This is my quick and easy install of OpenOffice on CentOS. The OpenOffice.org version is 2.3 and the CentOS version is 4.5. I will be using the RPM version downloaded from the OpenOffice.org website.
First let's make a temporary dir to untar our download to and switch to it.
cd /tmp
mkdir openoffice
cd openoffice/
Next, go to the website an download the latest RPM install package for OpenOffice.org to the temp dir we just changed to. The current OpenOffice.org as of this posting is 2.3. My filename was called OOo_2.3.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US.tar.gz so that's what we will use for the example.
Now, lets untar it and get to where the RPM's are.
tar xvzf OOo_2.3.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US.tar.gz
cd OOG680_m5_native_packed-1_en-US.9221/
cd RPMS/
Let's install all of the RPM's in the OpenOffice.org RPMS dir and uninstall any older installed versions of OpenOffice.org in the process.
rpm -Uivv openoffice.org-*
After installing all of the packages we need to install the links in the CentOS menu for the newer packages. We are going to install the freedesktop-menus and not the redhat-menus package because the redhat-menus package does not seem to work correctly.
rpm -Uvv openoffice.org-freedesktop-menus-2.3-9215.noarch.rpm
That should be it. You can access your OpenOffice.org programs from your CentOS menu on your desktop or I beleive the /opt/openoffice.org2.3/program/ dir.
Now, just clean up your mess in /tmp and we are done.
rm -Rf /tmp/openoffice/
After installing a new version of OpenOffice (1.1.1) using Debian's apt-get from unstable I did have one other problem. Everytime I started it up from the K Desktop menu it crashed. I wish I could remember what the error box said but I can't. But to fix it I deleted the directories ".openoffice" and the file ".sversionrc" in my home dir. I beleive that doing two upgrades before this from 1.0 and 1.1 must have messed up the config files that caused compatibility problems.
After getting it started I had a problem of the spell checker saying that every word was mispelled (underlining it in red) even if it was spelled correctly. Seems that I had to install the package named "myspell-en-us" (the debain package name) which had the dictionary.
