Difficulty uninstalling LibreOffice and installing OpenOffice in Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit
 

Hi all

I've recently installed Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit, my first tentative venture into the world of Linux. I'm trying to uninstall LibreOffice (which comes as part of the Ubuntu 11.04 package) and install OpenOffice.

Using either Ubuntu Software Center or Synaptic Package Manager, it appears to successfully uninstall LibreOffice (LibreOffice icons no longer appear under Installed Software), but after a restart the LibreOffice Icons reappear under Installed Software, and clicking on one of the icons LibreOffice immediately fires up as if freshly installed.

Similarly, using Ubuntu Software Center to install OpenOffice appears to work at first, but the OpenOffice icon never appears under Installed Software, and I can't find traces of it anywhere.

I'm still very much new to Linux, so my problem might just be a case of me missing something simple. Perhaps LibreOffice and OpenOffice are one and the same thing?

How do I go about completely purging a particular application from Ubuntu (uninstalling and removing any and all traces of it, to the extent that the OS is not even aware of the existence of the application)? I'd like to start with a bare-bones OS with no applications installed, leaving me free to decide which applications I want and downloading and installing only those. Perhaps I should be looking at a different distro if I want this amount of control? I'd love to hear your suggestions on this.

Thanks in advance!

No they are not but I would probably be looking at keeping Libre over Open if for nothing else than speed.
When you click on the box next to the software in Synaptic there is usually an option for complete removal (not sure of exact words).
Definitely a different distro, but as to which would depend on what level of work you wish to do?

You can look at source based distros like Gentoo, Slackware, Arch or LFS (to name a few) which give you the basics (and I mean you start at the console).

Ultimately I would suggest going to something like http://distrowatch.com/ or maybe http://www.linuxquestions.org/reviews/index.php/cat/2 and see what tickles your fancy :)

libreoffice and openoffice are pretty much the same thing. libreoffice forked from openoffice not too long ago. though they are probably going to be taking different directions from here. libreoffice is looking to move away from using java. though you should be able to be able to use them pretty much exactly the same way.

its possible that ubuntu installs libreoffice when you apt-get install openoffice, since they moved from openoffice to libreoffice in their last release, and they are pretty much the same thing.

They are (almost) the same thing.

Whan Oracle bought Sun, OpenOffice was forked into LibreOffice to be sure that it will stay open-source no matter what Oracle does with OpenOffice.

MKT358 is quite correct. LibreOffice is a fork of Open Office and will do all the same things and, as time passes, likely more, as Oracle has no interest in improving Open Office and, indeed, is looking to give it away.

If you really want Open Office, I would suggest keeping LibreOffice and installing OpenOffice. They can exist quite happily side-by-side.

Thanks, you've all been very helpful!

@grail:
I've got a pretty fast machine, so not too worried about speed. I work with MS Excel spreadsheets a lot, and often have to use some of it's more advanced features. So I'm interested primarily in the package that can provide as much of MS Excel's functionality as possible. Based on my internet research the better replacement appears to be OpenOffice, but given OpenOffice's uncertain future I'll definitely have a closer look at LibreOffice.
That option is there, yes, but at best it appears to uninstall LibreOffice until the next restart.
I've done a bit of reading, and am quite interested in Gentoo and Slackware. Being new to Linux it's probably a much steeper learning curve than what I was hoping for, but I'm prepared to give it a bash!

@frankbell
They appear not to be able to, at least in Ubuntu. Hopefully I can install both in Gentoo or Slackware.

Cheers!

I think functionality wise (excluding macros of course) you should be pretty right with either :)