OpenOffice.org

From openSUSE

About

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform, multilingual, open source office suit. It is available for most of the common operating systems like Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS X. Because it is open software, it is available at no cost. It uses the OASIS Standard OpenDocument format, but is also interoperable with every major office suite.

OpenOffice.org is based on StarOffice, an office suite originally developed by StarDivision and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999.

Update to Latest Version

The latest stable build is available for older openSUSE releases in the Build Service. It is usually a bit delayed after the upstream release because it includes many additional features and fixes from the Go-oo project. The stabilization of the openSUSE build is also affected by the openSUSE roadmap. It might get updated also between the upstream releases to provide some important or security fixes.

Enthusiasts could try an unstable build build that uses the sources from Factory. This build is regularly updated every few weeks. It is usually based on a recent upstream milestone and latest Go-oo modifications. The stability of these packages would vary over the time. In general, it should be very stable close before the openSUSE release. It might be less stable at another time.

Important: See the section about dependencies if you have troubles during the update.

Note: The latest OpenOffice.org version available for SuSE 9.3 is 2.1 and can be found at ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/OpenOffice.org/9.3-i386/.

Support

The primary information source is the official OpenOffice.org site. General questions about the application usage can be best answered on the mailing list users@openoffice.org. One must be subscribed to post messages there. It is also possible to search the mailing list archive.

The best place to ask the openSUSE community is the opensuse@opensuse.org mailing list. One must be subscribed to post messages there. Also there is an archive. It is a high trafic list, so it is a good idea to mention the word OpenOffice.org somewhere in the subject to draw attention of the right people.

The Go-oo development team can be contacted on the dev@lists.go-oo.org mailing list or via the channel #go-oo on irc.freenode.net.

Reporting Bugs

The Novell OOo team is interested into bug reports against all builds: official, stable, and unstable. It helps them to increase quality and catch problems for the upcoming products and maintenace updates. Please, read the general and OpenOffice.org specific hints before you report the bug.

Dependencies During Update

The OpenOffice_org package has been split into more optional packages (-writer, -calc, -impress) since OOo-2.3. Also the packages with extra localizations started to be architecture independent (noarch). Unfortunately, YaST has problems to process this situation correctly during the update from the Build Service, see the bug #332277. You need to select the right architecture and version by hand.

If YaST is reporting some conflicts or missing dependencies, please make sure that the right version and architecture is selected. They are visible in the the Versions tab:

Lost settings by an upgrade under SuSE 9.3 and OpenSUSE 10.0

Both these versions were shipped with a pre-release of OpenOffice.org 2. When OpenOffice.org is upgraded to version 2, all the settings of the pre-release can get lost. This is not a bug in OpenOffice.org, it is just that SUSE forgot to rename the settings directory. The pre-release used the .ooo-2.0-pre directory and version 2 is using the .ooo-2.0 directory. The old settings directory is still in the home directory.

A good Linux-way to solve this small problem is to make a symlink from the old directory to the new directory.

Go to you home directory, remove the new settings directory and make a symlink to the directory of OpenOffice.org 2.

cd ~
rm -vr .ooo-2.0
ln -s .ooo-2.0-pre .ooo-2.0/

See Also

• KOffice
• StarOffice
• Abiword

External links

• OpenOffice.org Home
• Go-oo project
• OpenOffice.org Templates Home
• The OpenOffice.org Forum (Unofficial)
• OOExtras: Extras for OpenOffice.org (Unofficial)
• OOMacros: Macros for OpenOffice.org (Unofficial)
• Tutorials for OpenOffice.org (Unofficial)
• StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Presentation Templates (Unofficial)
• OpenOffice on Wikipedia