How to remove and prevent LibreOffice PPA and updates from installing?

Question

I have removed LibreOffice from my Kubuntu system last week. I installed the latest version of OpenOffice. However, for some strange reason the software center is telling me I have updates for LibreOffice.

Could it be that I still have the PPA for LibreOffice install? Can someone please tell me how to remove the LibreOffice PPA and prevent the software center from installing LibreOffice or any updates for it. I would like to stick with just OpenOffice.

Thank you

Answer 1

To remove the libreoffice ppa run the following commands:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa --remove
  sudo apt-get update

To make sure no libre office components are left behind:

 sudo apt-get purge libreoffice*

Answer 2

To find out if you have any PPAs, open a terminal, and type sudo bash, followed by your password. Then cd to /etc/apt/sources.list.d and type ls | grep libre*. If you see any results in the terminal from this, you probably have a LibreOffice ppa, which you can delete using rm (whatever results the previous command gave you), or by using rm libreoffice*. However, it's worth noting that LibreOffice is also available from the Ubuntu Main source, which you shouldn't remove.

As for any LibreOffice trying to reinstall/upgrade itself, Ubuntu will only ever upgrade packages that are already installed. Just because you are subscribed to a software source, doesn't mean the software in said source will be installed. Odds are, you have some remaining peaces of LibreOffice left.

I would first try running sudo apt-get autoremove, and see if that helps. The autoremove command tells apt-get to remove any unnecessary packages from your system, some of which may be LibreOffice-related. However, if apt-get thinks some of the packages are important, it will not remove them, as may be the case here.

You can probably test this using sudo apt-get purge libre* -s. Do note that the -s at the end tells apt-get only to simulate the removal process: nothing actually gets changed. However, you will see a number of apps which the system pretends to remove, in which case you should be able to pick out the ones that actually seem LibreOffice-related (be warned: many apps and libs will probably be unrelated; use caution when removing them, as they may be important to your system) using sudo apt-get purge (program). From there, you can run sudo apt-get autoremove like I mentioned above, and that should get rid of LibreOffice completely.