Re: Trouble installing woody OpenOffice deb

[Dan Kegel <dkegel@ixiacom.com>]

Chris Halls wrote:
> > I grabbed the latest version from
> > http://ftp.freenet.de/pub/ftp.vpn-junkies.de/openoffice/ woody main contrib
> > and did get 1.0.2.  Sadly, it doesn't solve my display problem.
> >
> > Interestingly, I have two computers set up as Debian 3.0 machines,
> > and if I remote log in from the other workstation, it displays fine!
> > So perhaps it's an X thing?
>
> It is a problem with a broken font somewhere on your font path.  OOo 1.0.x
> is overly sensitive to such fonts - this section of the README describes how
> to work around it:
>
> No menus are visible
> --------------------
> If you cannot see any menus when you start OOo, there are two possible causes.

I found the problem.  If I comment out
  FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType"
in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 temporarily, the problem goes away.
Uninstalling and reinstalling the package 'msttcorefonts'
fixes it so I don't have to comment that line out.

> > The other Debian machine, by the way, can't install the openoffice deb at
> > all; it complains (probably because I used some unstable packages at
> > some point in the past):
> >  openoffice.org: Depends: openoffice.org-bin (> 1.0.1-pre1.0.2) but it is 
> >  not going to be installed
> > E: Sorry, broken packages
>
> This will be because your libfreetype6 is not the Woody version.  Newer
> versions of the library do not work properly with binaries compiled against
> an earlier version of the library, so the packages conflict.  You need to
> downgrade your libfreetype6 to the Woody version (2.0.9-1).

That was it!  The command for downgrading, in case other newbies are reading, was:
  apt-get install libfreetype6=2.0.9-1

Thanks for the excellent support.
- Dan