Unable to install openoffice.org on debian 6 19-04-2012

[Dave.Khuon]

Finally I received my RasPI!  I burnt the debian6 19-04-2012 (latest as of this writting) image to an 8GB SD (class 4).  Plugged the SD card to an Ubuntu and ran getparted to display the partition of the SD: total size: 7.5GB, used: 2.5GB, unused 5GB.

Plugged the SD to my PI.  Booted up, type user id: pi, password: raspberry.  It works like a charm!

Next, I like to install OpenOffice (the extra 5GB should be plenty!).  Here is what I did:  started LXTerminal, and typed  "sudo apt-get install openoffice.org".

After a bunch of files were downloaded and installed, I got:  "Could not resolve http://ftp.uk.debian.org.  Failed to fetch http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debia.....e4_all.deb ...".

What can I do next?  Thank for your help.

dave

[nick.mccloud]

Dave.Khuon said:


After a bunch of files were downloaded and installed, I got:  "Could not resolve http://ftp.uk.debian.org.  Failed to fetch http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debia.....e4_all.deb ...".


For what ever reason, suddenly your Pi can't find http://ftp.uk.debian.org on the internet - this is not about disk space, it's about getting hold of the file in the first place. In the first instance, try again. If it doesn't work, edit your sources list to point to other repositories that may be a better download for you - particularly if you aren't based in the UK

[Steady_Bear]

Yeah what he said

But I've just done a check of the Debian link provided. If you typed it by hand that could explain it but if it's a copy and paste then there's your problem...

The bits after .org/ ....

debian/pool/main/openoffice.org/openoffice.org-~~~~eze4_all.deb

Should read

debian/pool/main/o/openoffice.org/openoffice.org-~~~~eze4_all.deb

Excusing the slight name shortening, after /main/ if you don't see it.

Just typing 'apt-get update' at the command line may fix your issue, as the file could have had a bad database entery, or just missing on the day of download etc.

NOTE: OpenOffice is likely to run like Mr Creosote after dinner, pre-'wafer thin mint'.

[jbeale]

not to throw cold water on this idea, but remember with the ARM you are dealing with the compute power similar to a 300 MHz Pentium 2, and with at most 224 MB SDRAM available for the CPU. Any modern office type application will be designed for use with a processor that is about 5-10x as fast and has about 5-10x more memory available (that is internal SDRAM, not external disk space). So even if it runs at all you may find it essentially unusable due to speed.

[SN]

I would tend to agree with the Mr Creosote comment

While not as bad as MS Office it certainly felt like a monster install on my Fedora Laptop and doesn't run particularly slickly on it either (1.something Mhz Celeron)

And its another Oracle product – as an HP employee I am probably allowed to implore you NOT to use any Oracle product for whatever arbitrary frivolous reason I can think of allegedly… possibly… possibly not… on second thoughts… make your own mind up

[Steady_Bear]

SN said:


I would tend to agree with the Mr Creosote comment

While not as bad as MS Office it certainly felt like a monster install on my Fedora Laptop and doesn"t run particularly slickly on it either (1.something Mhz Celeron)

And its another Oracle product – as an HP employee I am probably allowed to implore you NOT to use any Oracle product for whatever arbitrary frivolous reason I can think of allegedly… possibly… possibly not… on second thoughts… make your own mind up




Dude, you don't keep up with the news do you? They've handed it over to Apache now. So HP staff may go back from using LibreOffice to OpenOffice!

What do you mean you don't use either?

[itsonlyme]

I have open office installed which I did through synaptic.

The install went without difficulty. I have the whole suite installed as I could not see an easy way to get just the modules I needed, but I have only used the calc and writer modules.

I find loading slow but once loaded it runs at an adequate speed. Updating on a large spreadsheet is almost as quick as on my windows machine.

Well fit for my purpose, and for most home situations

[markb]

I despair! People have got hold of a developer’s version of a kid's learning tool, and the first thing they do is try and use it as a desktop PC!

Surely you should be writing your own word processor and spreadsheet tool in Python? Until you do, you can use ed to produce that 312 page report and you can find the source for VisiCalc as a good starting point for your spreadsheet program.

[jamesh]

That's nothing. When I was a lad, we had steam driven computers and actually had to type in the binary patterns of the characters when using the spreadsheet.

Actually, when I say type, we didn't actually have keyboards, we were so poor. We just had one switch which we needed to rewire for each character.

And you tell that to the youth of today...and they won't believe you.

[SN]

markb said:



Surely you should be writing your own word processor and spreadsheet tool


Been there done that - circa 1985 when we didn't have a copy of Wordstar available anywhere so wrote something similar in Basic on a ICL DRS20 Minicomputer - the dept loved it and we pushed all our reports out to other departments using its output

[markb]

JamesH said:


That's nothing. When I was a lad, we had steam driven computers and actually had to type in the binary patterns of the characters when using the spreadsheet.



I beleive that the Analytical Engine that Babbage designed was intended to be steam powered?

[grumpyoldgit]

I'm running on Debian 29-04-2012.

I've just installed OpenOffice for the hell of it.

The given instructions were fine; i.e.:-

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org

Going into Write or Calc sends cpu up to max for a few seconds but once you are in it quickly goes down to nothing. I created and opened a couple of documents without any problems.

I've also created a spreadsheet 100 rows by 10 columns with a calculation in each, so that changing a figure in the top left column results in 999 recalculated cells. The recalculation is instantaneous and you don't see the ripple effect that used to plague recalculations in the old Lotus 123 days when there was insufficient RAM.

I will continue to use OpenOffice as I don't see the point in searching about for individual applications with lower overheads .

I'm happy to give the application a particular task if anyone has any suggestions.

[markb]

Grumpyoldgit said:


I'm happy to give the application a particular task if anyone has any suggestions.



Could you type in the King James' Bible and then re-format it to 20 point Arial and tell us how long it takes please?

[itsonlyme]

"The recalculation is instantaneous and you don't see the ripple effect that used to plague recalculations in the old Lotus 123 days when there was insufficient RAM."

By gum I had forgotten all about that ripple effect. Time flies.

I had tested on about 1500 rows by 15 columns. Same instantaneous effect.

[jamesh]

markb said:


Grumpyoldgit said:


I'm happy to give the application a particular task if anyone has any suggestions.


Could you type in the King James' Bible and then re-format it to 20 point Arial and tell us how long it takes please?


Ok, done.

[Steady_Bear]

Grumpyoldgit said:


I'm running on Debian 29-04-2012.

I've just installed OpenOffice for the hell of it.

The given instructions were fine; i.e.:-

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org

Going into Write or Calc sends cpu up to max for a few seconds but once you are in it quickly goes down to nothing. I created and opened a couple of documents without any problems.

I've also created a spreadsheet 100 rows by 10 columns with a calculation in each, so that changing a figure in the top left column results in 999 recalculated cells. The recalculation is instantaneous and you don't see the ripple effect that used to plague recalculations in the old Lotus 123 days when there was insufficient RAM.

I will continue to use OpenOffice as I don't see the point in searching about for individual applications with lower overheads .

I'm happy to give the application a particular task if anyone has any suggestions.



Okay, I confess. Last version of OOo I used was 'way back when' and I switched to Softmaker as it loaded instantly and worked damned well (and, for me, was more logically laid out).

It looks as if they've fixed a lot of the old issues. Good!

[Clair]

If you have to have the whole ball of wax, try LibreOffice. BUT, considering what we are running on -- I prefer the bare bones of AbiWord. It's the same as the writers in the OO and LO pkgs. And, there is also gnumeric for exploration.