Installation Problems

[deltanick]

I installed SoftMaker Office 2018 for Linux today and immediately had problems. Suddenly, my cursor keys no longer work properly in any application: TextMaker, Libre Office and Thunderbird e-mail. When I click the L or R cursor keys, the cursor either doesn’t move, or goes up or down instead. When I click in the Subject line of Thunderbird (52.6.0), my browser activates. So, I’ve decided to uninstall it (SoftMaker Office 2018 for Linux) and uninstall all my previous SoftMaker apps (Free Office 2016 for Linux and SoftMaker Office 2018 for Linux Beta). Hopefully, this will help get my situation back to normal.

So, my question is, how do I properly uninstall both of those applications, so that I can do a CLEAN installation of SoftMaker Office 2018 for Linux? Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Those older two applications never before caused any problems for me, but I have multiple SoftMaker folders on my computer now, and three versions of SoftMaker Office. I am an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS user and update daily using an ASUS K53E laptop (2012).

[Michael Uplawski]

So, my question is, how do I properly uninstall both of those applications, so that I can do a CLEAN installation of SoftMaker Office 2018 for Linux?

Irrespective of your Linux-distribution, the response depends on how you had installed them in the first place.
On a Debian based system, like yours, there are more than one tool which helps install and uninstall packages. Use whichever you prefer. I make my recommendation just to get on with the explanation and I am not indicating that it would be the best.

If you have aptitude installed on your system, open a terminal application and start aptitude. Wait for the package lists to be up to date, then search for any SoftMaker package that you wish to remove. You will find as many entries as office versions, installed on your system, so handle them one by one.
Searching is done by hitting the slash-key ('/') and entering part of the name of a package, i.e. just “softmaker”.
Deleting (uninstalling) is done by first marking the selected package with '-' (dash) then, when all packages have been marked, by hitting 'g' (like in Go!).

If you cannot find a SofMaker package which is however installed on your system, you are alone. It is a chore to find all the files which belong to an office-suite, if the installation has originally not followed the recommendations of the Linux distribution that you use.

Edits: Silly words removed and potentially some Kraut2English

[Michael Uplawski]

If you cannot find a SofMaker package which is however installed on your system, you are alone.

It took me these few days to remember, why my statement in the previous post made me feel uneasy.

For a situation, where your usual package manager cannot uninstall a package, you can even then use an alternative utility that registers all modifications made to the system during an installation-process. I have a favorite program for these interventions, but it may not be the only one available.
To uninstall a previously unregistered package, you could for example

• Install the Porg Package Organizer

• Re-Install the package in question, i.e. overwrite the previous install, with the help of Porg

• As Porg has now registered all the modifications that the new package required, you can use Porg again to uninstall the package

The result will be the best that you can hope for, if you had not moved around some of the files provided by the unwanted package before its removal.
Also, there may be other programs devised for the same purpose. I am though unaware of them, as Porg has been my friend for years.

Edit: Download-Link is alright.

[vtpoet]

Hi Deltanick,

What happened when you uninstalled SM2018? Did that solve the cursor issue?

To clean your system of all Softmaker folders (if you're using a Debian based system, which is what I'm familiar with) you would use the purge command.

1.) To locate all softmaker installations:

dpkg --list softmaker*

In my case, my result is:

ii softmaker-office-2018 2774 amd64 SoftMaker Office is a complete office suite.

2.) If you wanted to uninstall the application, and only the application:

sudo apt remove softmaker-office-2018

3.) If you wanted to ininstall the application and all your preferences --- pretty much everything:

sudo apt-get purge softmaker-office-2018

More info on uninstalling apps: https://askubuntu.com/questions/187888/ ... pplication

Last question: What keyboard are you using? Is it possible that the installation somehow changed your default keyboard?

Issue this command if the problem happens again:

localectl status

See what it says.

Lastly, the next time you post, type the following into your terminal:

inxi -F

And past the relevant results. Always helpful to know what your system is... (If inxi isn't installed, then 'sudo apt install inxi')

[dhalgren]

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get purge softmaker-office-2018

Will remove all system wide preferences, but you will have to manually remove ~/.softmaker to remove all user preferences.

There also is a ~/softmaker folder which may be removed.

Purging all softmaker (using apt-get or apt purge) installations, that is, Free Office 2016 and Softmaker 2018, and removing the softmaker folders in /home, will ensure that your have a clean installation next time.

If you have modifications you wish to keep, move the softmaker folders in /home to trash, then re-install, check if the problem still exists. If the problem is gone, you can check the trashed folders by returning them one at a time and checking to see if the problem returns.

I had a similar problem a couple of versions ago, which seemed to be caused by having Free Office and Softmaker installed one after the other, and this was the procedure I followed to fix the problem. Hopefully it will work for you also.