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I've tried to install LibreOffice and the Help on two computers where I work.
The computers both complain that the main installer is not a valid installer
- and that the Help installer has a corrupt CAB file. This seems fairly
unlikely to be true, but I'm checking to see whether there have been similar
problems reported by others. If no one else is having trouble, I'll hassle
the IT department here ... I'm suspicious that it's getting hosed on this
end, somehow ...
TIA!
Hi 
It's more likely the download process that went wonky somehow. Can you do an Md5sum or Sha check on the download to see if you did get it all? Firefox and some other web-browsers are better than others at coping with downloads that got interrupted but the best and easiest way to make sure the download is perfect is to torrent it as that performs constant checks on the quality of the download as it's doing the downloading. Have you used a torrent before?
I would probably chicken out and not bother with any of that just yet. First i would just re-download again and see if the new download installs any better on just 1 machine. If that works then use it on others If the 2nd download also seemed bad then i would try some of the things i suggested in the 1st paragraph.
Regards from
Tom
I had that same problem when I tried to install LO on both my new computer and on a new laptop.
I had also been having problems with my internet connection while trying to set up the new computer.
So, when the install did not work on either computer, I tried downloading the program with a different WiFi network, and this time I got different errors, but it would still not install on either computer.
So then I got the idea to download from a different web site, and this time it did work and it installed with no problems.
I still do not know if the problem was with my internet or with the download itself.
My new computers run Windows 8.
The original download (that gave errors during install) was the "official" site:
http://www.libreoffice.org/download
To find another site, I just googled "download Libre Office" and came up a number of sites.
I do not remember which one I used, but I think it was either:
http://www.download-21.com/libreoffice-20639/
or
http://download.cnet.com/LibreOffice/3000-18483_4-75337651.html
HTH
Ruth Ann,
Cincinnati, OH, USA
Hi
Ok, so this is off-topic but it's another security issue.
It's fairly easy for nefarious people to set-up unsecured wiifi networks. I've been caught out by this myself but was quite lucky because i was watching out for it and hadn't done any on-line banking through their connection.
Typically you have a computer or device that connects to the internet without needing a cable so you see a list of connections all with a padlock symbol and 1 or 2 with no padlock. Clicking on one of those gives you instant connection to the internet for free!! WoooHoo!?? However everything you do on the internet gets logged by the kind or stupid person that gave you the free access. They can fairly easily sniff through that to find passwords or login details of legitimate networks or even better grab your bank account details.
They might try to make life even easier for themselves by giving you spurious Phishing pages to attempt to discover your date-of-birth, mother's maiden name, address (you are out of the house and roaming around right?) and answer to a typical security question such as "What was your first school" or "Who was you favourite character in a book or movie". Hotel networks such as those used in cyber cafes, pubs, libraries, festivals, trains and other public places, might also ask some of those things but the only bit you really have to fill in is the password/number that they give you. Anything else should be optional and most reputable places avoid asking anything more than they really need.
Of course all the legitimate places (plus all those who really do accidentally leave their Wiifi hook-up wide open) all collect the same information too, as do your ISPs, but the difference is that
1. usually they are not so interested in your personal stuff
2. they have tons more information to sift through and are usually more worried about clearing out all the temp folders and logs rather than using them for nefarious purposes
3. it's less impossible to trace back to them when/if something does go wrong. Hotels tend to still be there in the morning.
Apparently in Germany it is illegal to have a wireless network that is not secured and sniffer vans go out to try to catch people and fine them. I think the sniffer vans find enough that they kinda pay for themselves. Of course the other way around is also true = that nefarious characters can scrape a lot of information out of your computer just by going in through your unsecured wireless access point on your home router. I just don't hear abut many people doing that yet but then they probably wouldn't brag about it much because it's too easy.
So, hopefully people have changed their password from "password" and their pin numbers from 1234, 1111, 2222 to something that is not quite so widely used but you still know that vast numbers of people do still keep using them so they continue to be the number 1 most unsafe things to use.
Regards from
Tom
Hey Tom,
Thank you for the advice - I was guilty of having an unsecured network myself for a while, as did a couple of my neighbors. Then I found out that another neighbor had been "stealing" the wifi from all of us for years.
That's when I added the secure password to my WiFi.
Oh, and the neighbor thief got pretty mad at me when I did that 
He also just started using another neighbor's WiFi instead (sigh).
Unfortunately, my ISP started having problems with the service around that time to the point where some days I did not have any internet access at all.
I finally got frustrated enough to make a change, and went ahead and switched to a different provider a couple of weeks ago.
This is a metered Wifi, so you better believe that the first thing I did was to set up a password for it!
Ruth Ann, Cincinnati, OH USA
To establish a secure http (and any other tcp based) connection via a public
wifi network do this (requires an ssh client on your mobile device):
HOST=yoursshdhost.yourdomain.tld
PORT=3000
USER=youruserid
ssh -Y -L $PORT:$HOST:$PORT -o ServerAliveInterval=30 -o
ServerAliveCountMax=10 $USER@$HOST
Given Firefox for example you then do this:
Firefox -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings -> Manual -> SOCKS
v5 -> SOCKS Host = localhost -> Port = 3000
Now all your http traffic goes out over the air and through the public
internet via an encrypted tunnel to a known point for further dissemination.
Note that while I do this from my MacBook Pro all the time I do not have that
device to hand at the moment so I am reproducing this from memory. There may
very well be some error or omission in the example but this is close to what
works if it is not exact.
Note also that you may first need to 'register' your mac address with the wifi
hot point provider using a regularly configured web browser session before you
can establish the ssh link. But once that is done and the ssh link
established then nobody between you and there is able to read your traffic.
And you know for certain who you are talking to at the other end of the link.
Alternatively get the Tor Browser and configure a secure and anonymous
connection using it: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
Regards,
hello,
am I mistaken? I thought any https address is already encrypted.
F.
Hi
Thanks :) I think that is over complicating it for most users.
It is useful to learn such things if you really are doing on-line banking from outside of your home or work networks or sometimes even inside them but for the most part i think we can hope that most people have a reasonably secure machine and a good enough place to use it that they don't have to worry too much about this sort of thing.
I think my main point was that people so seriously undermine their own security through bad passwords and such simple stuff that it makes their existing security useless. Even changing to a better password suddenly makes their own existing security plenty strong enough for most usages.
Regards from
Tom
Hi
On a dodgy connection that intermittently "drops out" Internet Explorer just stops the download and pretends that it's all done. Firefox and most others tend to try to either resume the download or starts the download again.
It's better to use torrenting because torrents allow you to interrupt and then resume again later, plus it keeps track of the download and keeps checking you are getting a perfect download. The normal web-browser method don't keep checking the accuracy so rigorously. However, it takes a little while to get used to torrenting and it means you need to install a "torrenting client". There are a lot of fanboys out there saying this one or that is better and that others are rubbish but really it's best to just start with any torrenting client and then try out other later to see which you prefer. You will fairly quickly work out which features you like and which you don't find necessary.
A Sha or Md5sum check involves running a small program on your computer to generate a number (called a "hash" but you can't smoke it and it's not illegal) and then compare that number with the relevant one listed on the website you are downloading from. The couple of times i tried this i used an on-screen calculator to copy&paste the numbers so i could easily take one away from the other. A non-zero result meant my connection had stuffed-up.
Usually it's fairly tricky to find the sha or md5sum number and for most projects they tend to all be on one page so you have to scroll through the look-up table to try to find. If the download was for one of the recent versions and was the one for Windows then it's likely to be either near the very top or near the very bottom so if you can't see it at the top scroll all the way through very fast and then come back to the middle later on if you still haven't found it. For LibreOffice we have a different page for each release and list the has/number for all the types of checking tools. You can get these from the downloads page by clicking on the "info" link in the fake button. For example
The best version for corporate deployments, because it is the current most stable version, so it's less likely people run into weird problems, is the 4.0.5
Windows - LO 4.0.5 main installer in English (US)
SHA-256 Hash: 903816ac56bacff8c1a7fe98919da579548b4f2433a35a7525442892a9bbc189
SHA-1 Hash: 0117ba5ae0bda3b1259a455ffaa0a240c155e0d8
MD5 Hash: 2591a067e9264f615552f11803c1cd64
Windows - LO 4.0.5 in-built help files (so when people click on the Help button in LO they get a pop-up help rather than being sent to an online wiki page) in English (US)
SHA-256 Hash: 5966730df81da65da4fc9b3487aae942014eeead71349a2d682fdd28efaa59aa
SHA-1 Hash: 6c7f477e915e8c92ab0c55298a790b54e8e150a5
MD5 Hash: 0a7331174784616ac294c9cd831fb088
Even though the default download, the 4.1.1 (soon the 4.1.2), has better compatibility with MS Office formats such as DocX (and has tons of new features) it's probably not so good for corporate deployments unless users have been using LibreOffice for quite a long time and know what to expect. When they first encounter LibreOffice they are likely to have a lot of questions and it's good for you to feel confident that their questions are NOT bugs and ARE solvable, possibly just requiring a slightly more sensible approach than the MS Office way. With early releases in a new branch (such as until x.x.4) you can never be certain. So, anyway;
Windows - LO 4.1.1 main installer in English (US)
SHA-256 Hash: 0fb99813311b46117b76f815d5d417c6d031a52fd577dba0bae00854fe666358
SHA-1 Hash: 43dfcfcdf3d828654a6408ab8bdb8b2666012a88
MD5 Hash: 4fa047c0590097ce201f49655365d772
Windows - LO 4.1.1 in-built help files in English (US)
SHA-256 Hash: da63436432e6ca438c367df68502faae5b58d309ea9574249fcffe3541ebd648
SHA-1 Hash: 5465fe639d3a3b0e7d51ff007ab6e00cbf8db27b
MD5 Hash: c48277e435c9f4e8b6984a7b58f52bbc
If you have not yet learned about checking downloads using these keys/hashes/numbers then it's probably best to start using the Sha256 and get ahead of those of us that are still stuck on older versions.
However, like i said, it's probably best to start off by just re-downloading but use Firefox or some other web-browser rather than using Internet Explorer. Then test on just 1 or 2 machines to see if the download did work. Ruth's advice is good and she gave 3rd party sites that both have a fairly good reputation. Anyway, i just felt my own previous reply was a bit shoddy so i thought i would make the effort to improve on my own answer.
Good luck and regards from
Tom
There is encryption and then there is ENCRYPTION. PKI certificate keys are
only used to authenticate and to establish a cipher and share a secret session
key between two hosts. If the negotiated key/cipher is low quality then the
resulting https session data stream may be compromised with relative ease.
Unfortunately many, if not most, web servers are configured to allow low
quality session encryption. Likewise many browsers are still shipped with
support for low quality ciphers. Both these conditions are in large measure a
consequence of early US government restrictions on cipher use by the public
and some places, France?, still have them I think. So once the https session
handshaking is complete using your RSA-4096 public key you can still end up
running an https session encrypted with an MD5 level cipher. And with few
exceptions you have very little control over what your browser chooses to use.
However, since you know the security level and cipher choices at both ends of
your ssh tunnel (because you set them up in the first place) then that link is
as secure as can be made. As it is the public access point where the greatest
danger of eavesdropping occurs a private ssh tunnel secures the weakest link.
DNS leaking is another security issue relating to public wifi hotspots but
that is a story for another time.
Hi
Lqtm. Of course the "try downloading from a different computer in a different place" should have been one of our first answers~! Agh, maybe next time! Anyway congrats on finding the answer!
Regards from
Tom
Wow!
Nice thread hijack, folks!
From busted downloads to nefarious Wi-Fi in three easy steps!
My company's firewall doesn't allow torrent downloads.
I never use IE unless it's the only option.
I used Firefox and Chrome - with identical, broken results.
Eventually, I took one of the computers off-site, and immediately got a good
download. .
Back inside the perimeter, another try yielded another broken file.
I'll grouch to my IT crew about it tomorrow.
Hope y'all have fun with the Wi-Fi thread ... !
Hey Tom,
Thank you for the advice - I was guilty of having an unsecured network myself for a while, as did a couple of my neighbors. Then I found out that another neighbor had been "stealing" the wifi from all of us for years.
That's when I added the secure password to my WiFi.
Oh, and the neighbor thief got pretty mad at me when I did that He also just started using another neighbor's WiFi instead (sigh).
Unfortunately, my ISP started having problems with the service around that time to the point where some days I did not have any internet access at all.
I finally got frustrated enough to make a change, and went ahead and switched to a different provider a couple of weeks ago.
This is a metered Wifi, so you better believe that the first thing I did was to set up a password for it!
Ruth Ann, Cincinnati, OH USA
Wow!
Nice thread hijack, folks!
From busted downloads to nefarious Wi-Fi in three easy steps!
My company's firewall doesn't allow torrent downloads.
I never use IE unless it's the only option.
I used Firefox and Chrome - with identical, broken results.
Eventually, I took one of the computers off-site, and immediately got a good
download. .
Back inside the perimeter, another try yielded another broken file.
I'll grouch to my IT crew about it tomorrow.
Hope y'all have fun with the Wi-Fi thread ... !
Hi
Thanks :) I think that is over complicating it for most users.
It is useful to learn such things if you really are doing on-line banking from outside of your home or work networks or sometimes even inside them but for the most part i think we can hope that most people have a reasonably secure machine and a good enough place to use it that they don't have to worry too much about this sort of thing.
I think my main point was that people so seriously undermine their own security through bad passwords and such simple stuff that it makes their existing security useless. Even changing to a better password suddenly makes their own existing security plenty strong enough for most usages.
Regards from
Tom
Hi
Maybe consider being nice to them and getting a cute cuddly penguin as a present. Also see if you can spot anyone that already has a penguin on their desk as they might be more amenable to using OpenSource software.
Personally i tend to hate cute and cuddly things but even so if it was a penguin that would make me smile. Penguins are so cool, especially Tux
Regards from
Tom
I collect every non-movie-character penguin stuffed animal as I can
find. I think they are cute, for some odd reason.
Still, it would be interesting to see more Tux Penguin "items" being
sold somewhere so you could have a "Tux" on your desk or door, or
somewhere. Then if the ask why you have a pengiun there, you could tell
them. Actually, I found severl hundred penguin images that have the
character dressed in super hero and other "costumes". I even have a
self made poster stating that my place is defended by a Penguin Defence
Squad with about a dozen costume character penguines that are dresses in
such a way that I would not want to have a bunch of humans dress liked
that I had to go up against, even if a few look more Halloween costume
than real type people would wear.
These two messages 'splain a lot. You Linux dudes are really weird.
Virgil
We are not weird, just passonate about Open Source.
Actually, to be honest, having some type of penguin stuff animal or sign
at our work desks can be a good conversation starter for Linux, Open
Source Packages, and even LO. Instead of you coming to them, they come
to you and would not be concidered rude on your side to answer questions
when they come to you.
The Penguin Defence Squad poster was just something to give others a
good laugh.
Well, to be perfectly honest, it is weird for us to . . . .
1 - want to pay for an operating system for our computers, if we get a
good one for free.
2 - want to pay for an office suite when you can get a good one for free
- think LO
3 - want to deal with all of the crashes and other stability issues
4 - want to have the OS "type" that runs most of the Internet and other
"must be up 99.99% of the time" servers?
5 - want to have the freedom to choose what the desktop environment will
look like - Untiy, KDE, MATE, and a whole lot of others - instead of
what some big company boss decides you must like.
It is called Freedom
by the way
more and more industries are moving over to Linux as their primary
business systems, desktop and server, and dropping MS products, after MS
decided that everyone wanted those little tiles on your computer and
many other things that businesses really do not want.
Would you have 10+ windows open and on the screen or minimized to the
"tray"? When I work, I tend to have many windows open at the same time,
or minimized so I can interact with all them creating my documents.
Last Time I tried it on Windows, Vista or Win7, it was a nightmare.
I really love Ubuntu Linux over Windows 7. I started using Linux when I
could not find a free Windows package to do what I needed after the
Windows package crashed and would not allow me to reinstall it. I have
been using it as my default desktop since early spring of 2010. I have
all my Windows laptops dual booting to Ubuntu as well. There are
something I need Windows for, but I rarely use it more than a few times
a month.
Yes, we are weird, but it is a good weird.
Virgil Arrington wrote:
Still, it would be interesting to see more Tux Penguin "items" being
sold somewhere so you could have a "Tux" on your desk or door, or
somewhere.
I have, sitting on my computer, a "Tux" penguin, wearing a blue tux &
bow tie. Written across the belly is "ibm.com/linux". I picked it up
at a trade show several years ago. I also have a raised dome "Tux"
sticker on my ThinkPad, along with a "GNU/Linux Inside!" sticker that
came with openSUSE when I bought the boxed DVD & manual. I also have a
couple of Ontario Linux Fest coffee mugs, with Tux on them. These
things are often available. You just have to keep your eyes open. Of
course, with a decent colour printer, you could make your own stickers.
The Tux image is readily available.