[ale] just installed LibreOffice in Linux, should have been easier

[Ron Frazier]

Hi Mike T.,

See comments below.

On 03/14/2011 12:59 AM, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-03-14 at 00:54 -0400, Ron Frazier wrote:
>    
>> Hypothetically speaking, if I wanted to get rid of LibreOffice (which
>> I don't) is there a way to identify the master package, so to speak?
>> A Synaptic search yields 22 items.  Nothing jumps out as being a
>> master record.  There's no mention of it in the application in
>> Software Center.
>>      
> There is no "master".  However, if you installed it using a single
> package that then pulled all of the other packages, you can easily
> remove it with a command line thus:
>
> $ sudo aptitude --purge purge main-package-that-pulled-the-others
>
> This will purge the main package (e.g., the one that you used to pull
> all of the other ones) and it will purge any other associated packages
> that are *automatically* installed *and* have no other dependencies.
>
>    

This is another post I'm saving for later reference. That's good info. 
LibreOffice wasn't originally in the Ubuntu Repositories, so I didn't 
use synaptic. Again, I don't wish to get rid of it, so this is all 
hypothetical.

For PC #1, I used this command, per the LibreOffice website, executed 
from within each of three DEBS directories extracted from tarballs.

|sudo dpkg -i *.deb

|I'm afraid I don't know what the procedure did, other than that it 
installed LibreOffice and it appears to work. Later, I learned about the 
PPA. I'm working on activating that on PC #1 so I can get the auto 
updates going.

On PC #2, I used the following commands to install LibreOffice from the 
PPA. I didn't use synaptic this time either.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libreoffice
sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gnome

Again, this did LOTS of stuff, I know not what. I wouldn't know what 
synaptic record to purge if I wanted to.

> I'm not sure that there is a way to directly translate that into a GUI
> with a reasonable number of steps.  The packaging systems on (most)
> distributions are quite a bit more flexible than the packaging scheme
> that Microsoft uses (that is, the Windows Installer package management
> system, also known by some as the MSI package management system).
>
> 	--- Mike
>
>    

I don't have to use the GUI. I just prefer to most of the time. However, 
I do realize there are times you just need the command line. I think my 
sister is vaguely aware of the command line, and my Dad and son are not 
hardly aware of it at all.

Here's something I've found the command line useful for on both Windows 
and Linux. That is getting directory listings with odd characteristics. 
For example:

Windows: dir c:\mydir /s /os > dir.txt - This will take a directory 
listing of c:\mydir, and all subdirectories, and order the list by file 
size, and send the result to dir.txt. Now you wouldn't want to do this 
against c:\ (the root directory) unless you want to wait an hour and get 
a text file with 2+ million lines in it. One neat thing you can do with 
the resulting text file is print it, which you can never do from any 
graphical file browser I've seen.

I'm sure you can do something similar with the ls command in Linux. I 
just haven't taken the time to figure it out.

I also sometimes use the command line for copying files, particularly if 
I want to use wildcards, and I sometimes use the command line for 
checking the IP address of a machine and the status of it's network 
interfaces.

Sincerely,

Ron


-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
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Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com

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