lost opportunity

users
#1

A minor tale of woe:

I have been trying for years to convince a young lady friend to break away from slavish dependence upon Micro$oft, and at least give LO, et. al, a try.

Her Curtains machine, running on Vista, finally got so clogged with untraceable trash that a complete system reload seemed the only remedy.

That meant re-authorizing the bundled M$ office suite and Bill, apparently continuing his unholy lust for revenue, refused to accept her utterly legitimate "product key".

What a chance to gain a convert but, alas, LO queered the deal once again.

I downloaded the software at least 6 times, mostly from the Clarkson U. mirror where TDF sends one by default, but from at least one other mirror as well.

4.4.6 three times, 218,736 KB each; 4.4.5 at 219,300 KB; 5.0.3 twice at 215,632 KB each. None of these would install, or give any indication of why they wouldn't.

Readers may assume that my procedure is at fault, and it may well be, but after these failures I had no trouble fetching and successfully installing AOO, Abiword, Jarte, HexEdit, Foxit, Firefox, Thunderbird, Audacity, &c.

I have a number of LO .msi files, going back to 3.5.4, on my own machines (all Curtains 7), and can try transporting them to the target via an external drive, in case there is actually something squirrelly about today's downloads.

But, after this experience, the would-be client - fearful of change in any case - can be excused for looking askance at LO, and may be a lost cause.

For my own edification, even if there's no salvaging today's fiasco, does anybody have any suggestions as to how such a supposedly foolproof process can go so far awry?

trj

#2

Hello Marianne,

A minor tale of woe:

I have been trying for years to convince a young lady friend to break
away from slavish dependence upon Micro$oft, and at least give LO, et.
al, a try.

Her Curtains machine, running on Vista, finally got so clogged with
untraceable trash that a complete system reload seemed the only
remedy.

That meant re-authorizing the bundled M$ office suite and Bill,
apparently continuing his unholy lust for revenue, refused to accept
her utterly legitimate "product key".

What a chance to gain a convert but, alas, LO queered the deal once again.

I downloaded the software at least 6 times, mostly from the Clarkson
U. mirror where TDF sends one by default, but from at least one other
mirror as well.

4.4.6 three times, 218,736 KB each; 4.4.5 at 219,300 KB; 5.0.3 twice
at 215,632 KB each. None of these would install, or give any
indication of why they wouldn't.

Readers may assume that my procedure is at fault, and it may well be,
but after these failures I had no trouble fetching and successfully
installing AOO, Abiword, Jarte, HexEdit, Foxit, Firefox, Thunderbird,
Audacity, &c.

I have a number of LO .msi files, going back to 3.5.4, on my own
machines (all Curtains 7), and can try transporting them to the target
via an external drive, in case there is actually something squirrelly
about today's downloads.

But, after this experience, the would-be client - fearful of change in
any case - can be excused for looking askance at LO, and may be a lost
cause.

For my own edification, even if there's no salvaging today's fiasco,
does anybody have any suggestions as to how such a supposedly
foolproof process can go so far awry?

It's a shame indeed. I don't know if it's really lost though: perhaps you could reinstall LibreOffice for her if there's a working mirror - few people experience what your have gone through and I don't really know what went wrong with this particular server.
My personal suggestion would be to ping us (this list, http://ask.libreoffice.org or even our twitter account (@libreoffice or @tdforg) or directly try a different mirror.

Also, I'm curious to know what operating system you replaced her existing system with. It looks like you didn't want to migrate the person on Linux. If this had been the case, you would probably not have had to download all these software for her - but a migration to Linux may cause issues as well.

Thank you for helping out this person!

Best,

Charles.

#3

Marianne, it's really strange since I use to install LO on a daily basis on
M$ Windows as well, and not having any issue.

I don't know if it's a mirrored files issue or if it's something on -that-
computer, as it happens now and then that Windows has strange (at least)
behaviors.

My suggestion is to to have a Pen Drive dedicated to software installations
and deployments with tested files on which you can rely on. This way gives
you the sureness that the problem is on the customer's computer side.

Anyway I believe it's not all lost since at least she'll be using ODF
format and whenever You'll want to try convincing her to migrate to LO, the
impact will be much softer. The most is done when leaving M$O.

I hope to have been helpful somehow, at least for the future.

Bye.

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
+1
Except i do see this as a lost opportunity for LibreOffice. At least for
the immediate future. On the other hand, as pointed out by Marianne, at
least AOO did work and that brings her within the same eco-system.

That is the main issue. The specific program/suite is much less relevant.
Once people have managed to escape the black-hole of MS they begin to
realise that they can easily work with different versions of the same
software and even quite a wide variety of different programs. There still
remains the problem of working with people still stuck on legacy
proprietary software that can't reach any agreed standard but aside from
that it is much easier to share files between LO, AOO and many more.
Eventually she will inevitably try LibreOffice again because it's just the
best.

In the past we had a problem with some people trying to download the
installers using Internet Explorer. For some weird reason IE decided to
rename the downloads from ".msi" to another format. It's the only
web-browser to do that sort of trickiness. All other web-browsers tend to
stick much more closely to internationally agreed standards but IE has
apparently always had trouble in that regard.

Anyway, many congrats in getting someone to dare to try a non-MS
alternative. I hope it goes well.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#5

marianne-x wrote:

A minor tale of woe:

I have been trying for years to convince a young lady friend to break
away from slavish dependence upon Micro$oft, and at least give LO, et.
al, a try.

Her Curtains machine, running on Vista, finally got so clogged with
untraceable trash that a complete system reload seemed the only remedy.

That meant re-authorizing the bundled M$ office suite and Bill,
apparently continuing his unholy lust for revenue, refused to accept her
utterly legitimate "product key".

What a chance to gain a convert but, alas, LO queered the deal once again.

I downloaded the software at least 6 times, mostly from the Clarkson U.
mirror where TDF sends one by default, but from at least one other
mirror as well.

4.4.6 three times, 218,736 KB each; 4.4.5 at 219,300 KB; 5.0.3 twice at
215,632 KB each. None of these would install, or give any indication of
why they wouldn't.

Readers may assume that my procedure is at fault, and it may well be,
but after these failures I had no trouble fetching and successfully
installing AOO, Abiword, Jarte, HexEdit, Foxit, Firefox, Thunderbird,
Audacity, &c.

I have a number of LO .msi files, going back to 3.5.4, on my own
machines (all Curtains 7), and can try transporting them to the target
via an external drive, in case there is actually something squirrelly
about today's downloads.

But, after this experience, the would-be client - fearful of change in
any case - can be excused for looking askance at LO, and may be a lost
cause.

For my own edification, even if there's no salvaging today's fiasco,
does anybody have any suggestions as to how such a supposedly foolproof
process can go so far awry?

trj

I have some recollection of having had problems installing software which required Microsoft .NET Framework on a clean system. It was several years ago, so not certain of the details, but it may have been OpenOffice. Basically, with no version of .NET installed, the installer would fail with a rather unhelpful error message (it would be useful to know what errors you got, if any). With a version of .NET installed (even if not the right version), the installer then gave a message saying which version is needed. Bit of a catch-22 I think - the installer couldn't run at all without .NET Framework, but having any version it could get far enough to work out that it's the wrong version and say what it needs.

It may not be the problem, as I thought Windows Vista came with a version of .NET preinstalled, but I may be wrong. I'm also not sure whether "Curtains" is another name for "Windows" or something else entirely? Anyway, it might be worth trying to install the latest .NET from <http://www.microsoft.com/net> and see if the installer will then run (or at least which version of .NET is needed).

Mark.

#6

05.11.2015 23:19, Tom Davies:

For some weird reason IE decided to
rename the downloads from ".msi" to another format.

That 'weird reason' was the error in the default webserver configuration
which no one of LO people cared to fix.

#7

When that problem occurs, it's due to specific mirrors being misconfigured, not LibreOffice's own servers. If the faulty mirror can be identified and reported, they do work with the mirror operator to fix it, e.g.:
<https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88913>
<https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/1124>

I've just downloaded LibreOffice 5.0.3 from the University of Texas mirror (the only one I can see explicitly mentioned in this thread) using IE:
<http://ftp.utexas.edu/libreoffice/libreoffice/stable/5.0.3/win/x86/LibreOffice_5.0.3_Win_x86.msi>
It saves with a .msi extension and checksums match, so there doesn't appear to be a problem with that mirror.

Mark.