "-u" at the same time.

Perhaps you used dpkg -i instead?

> now when I run aptitude upgrade I get this:
> # aptitude install kdebase-data
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree... Done
> Reading extended state information
> Initializing package states... Done
> Writing extended state information... Done
> Reading task descriptions... Done
> Building tag database... Done
> The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
>   openoffice.org-base openoffice.org-calc openoffice.org-draw
>   openoffice.org-impress openoffice.org-math openoffice.org-writer
> The following packages have been kept back:
>   kdebase
> The following packages will be upgraded:
>   kdebase-data
> 1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
> Need to get 9764kB of archives. After unpacking 217kB will be freed.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

Did you agree to remove these packages?  You don't say what your
response to this prompt was.

> this morning, when I for logged on, my office menu was empty of any office 
> packages, so I went back in and reinstalled them and the desktop menus.
> Am I doing something wrong??

If you agreed that aptitude should remove the packages, that would
explain why they're gone.

Aptitude remembers which packages have been "manually installed" by
it.  Packages that the manually installed packages don't depend on (or
suggest) are removed automatically to keep the system clean.

If you installed the .debs with dpkg, aptitude wouldn't know about it
(it works at a higher level than dpkg), so on its next run, it would
think those packages are extraneous.

You can tell aptitude to treat packages as manually installed by it
with the "unmarkauto" subcommand.  So, for example, after
re-installing the debs with dpkg, you might do:

 aptitude unmarkauto openoffice.org-{base,calc,draw,impress,math,writer}

according to man aptitude:

          For more information on automatically installed packages, see the
          section "Managing Automatically Installed Packages" in the aptitude
          reference manual.

hth,

        --dkg
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