Hi John, Thanks for these additional instructions. Earlier today I needed libc6-dev and when I went to install it a bizarre thing happened... synaptic asked for the CD!!! That was a first! Strangely, nothing had changed. A possible factor was that the first time I opened Systems->Language_Support (several days ago) I got an error message saying that the locale was not correctly installed, after which a lot of stuff was downloaded from the net by the language support wizard, including openoffice-core if I'm not mistaken.
Now on to your suggested work-around. After editing sources.list, updating apt and reloading the package list (which must have been cached because the CDROM didn't spin up), the list diminished to 882, of which 856 were installed. I was able to install the serial port driver from the CD, so that part was working. However, uninstalled OpenOffice packages didn't appear in the list. To prove the point, I uninstalled OO-Calc, deleted its package from the apt cache and restarted synaptic. It was gone. This brought me full circle to the situation described in the first post, i.e. AddRemove said the application list was out of date and would display OO-Calc in the list but wouldn't install it, with the "cannot be installed on your computer type (i386)" error again. After replacing the net links in sources.list and updating the package list I could reinstall OO-Calc but not from the CD. At this point I have to ask a silly question - is OpenOffice actually on the CD or is this my misunderstanding? If it is on the disc then something is still wrong here. The extended partition and locale problems may have been contributing factors but I don't think they can be the reason the condition persists. Sorry for so many words over something which seems less important with each passing day. However, the ability to perform stand-alone installations (without net access) is a very attractive feature, one which Ubuntu seems to aim for but one which for whatever reason I haven't been able to achieve with Xubuntu Edgy. Thanks again for your assistance which is very much appreciated. Cheers, clubsoda -- Cannot Install Packages from CD and Need Internet Connection https://launchpad.net/bugs/71964 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
