On 03/01/10 12:36, Claire Wood wrote:
Hi
I'm having a problem uninstalling and reinstalling OOo because the download
seems to get stuck after downloading 25% of the package and so I went onto
the mirror site for UK, not the Virgin media one cos that one runs really
slowly.
I've only had to use the mirror site once before today (on 29 Jan) and
it was simple to use then. Now I think it's been made alot more
complicated. There's no instructions on there what to do. There shouldn't
be an assumption that everyone knows what to do with the list of files
presented to you as we're all at different learning levels.
I went to look at the files in the UK Mirror Service (and I compared
what's there with a couple other random mirrors), and what I see is
pretty typical of any mirror service... a directory listing of the
available files, in this case, the stable/3.2.0 release. The filenames
used seem to be pretty logical with the architecture included in the
filename (eg Linux, Solaris, OSX etc)
Mirrors are the responsibility of the mirror provider, not OOo. OOo
provides the files to be mirrored, but has no control over how they are
presented in the Mirror provider's web interface (if they even have
one... for example, some mirrors can only be accessed by ftp). There
will never be any comprehensive instructions in a mirror server until at
some point someone redesigns how mirror servers work... I wouldn't hold
my breath waiting for that to happen. Since each mirror presents the
info/files slightly differently, documenting a click-by-click for the
inexperienced would be a LOT of work.
I've seen some mirror services that truncate long filenames in the
displayed info, so you end up having to hover over every single link
until you find the filename you're looking for. Others provide a nice
easy to use web interface.
If you happened upon an easy to use mirror on 29 Jan, then you were
lucky :-)
Typically, an inexperienced user would never find or even know about the
mirrors.. they'd simply go to the main OOo page and click the download
link. The bouncer would auto-select the closest/fastest mirror, and
they'd get the right installation file for the OS they are connecting
currently using to connect to the OOo website.
Do you have to
load each file separately? Isn't that going to take ages? Where do you
download them to: Desktop, C:\ drive? Why can't we download as a package?
If you download every file there (around 3GB), you've got every
supported install for OOo. Probably not what you or any random user
would want.
You download the file to wherever you want - I don't have C:\ on my
computer, so instructions telling me to do so would not be helpful. My
browser defaults to save all downloaded files in
/home/myusername/Downloads so telling A Windows user to download to this
location wouldn't help much either :-) If you're on OSX, again it's a
different file path/location.
The install files are packages that canbe downloaded... for Windows, you
get an EXE, for OSX you get a DMG, for Linux, you get an RPM or DEB and
so on. All are "packages", you just have to click on the right one for
your OS.
C
--
Clayton Cornell ccorn...@openoffice.org
OpenOffice.org Documentation Project co-lead
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