Last year Nanci posted that there were grammar checking tools for OpenOffice.org, the wonderful open source office suite, that takes care of one of the most glaring omissions and deal breakers in people looking for a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office. Unfortunately there seems to be a bit of a glitch with it in Ubuntu Hardy. Luckily there is an easy way to fix it.
The problem is a simple one. The LanguageTool software requires Java to work, but just having Java installed isn’t good enough. You need the openoffice.org-java-common package in the main repository for OpenOffice.org to be able to use Java, and it’s too big for the distribution CD so most of us don’t have that crucial package installed. It’s possible that while upgrading to Ubuntu Hardy that package may have been deleted rather than getting updated, but either way I’m seeing many people are running into this problem. Luckily it’s an easy problem to resolve. Simply install the missing package either in Synaptic or enter the following command in Terminal
sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-java-common
entering your administrator password when prompted for it. Then simply fire up OpenOffice.org once the installation is done and you can use your grammar checker in OpenOffice.org.
I apologize for not postying this sooner. I actually discovered it while writing my article on Mac4Lin for Full Circle magazine and should have passed the information along here sooner. Big thanks to calc and ckakman for pointing out the needed file.
5 August 2009 at 10:00 am
I am not able to connect. Help!
5 August 2009 at 10:52 am
What are you not able to connect to?
8 August 2009 at 8:09 am
Hello Peng and thank you for writing this tutorial!
I’m on a Ubuntu 9.04 machine (64-bit) and I followed the above steps but I’m still unable to install the Language Tool…
I’m running OOo 3.0 and therefore can only install LT 0.9.5 but I’m getting the exact same error message as the one I was getting before I installed the openoffice.org-java-common package.
Could it be that my system is 64-bit?
Thank you very much in advance,
Nik
8 August 2009 at 2:21 pm
You’re welcome, Nik. What was the specific error you got? It sounds like there may be a compatibility issue somewhere, but the error may help us track down the problem. As far as the 64-bit status goes, I don’t know. I run a 32-bit system so I may have missed something that affects 64-bit systems, but hopefully someone will have the solution once you post the error message.
8 August 2009 at 4:42 pm
Hello again Peng,
I’ve tried to copy the error message but it was not possible so I took a screen shot of the window which displayed it.
It can be found at this URL: http://i204.photobucket.com/albums/bb167/dreijun/screenshot_001.png
Thank you again for taking the time to look into this!
Nik
9 August 2009 at 8:14 am
Wow, that’s some error. I can’t tell what may have caused the error so I’m going to recommend you post a question either on the Ubuntu Forums or on an OpenOffice.org support site. I’m sure someone has encountered it in the past and will know what you need to do to fix it.
9 August 2009 at 11:03 am
Hehehe, I know!
Will give it a try in either of the two forums and hopefully I’ll manage to sort this out.
This is an excellent plug-in (even if you just want to remove the double whitespaces) and I really want to have it in my arsenal in OOo.
Thank you for your help!
Nik
28 September 2009 at 12:18 pm
Any clue since august ?
Ugo
28 September 2009 at 1:40 pm
I had to do some checking since I couldn’t recall if I had installed the LanguageTool when I did my last fresh install, but it turns out I didn’t. Grammar Checking is now included in OpenOffice.org 3, but it may require Java to function. The OpenOffice.org Java package (mentioned above) is the best way to get OOo to recognize that Java is installed. It’s not included on the Ubuntu LiveCD simply because there just isn’t room in the LiveCD for it.
As far as OOo recognizing another Java installation goes, that’s a matter for the OOo devs to adddress, and an admittedly quick search didn’t turn up any links to pages that address the matter.