Looks like it’s fairly easy to be able to use your own copy of OpenOffice.org 2 beta2 on Debian testing. OpenOffice comes only packeged in unstable at the present time, or for RPM-based distributions. But it’s easy to install the later version on a Debian testing machine, and it looks like it will run OK.
You will need to have alien installed to be able to convert the packages.
Here are the steps I applied :
- Download the
tgzarchive : English, x86, and your preferred mirror - Extract it’s content in your home directory
- cd into it
- remove
RPM/openofficeorg-testtool-*.rpm - Convert the
.rpminto.tgz. Apply the following script :for i in RPMS/*.rpm; do alien -t $i; done - Extract the contents of the tarbals :
for i in RPMS/*.tgz; do tar zxf $i; done; it will create anopt/directory there. - That’s it. you only have to run
.../OOo2.0beta2_native_packed_en-US/opt/openoffice.org1.9.125/program/sofficeto launch it.
I’m not sure everything will run smoothly but that should be enough to read the .odp documents sent by my collegues running Fedora Core 4.
Update 16/11/2005 : you may then remove the rpm and tgz files from the RPMS directory, which are rather big 😉
Et alors, que penses tu d’openoffice 2?
Faut-il que l’on s’y mette rapidement? Est-il indispensable ou juste une release pas importante?
Pas encore testé, à vrai dire… juste pour lire des documents transmis par des collègues en FC4 qui se rendent pas compte qu’ils utilisent des versions beta…
Mais je pense que OpenDocument est LA nouveauté, qui méritera qu’on l’utilise.
A couple of remarks :
alienbeforefor i in *.tgz; do tar zxf $i; doneinstead offor i in RPMS/*.tgz; do tar zxf $i; doneHi Olivier,
Many thanks for providing these instructions. They work fine with OOo 2.0.1 as well, as was already commented somewhere else in your blog. For an encore, I moved the openoffice.org2.0 directory that was created in the opt directory to /usr/local and then performed this little script from within the /etc/alternatives directory
for i in sbase scalc sdraw setofficelang setofficelang.bin simpress smath soffice soffice.bin spadmin.bin swriter; do sudo ln -s /usr/local/openoffice.org2.0/program/$i; done
Please note this script uses sudo, so make sure you have sudo installed and your user is allowed to use it. The script can also be performed by the root user and then you may leave “sudo” out of the commands. Next I did this from within the /usr/bin directory
for i in sbase scalc sdraw setofficelang setofficelang.bin simpress smath soffice soffice.bin spadmin.bin swriter; do sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/$i; done
and now I can type “scalc” and OpenOffice.org Calc will start up. Please also note that this probably will only work after OpenOffice.org has once been started using the soffice command so all local files have been created properly. This is the behaviour under Windows and I assumed it would behave the same under Linux.
Thanks, Wouter van Reeven