If you’ve ever found yourself looking for a free micro$oft office alternative, you may have stumbled on OpenOffice, the free and open productivity suite.
If you remember much news from a year ago, you should remember the headline “Oracle buys Sun” in all the newspapers, technology magazines and blogs.
The acquisition of Sun was rumored to be worth well over $7 Billion. Among the assets now belonging to Oracle are MySQL, Java and OpenOffice.
Once this buyout took place, issues between Oracle, The Document Foundation and those who helped build LibreOffice immediately came to light.
In an OpenOffice.org community council meeting, council chair and Oracle employee Louis Suárez-Potts kicks LibreOffice supporters out of OpenOffice. Lets just say the people asked to resign were key players in making OpenOffice what it was.
Many, if not all, of those who did resign, are now part of The Document Foundation. Leaving Oracle with very few people who actually know the inner workings of OpenOffice. Not too long after, major supporters started bailing out on OpenOffice in favor of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, including Canonical (Ubuntu andKubuntu).
An article in Linux Journal on January 18, 2011 referenced a poll on Tuxmachines.org about this ordeal.
A recent poll on Tuxmachines.org found that 37% of respondents plan to switch to LibreOffice right away, 49% plan to at least test it, and only 5% plan to stay with their current office suite. – Susan Linton
If you are new to LibreOffice, it is the free, power-packed, Open Source, personal, productivity suite by The Document Foundation. It will definitely be every bit as good as OpenOffice.
If you want to get rid of Oracles’ OpenOffice suite and are using Kubuntu, type:
sudo apt-get remove openoffice*.*
There ya go. Now you are all done with Oracle!
Then, to install LibreOffice, type:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
This should be followed by:
sudo apt-get update
Finally, type:
sudo apt-get install libreoffice