This guide manually installs Apache OpenOffice in dCore. It does not appear present in Debian/Ubuntu repositories or PPA. The installation is not as hard as it seems, fortunately the mksquashfs and sce-deb2sce commands perform the heavy lifting.

The download, extraction and SCE creation process will temporarily require up to ~1GB of space. After cleanup, however, the resulting openoffice.sce is only 167MB. Only use /tmp/ as a temporary working directory, therefore, if adequate system RAM is available. Otherwise temporarily use a mounted data partition, even the TCE directory, being careful not to accidently modify or delete any important dCore system files. After successful OpenOffice installation all downloaded and temporary working files can safely be deleted.

There is no easy update process. If a newer version becomes available and an update is desired, backup or remove the outdated openoffice.sce, download the newer version and repeat these installation steps.

Although not tested, it may not be wise to load both OpenOffice and LibreOffice simultaneously.

Apache OpenOffice download site:

http://www.openoffice.org/download/

Download the Apache OpenOffice Linux 32-bit (x86) 146MB v4.1.3 DEB (not RPM) file to /tmp/ or a data partition:

Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.3_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz

Note older releases are also available if desired.

Run the following commands from a terminal.

Extract downloaded archive:

tar xvf Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.3_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz

Change to extracted (en-US) sub-directory:

cd en-US/DEBS/

Remove desktop-integration directory:

rm -rf desktop-integration

Now left with 41 separate .deb files.

Retrieve and load sce-deb2sce (helper command to process the .deb files):

sce-import -o sce-deb2sce
sce-load sce-deb2sce

Loop convert all 41 .deb files into individual SCEs (takes a while):

for f in *; do sce-deb2sce $f;  done

Remove all *.sce.md5.txt files:

rm -f *.sce.md5.txt

Force unsquash all separate SCEs into a single squashfs-root working directory:

for f in *.sce; do unsquashfs -f $f; done

Create the OpenOffice SCE:

mksquashfs squashfs-root openoffice.sce

Create the openoffice.sce.md5.txt file:

md5sum openoffice.sce > openoffice.sce.md5.txt

Copy openoffice.sce and openoffice.sce.md5.txt to the SCE directory:

cp openoffice.sce openoffice.sce.md5.txt /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/sce

Load openoffice.sce:

sce-load openoffice

Create an OpenOffice executable symlink:

ln -s /opt/openoffice4/program/soffice ~/.local/bin

Note additional symlinks can be created, review available executables in /opt/openoffice4/program/.

Test OpenOffice, run:

soffice

Welcome to OpenOffice wizard, blank username info okay, just select 'next' and 'finsih', then OpenOffice 4 should launch.

Success!

Note a large ~50MB ~/.openoffice configuration directory gets created, which is not acceptable for dCore systems that do no have a persistent /home directory.

There is an ~24MB temporary /home/tc/.openoffice/4/user/extensions/tmp/ directory that can safely be emptied.

The other is a large ~24MB /home/tc/.openoffice/4/user/uno_packages/ directory. The directory contains the spellcheck dictionary and should not be deleted.

Users wishing to keep /home/tc/ small for backup should move the entire /home/tc/.openoffice configuration directory to a mounted partition. In this example the TCE directory is utilized as it is always mounted at boot, although any mounted data partition should work. Example move and symlink:

cd /home/tc/
mv /home/tc/.openoffice/ /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/
ln -s /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/.openoffice .openoffice

Finally run a backup to change the configuration change: backup

Minor issue, terminal output running soffice will indicate 'Could not find a Java Runtime Environment'. If desired JRE can be set up separately <link>.