OpenOffice 3 Install on Slackware Linux

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Installing OpenOffice 3 Under Slackware Linux

Just a quick heads up for anyone who is trying to install the OpenOffice 3 under Slackware Linux. The system used here is a stock Slackware 12 install, but I would imagine it would work pretty much the same for 11 or 10.2 and possibly earlier versions of Slack. Since OpenOffice switched to using rpm based packaging, Slackware users typically install OpenOffice by means of the following the steps:

download and uncompress the OpenOffice archive
cd into the RPMS dir
run rpm2tgz *.rpm
run installpkg *.tgz

This has always worked fine. It places OpenOffice suite in the /opt dir where it belongs and everyone was happy. This rpm2tgz method came up with a few problems when installing the OpenOffice 3. Everything installed and started up fine and appeared normal. A few critical items where not working however.

link for OpenOffice Impress on the new start screen doesn't work and the icon is damaged/missing
backspace key does not work in OpenOffice Writer
arrow keys do not work in OpenOffice Writer

There may have been other issues, but since a word processor isn't of much use if you can't backspace, I didn't stick around to test other areas. I killed the new OpenOffice dir and my new preferences dir and tried the install again: same result. I then tried to start up OpenOffice as the root user: same result. I then went back to my old version of OpenOffice 2.4 (I had just renamed the 2.4 dir in /opt) and it was working fine. So in my mind this was a verified issue.

I searched high and low to find the issue, but OpenOffice.org version 3 was fairly new so not much was out there. The few things I did find related to versions of Linux other than Slackware. I did find a few posts about the backspace/arrow keys not working for people in 2.x releases of OOo. Those were corrected by blowing away the user's preferences folder and having OpenOffice recreate it again on start up. This did not work in my situation however.

I began to wonder if something had gone awry with the conversion from rpm to tgz packages. So I thought I might give it a shot by actually using the rpm packages directly as opposed to converting them first. The rpm application suite is installed by default with Slackware Linux, it is just not commonly used. Anyway, long story short, I went back to the RPMS dir and issued the following command:

# rpm -i --nodeps -vh --ignoresize *.rpm

It went through the normal install process and placed OpenOffice into /opt as usual. Low and behold, all of the sudden my backspace and arrow keys are all functional and the OpenOffice Impress link and icon are back in working order.

Unfortunately, I do not know exactly what goes wrong with rpm2tgz and the OpenOffice 3 rpms, but skipping the conversion to Slackware tgz packages and just using the straight rpm command to install OpenOffice seems to go well under Slackware Linux.

Slight Update: If you've used the technique listed above to install OO and now you want reinstall OO for some reason (using the same technique), the rpm command will complain about various conflicts and other RPM rubbish. I'm absolutely certain that there's a better way to do this, but if you're like me and ONLY use rpm on Slack for OO, then just kill the /var/lib/rpm dir and that will knock out any and all traces of your previous Slackware OpenOffice install (at least as far as the RPM database is concerned). Now you can run the command above without getting any complaints from rpm.

Happy installing, KRM

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Kevin R. Marshall

Installing OpenOffice 3 Under Slackware Linux