Libreoffice corrupted by Ubuntu failed upgrade

users
#1

Hi all

So I thought I would upgrade from Ubuntu to 18.10 to 19.04. The normally easy, no dramas upgrade was far from ideal.

After several hours of fiddling, my tech expert son found some obscure gnome settings got wrecked, and once we trawled through various log files and found the  offending files, all was well.

Except Libre Office.

Everything important seems to work unless you try to use templates- either through the opening screen or through File- Manage Templates. At that point the program freezes. Eventually a message window opens to say that "Libre Office 6.2 Writer is not responding" with options to Force Quit or Wait.

I have tried the usual things:

  * remove configuration files
  * re-install
  * downloaded the DEBs from the Libre Office web site and tried to
    install over the existing installation.

So far nothing has resolved the issue.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thank you

#2

Hi,

I opened a bug about this yesterday (bug 124864). I have been
experiencing this since 6.2.2 on Linux Fedora, and the only possible
resolution I found was to stick with using 6.2.1, downloaded from the
LO site. Hopefully this will work for you as well.

Rémy.

#3

So I thought I would upgrade from Ubuntu to 18.10 to 19.04. The normally

The only safe way to upgrade from one version of Ubuntu, to another, is
to wipe the drive, and install the new version of Ubuntu.

Except Libre Office.

Uninstall LibreOffice.
Delete _all_ configuration files.
/home/user_name/config/.libreoffice/*

Delete _all_ files in /opt/libreoffice/*
from /home/user_name/
cd ..
cd ..
ls -alR | grep offic

Delete all folders and files that have libreoffice as part of their name.

Then download LibreOffice from
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

Unpack and install LibreOffice.

jonathon

#4

Please don't spread nonesense. Ubuntu upgrades are designed to work well in
the VAST majority of cases.

Gilles

#5

In any case, the bug should be notified to Ubuntu, as they repackage LibreOffice (and in some cases they create specific bugs, which do not affect LibreOffice vanilla).

#6

When I've had stuff I MUST recover after an event like this, I find the
easiest way is to make a new user account, and set the permissions on the
old user account folder to either be owned by the new user, or open to the
drive, depending on my mood and the distribution's built in networking.

I won't try to give you a detailed instruction, but once you have a new
user account, and are sure it is the default user that will login when the
system boots, "chown" is the secret to allow access to your older files.

#7

You wouldn't believe how simple this was to fix!

I considered doing the complete removal then re-installation but what put me off that was it wanted to remove gnome for some reason. Even removing just some of the components dragged gnome with it, and I am not keen on using linux without a desktop environment.

I had a spare log-in profile  already, and LO works in that profile. The thought of using one log-in to access software installed on a different log-in just seems too prone to messing up, but at least I knew there was an option there.

In the end, I thought about it and realised that it is only templates that are the issue here, so let's examine the templates issue.

I looked at the Path options in Tools-Options-Libre Office- Paths. It appears that for some reason LO had added my home directory as a path for templates, as well as the default path. I deleted the home directory, recreated the template folder in my config folder then copied my templates back in and now it's all working.

Thank you for all the suggestions

Keith