SOLVED: problem installing OpenOffice 2.4

If you already have OpenOffice 2.x.x installed, you may have problems installing version 2.4. You may got one of the following message when you executed OOo 2.4’s setup :

An older product is installed
— or —
Same product is installed

Searching on Google revealed almost nothing – but I did find the source code for OOo 2.4’s installer. So I checked it out.

Apparently, here’s OOo 2.4’s installer default behaviour when it encountered existing installation :
(quoted directly from the source code)

// Checking version of installed package:
// If installed package is older: Force update mode, no selection of packages
// If installed package is equal: Force maintenance mode, only selection of packages
// If installed package is newer: Abort installation with message

That’s definitely not sane decisions. There’s no choice to uninstall previous version, for example.

So I’ll have to uninstall the existing installation manually. Question is, how ?

I looked around the source code again, shortly I found this.

So the installation details are in RPM’s database. We can uninstall existing installation via RPM.

To find out existing installation, type rpm -q -a

There are quite a lot of packages installed by existing OpenOffice. Copy the output from the command above, paste into your favorite text editor, and make it into these :

rpm -e –nodeps openoffice.org-core02-2.3.1-9238
rpm -e –nodeps openoffice.org-core03-2.3.1-9238
rpm -e –nodeps openoffice.org-core04-2.3.1-9238
rpm -e –nodeps openoffice.org-core05u-2.3.1-9238
rpm -e –nodeps openoffice.org-core07-2.3.1-9238
rpm -e –nodeps openoffice.org-core09-2.3.1-9238
rpm -e –nodeps openoffice.org-writer-2.3.1-9238
rpm -e –nodeps openoffice.org-impress-2.3.1-9238
rpm -e –nodeps openoffice.org-math-2.3.1-9238
……….
(and so on)

Then paste those lines on terminal / shell. Wait while rpm uninstall everything.
(of course, do take care to just uninstall openoffice packages)

Once finished, try installing OpenOffice 2.4 again. This time it’d work just fine.

btw; I did these all on Ubuntu dapper & gutsy, but it should work on any distro.

Hope it helps someone else out there.

10 thoughts on “SOLVED: problem installing OpenOffice 2.4

  1. wah untung saya pake slackware pak… tinggal ambil paket OOo 2.4 di situsnya, build pake slackbuild, terus tinggal upgradepkg…skrg saya dah pake OOo 2.4

  2. Saya pake OOo dari OOo langsung
    convert ke tgz pake rpm2tgz, lalu hapus yg lama, baru install yg baru
    kayaknya memang paling aman dibuang dulu, baru install yg baru

  3. kalau di ubuntu gutsy aku mesti uninstall yang lama dulu, baru deh install oOo 2.4, tar -zxvf OOo_2.4.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz, kemudian cd ke directory hasil extract, next sudo dpkg -i *.deb, masih di directory yang sama cd desktop-integration/ and sudo dpkg -i openoffice.org-debian-menus_2.4-9268_all.deb , sekarang sudah pake oOo 2.4 deh di my ubuntu ku.

  4. Hallo, trims untuk komentarnya.
    .
    Posting saya kurang mendetail, sebetulnya saya bukan upgrade OpenOffice bawaan Ubuntu.
    Jadi sebetulnya saya memasang OOo 2.3.1 secara manual (tarball), dan kemudian saya kesulitan ketika akan memasang OOo 2.4
    .
    Kalau OOo dari bawaan Ubuntu sendiri tidak ada masalah. Hanya saja versinya agak “tua” (2.3.0 🙂 )
    .
    Semoga menjelaskan.

  5. saya sudah install open office 2.4 tapi kok words, excell, power point dr short cutnya nggak bisa dibuka ya? bisa tolong sy ?

  6. Hanya saja karena ada stigma yang lebih negatif soal perjodohan, maka saya membuat posting ini, yang memberikan contoh sebaliknya

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