n00b Question: Uninstalling OpenOffice, then installing it again..
 

Ok, I want to update OpenOffice to 2.0.1 on Mandriva Linux 2006, but, alas, have no clue being a windows guy and used to the "Uninstall" button...

Many apps will automatically update when you install over an existing version.

What does OpenOffice web site say?? If nothing there, then just try it and see what happens.

It also depends on how the SW was intalled in the first place---eg rpm, deb, etc. for example, in RedHat and Ubuntu, if the distro came with version X of an application, and you use the distro's update tools to install version Y---then it is all automatic.

Push comes to shove, it is not the end of the world to unistall by hand....

You can run the Mandriva Control Center, go to the Software section and then to Remove Software and search for openoffice. Select all the packages for uninstallation. Once thats done, install the new packages using the rpm command. If you need more help, just post back.

Ok, most guides say:
# Download the tarball from OpenOffice.org (the download can be done from any user account and then moved), and extract the tarball (.tar.gz file) to a temporary directory.
When doing this, I download the tar.gz file...and then extract the contents of the ter.gz to the directory, resulting in a folder...

"/tmp" is a good place for example. For the purpose of this example, I will assume you have downloaded the tarball to your /tmp directory.
Easy...

# Open a terminal, such as xterm or konsole.
To extract the tarball, change to the /tmp directory: cd /tmp
and extract the tarball: "tar -zxvf [tarball name]".
What tarball?

# This should create a directory "OOo_1.1x_LinuxIntel_install".
("x" in this sense is a suffix to version 1.1 that will depend on the version you downloaded.)
Nope...



Does anyone understand what I'm sayin?

That is a guide for OOo 1.x and does not apply to OOo2. OOo2 ships rpms by default, so you need to user the rpm command to install them on Mandriva.

Here are the instructions on the OOo web site to install the current version of OOo.

http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.0...ons.html#linux