On several occasions, installation problems reported on the mailing list have turned out to be due to Internet Explorer's behaviour of giving the downloaded installer .man extension instead of .msi. On attempting to run the installer, Windows then complains that it doesn't know what to do with a .man file. While there is probably not much that LibreOffice can do to fix this, one user recently encountering the problem commented "why can't they save everyones time by saying at the outset that their software only downloads via certain browsers". Sounds like a reasonable suggestion to me - a note on the downloads page about this behaviour of Internet Explorer, and how to work around it. Perhaps only displayed if Internet Explorer is detected. Various options to suggest for a workaround: - Use Save > Save As when Internet Explorer pops up the download bar, and change .man to .msi before downloading, rather than letting it download to a default name and location. - Rename the .man file to .msi after downloading (but note that this also requires changing an option in Windows Explorer to show the extensions in the first place!) - Use a different web browser. Steps to reproduce: 1. From Internet Explorer (I'm using version 9) go to http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-still/ (fresh version 4.4.0 doesn't seem to download anything at all at the moment, but I think that's happened before when the download page has preempted a new version) 2. Click the button to download the current version 3. When the download bar (at the bottom of Internet Explorer) shows, click "Save" 4. The installer is downloaded to a default location, with a .man extension At step 3, it is possible to: 3. When the download bar (at the bottom of Internet Explorer) shows, click the arrow next to "Save" and select "Save As" 4. Change the extension from .man to .msi 5. Click save 6. The installer is downloaded to the specified location, with a correct .msi extension. However, many people probably just click "Save" and get a .man file downloaded to a default location and, even if they do use "Save As" to choose where the download goes, may not realise the extension needs to be changed.
This should not happen if our mirrors are correctly configured to deliver application/octet-stream msi -- no reason to expect that is not the case. Unfortunately, the OP and thread on ML never identified the download source. Any version of MS Internet Explorer is just as valid for downloading the msi installer(s) as the next browser. No need to recommend otherwise. Resolved Invalid.
Sorry; I didn't realise it was related to the specific mirror. I tried this myself before reporting, with IE9, and it give the file a .man extension by default. That was with http://mirror.catn.com/pub/tdf/libreoffice/stable/4.3.5/win/x86/LibreOffice_4.3.5_Win_x86.msi Attempting today, I find with the 3 mirrors offered for the UK: - http://mirrors.coreix.net/thedocumentfoundation/... is OK (.msi extension) - http://mirror.catn.com/pub/tdf/... is faulty (.man extension) - http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.documentfoundation.org/tdf/... is OK So it does seem to be just one rouge mirror. Hopefully this provides the information you need.
And indeed, http://mirror.catn.com/pub/tdf/libreoffice/stable/4.3.5/win/x86/LibreOffice_4.3.5_Win_x86.msi is returning headers like: HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2015 19:29:07 GMT Server: Apache/2.4.6 (CentOS) PHP/5.4.16 Last-Modified: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 17:56:39 GMT ETag: "d76d000-50a6d328763c0" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 199722916 Content-Range: bytes 26167388-225890303/225890304 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: application/x-troff-man Which presumably explains the .man extension. Other browsers seem to keep the .msi extension from the original URI, so don't have a problem.
@cloph, Florian Seems to be another round of incomplete mime.types... http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Problem-with-the-way-the-Supportex-mirror-handles-download-requests-man-files-instead-of-msi-files-tt3744192.html Can we ping the maintainer for the http://mirror.catn.com/pub/tdf/ site and ask them to check their MIME type configuration. =-ref-= https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Infra/Mirroring
I forwarded this ticket to the mirror maintainer just now ;-)
Ci-infra bugs are now tracked in redmine. Redmine bug #1124 https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Category:Infrastructure https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/projects/infrastructure https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/1106 https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/1124 Closing this bug as MOVED.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 53241 ***