I thought I’d try LibreOffice 3.3.2 for Linux after having read that Oracle have effectively dumped OpenOffice back on the community after having failed to monetize it, but succeeding in losing all the developers and community support.

Nowhere in the installation instructions does it say if you don’t uninstall OpenOffice first, you’ll end up with no file associations!

After finding that LibO doesn’t actually fix the only thing I hate about OO.org – broken OLE support and the inability to open embedded objects in Word documents – I reinstalled OpenOffice 3.2.0

Well that didn’t fix the associations either, so now I’ve had to manually set Nautilus’s open-with property for all the MSOffice .xls[x,m], .doc[x], .rtf, .ppt[x] filetypes and hope I haven’t forgotten any.

The OpenOffice .odt/.ods and StarOffice .sxw/.sxd filetypes still seem to work. Of course that “fix” will only work for my user and not system-wide, which I assume relies on a mimetype setup somewhere.

Update: after a couple more uninstall/reinstall cycles, I found that running update-desktop-database and “update-mime-database /usr/share/mime” seemed to force the file associations back in place for everything except RTF, which is fixed by removing the application/rtf entry from /usr/local/share/calibre-gui.desktop