While writing some text (under Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy with OpenOffice 2.4) I wanted to insert a formula and much to my surprise the Insert -> Object -> Formula way grayed (greyed?) out. My first reaction was that this is probably because I was missing Java (or more precisely: OpenOffice didn’t recognize my installation of the OpenJDK 6). So I tried to configure it, to no avail. I kept getting the error message: no java installation was found in the given directory
. Not to developers: it would be really nice to specify what file you are exactly looking for in the directory, so that I can search my HD and located the correct folder!
I solved the Java issue by installing the package openoffice.org-java-common
via apt-get, but this still didn’t solve my formula problem:
sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-java-common
Finally I found some posts on the ubuntu forums which indicated that all you have to do is install the correct package:
sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-math
This solved the problem, but begs the question, why wasn’t this package installed by default? I suppose that someone (Sun? Ubuntu? Debian?) was following the Microsoft Office practice of not installing the Equation editor, but this is the one optional component I always installed when I used Microsoft Office.
3 responses to “Resolving the problem with inserting formulas in OpenOffice with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy)”
Thanks for the solution. I also came to my surprise that this package is not installed by default.
Greetings!
Thanks for the solution. It also came to my surprise that this package is not installed by default, since it is a quite needed feature, I would say. Thanks once more!
Greetings
I think that may not be installed complete in the Ububtu Cd because of space reasons, only go to synaptic ans install openoffice.org.
I had the same problem but that seemed to fix it, also it works whit your solution, Thanks!