Posted by Jim at April 6th, 2004

I’ve just hit something that irritates me greatly.

When I installed Mandrake Linux on my pc, I found that Open Office mysteriously didn’t work. Tonight, for the first time, I tried to solve this problem. I uninstalled and then reinstalled Open Office. Now Open Office works. Unfortunately, it has one problem. It is not in English. It is instead in Catalan, a dialect of Spanish.

I’d do something about it, but when I try to remove the Catalan module, it informs me that I’ll have to uninstall Open Office as a whole. I’ve been searching for the English module, but I can’t find it.

I’ve tried to go into the help files, but they have not been installed. The configuration menus, however, are of no help. They are all in Catalan.

I’m getting tempted to uninstall Open Office and then download and install Open Office directly from the project website. This irritates me on aesthetic grounds, however. Mandrake has a package system and I’d prefer to use it, if possible.

If I’ve got to screw around with the details of this supposedly “easy” distribution too much more, I will probably switch to Freebsd. With that, I’ll at least be assuming the need for configuration and having to put up with some crap won’t annoy me quite so much.