On Tue, 2016-09-27 at 08:51 -0700, paulwhee...@cox.net wrote: > I attempted to install LibreOffice (office productivity suite > (metapackage)) on my mint Linux system. > 1. Synaptic said the package was broken - Image 1. I changed > repositories and got it to install. > 2. However, it would not start. Found that it had been installed as a > file owned by root, so user could not run it. - Image 2. I changed > owner to user. > 3. I tried to start it, again, and got message 3. > > The last time I tried to report a bug in this package, someone told me > I was in the wrong place. I am not sure how talking to the package > maintainers could be the wrong place!
I think you're misunderstanding the complexity of the F/OSS ecosystem. For a software package like LibreOffice, there are upstream maintainers who actually write the code. They provide source code to users. Some of those maintainers also provide binary packages that can be installed; LibreOffice does this for example: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/ However, most upstream maintainers don't do this, they only provide source code. Then there are the distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, Arch, etc. They take the source code from upstream maintainers for all the different packages that make up a complete GNU/Linux system, compile them to create packages that are appropriate for their particular distribution (and do a huge amount of other work involved with constructing a usable and useful system from a bunch of component parts). So you can't (generally) install a Red Hat package on a Debian system, or a Gentoo package on a CentOS system, etc. You have to get the package that was built for your particular distribution. That's why people are telling you that you're in the wrong place: problems with the installation of packages are specific to the distribution you're using, and you're using Linux Mint, not Ubuntu--this mailing list is for people using the Ubuntu distribution. Linux Mint in particular is a "derived distribution", which means it is created by taking the results of another distribution (in this case Ubuntu and Debian), and adding its own set of packages on top of that. So, a large number of the packages in Linux Mint _are_ straightforward Ubuntu packages, unmodified. But, not all of them, and the package management on Mint is not identical to Ubuntu (as I understand it), which means problems in package installation may not be related to Ubuntu. I'm sure that if people using Ubuntu were having this problem installing LibreOffice on their systems we'd know about it by now, so presumably the problem is specific to Linux Mint. You'll have more luck asking on one of the forums here: https://www.linuxmint.com/links.php It may be that after discussion there you'll find that there really is a problem with the Ubuntu packaging, but it seems unlikely as LibreOffice is hugely popular. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
