I’m using openoffice base in order to extract various data from a postgresql database to a oocalc file to make charts. This can vary from work related to blogosferic charts. I am using the sdbc postgresql driver and not the jdbc alternative. Since by default ubuntu intrepid ibex does not install the “base” package I tried to do a simple

apt-get install openoffice.org-base

to my horror this tries to bring a lot of gcj dependencies even if I had already installed a sun sdk.

The following NEW packages will be installed:
  bsh bsh-gcj ca-certificates-java default-jre default-jre-headless
  gcj-4.3-base java-common libaccess-bridge-java libgcj-bc libgcj-common
  libgcj9-0 libgcj9-jar libhsqldb-java libjaxp1.3-java libjaxp1.3-java-gcj
  libjline-java libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj
  libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless
  openjdk-6-jre-lib openoffice.org-base openoffice.org-java-common rhino
  ttf-bengali-fonts ttf-kannada-fonts ttf-oriya-fonts ttf-telugu-fonts
  ttf-wqy-zenhei tzdata-java
0 upgraded, 33 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 75.0MB of archives.
After this operation, 186MB of additional disk space will be used.

After a lot of tries I came up with this method of installation. First just fetch the packages.

apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
apt-get -d install openoffice.org-base

Second install them using dpkg

cd /var/cache/apt/archives/
dpkg -i libjline-java_0.9.94-1ubuntu1_all.deb
dpkg -i bsh_2.0b4-8ubuntu3_all.deb
dpkg -i libjaxp1.3-java_1.3.04-3ubuntu2_all.deb
dpkg -i libxerces2-java_2.9.1-2ubuntu2_all.deb
dpkg -i libxalan2-java_2.7.1-2_all.deb
dpkg -i libservlet2.4-java_5.0.30-8ubuntu3_all.deb
dpkg -i libhsqldb-java_1.8.0.9-3ubuntu1_all.deb
dpkg -i openoffice.org-java-common_1%3a2.4.1-11ubuntu2_all.deb

It gives some errors at the beginning because I don’t know the exact order to install them but in the end no dependency is unresolved and no gcj packages is installed, remains to install the sdbc part

apt-get install openoffice.org-sdbc-postgresql

and go make some more charts.