I hate these type of surprises, caused by badly designed and/or published improvements. The professional way to introduce those changes, is enabling the new intrusive function in the settings function of the program introducing that change.
I store all my files in the Virtualbox Shared Folders on a separate partition, because they are in principle accessible by all my virtual machines, who need them and I have VMs for: - the normal office work - banking and other financial apps - to try out new apps - windows for compatibility with old files - to try-out alpha and beta releases of the OSes I avoid the use of the home folder for documents, since it is a dirty mix between computer settings and documents. I only use Home for my local settings and store my document in a separate set of folders on a separate partition, not influenced by any OS changes. I do not intend to change that set up. The Vbox shared folder files are owned by the root and I could get read and write access, by becoming a member of the vboxsf group. I do not intend to change all my "/etc/apparmor.d/tunables/alias" files in my VMs. Probably I will simply upgrade to LibreOffice 6, not having any access problem yet or I use Microsoft Office again in my Windows VM. I have been in IT since 1969, but I have no clue what you hope to achieve nor how it could improve my situation. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to libreoffice in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1751005 Title: libreoffice cannot open a document not within $HOME Status in libreoffice package in Ubuntu: Fix Committed Bug description: Starting with today's update to LibreOffice 5.4.5.1 40m0(Build:1), files not within the user $HOME directory cannot be opened. This has nothing to do with ownership or permissions - the target document is owned by the user with full permissions. Moving the file to ~/Desktop allows it to be opened normally. Error message in popup window: Access to /home2/mico/documents/personal/2018 lists.ods was denied. Error message when launched from terminal: $: localc "2018 lists.ods" javaldx: Could not find a Java Runtime Environment! Please ensure that a JVM and the package libreoffice-java-common is installed. If it is already installed then try removing ~/.libreoffice/3/user/config/javasettings_Linux_*.xml Warning: failed to read path from javaldx The file mentioned in the error message does not exist. I removed the corresponding file under ~/.libreoffice/4/ but that makes no difference. This but started in Ubuntu 18.04 (alpha) around Feb. 15, and with today's update (Feb. 22) it appeared in Ubuntu 17.10. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10 Package: libreoffice-core 1:5.4.5-0ubuntu0.17.10.1 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-36.40-generic 4.13.13 Uname: Linux 4.13.0-36-generic x86_64 ApportVersion: 2.20.7-0ubuntu3.7 Architecture: amd64 CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME Date: Thu Feb 22 09:35:49 2018 InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-01-27 (25 days ago) InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Release amd64 (20180105.1) SourcePackage: libreoffice UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/1751005/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp

