Definitively fixing the dreaded Error 1335 libreoffice1.cab error

[namxat]

Hello. I have a question that has a technical dimension but isn’t primarily technical in nature. Today I downloaded LibreOffice today, went to install it, and got the dreaded “Error 1335 libreoffice1.cab is corrupt” error. This is not the first time I have encountered this particular error with LibreOffice installation. Anyway, I did some searching and stumbled across a post that revealed that this happens when the downloaded MSI is somehow corrupt. The post went on to suggest that I verify the MSI with 7-Zip (my MSI was indeed corrupt) and re-download the MSI if necessary. After testing, re-downloading the 237 MB MSI (which takes a while even over a high-speed connection), and re-testing, I was finally able to install LibreOffice.

Though this remedied my issue, in my mind this whole “sorry, try again” approach is wholly unacceptable, and completely skirts the root issue. To clarify, the root issue is that libreoffice.org is frequently and intermittently serving up corrupt MSI downloads. Is there any effort currently underway to address that issue? Surely you are all aware of it, as it has been an issue for some time. What is the adoption rate for LibreOffice? Is it fairly high? Might it get even higher if your website were stop serving up crap downloads?

[mikekaganski]

LibreOffice doesn’t serve any installer from its site. If it would, then there were never such a problem (unless user has connection problems, of course). But that’s impossible, because that would put such a huge load on TDF servers that they’d just go out of service.

Instead, TDF relies on public mirrors, which are randomly chosen from by a service. And those mirrors, owned by external parties, unfortunately aren’t always configured to properly report the MSI’s ContentType. This e.g. may make your browser to believe that MSI is actually text file, and modify it while downloading.

The problem is tdf#53241 (see comment 9 for current state).

[davidbishop]

This is not an answer as such, simply an observation in support of the above. While appreciating the efforts of all those who provide this free - and generally excellent - office suite, I, too, have been frustrated by Error 1335, twice in the past few months. Despite several attempts to obtain a clean download of Version 5.2.7.2, I kept getting the same error (1335). I even had a look at using 7-Zip (see above) to extract the downloaded files, but the technicalities of that were beyond my everyday user capacity.

What was frustrating was that when forced to abort the installation, a message pops up to inform the user that “Your system has not been modified”, whereas in fact the previous version had been deleted! This leaves the user with no program at all!

In the end (after several hours) I found a suggestion to use the torrent rather than the standard download and, lo and behold, it worked fine!

So a polite suggestion to the good people at Libre Office: please try to fix this bug, which from only a quick check on your forum has been a problem since at least 2012!

[LibreTraining]

The assertion that LibreOffice is serving ‘corrupt’ downloads is ridiculous.

If that were actually the case there would be thousands of complaints, not the few complaints of a few people with bad internet connections or computer issues.

Using bittorrent to download works around whatever issues the downloader is having at their end.

[mikekaganski]

You are over-confident. The problem exists.

If you search for 1335 here, you’ll find 23 questions (one of them is irrelevant, though). If you use google for that, you’ll find about 6000 hits.

User observing this might rightfully conclude that there’s some problem on our side; and actually it is.

[LibreTraining]

Doubt it without some definitive evidence.
Over many years of supporting Joomla I saw countless claims of bad downloads.
Upon investigation even downloading the exact same file from the same location it became evident the problem was not the file.
Bad connections, bad ISPs, bad modems, antivirus issues, firewall issues, etc. - with a much smaller file.
Given that thousands download the same files without issue, I remain skeptical.
Show me an actual issue which can be replicated.