Hi Lane.
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I understand your nervousness, I never upgraded from the initial install of OpenLP 2.0.3 at my church because we didn't have any issues.
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Is there any possibility of "downgrading LibreOffice" to 3.x?<br>
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The beta/nightlies will offer to back up your data for you. However you can do it manually if you wish. You'll find your data under ~/.local/share/openlp you should also back up your config file, but ATM I cannot remember where that is!
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You can either use one of the packages tgc mentioned, or run from source. If you run from source you don't need to compile it as its interpreted. Just follow the instructions at http://wiki.openlp.org/Development:Linux_Development_Environment#Installing_on_Ubuntu_and_its_Derivates to get all the packages you need. In the scripts folder there is a check_dependencies.py script, run that to confirm that you have every thing then run openlp.py
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You can run OpenLP with the argument -p so that it runs in portable mode, running from source this will save the data in the folder that you extracted your source to. (I'm not sure how running OpenLP from a package will work with the -p as it will replace your previous OpenLP install)
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P.S. There a new beta due soon, if you wanted to wait for that. It has over 60 bug fixes, at the current count, since the previous beta.