Install OpenOffice.org for a Single User

Posted by Angelo on August 8, 2008

OpenOffice.org distributes their binaries as rpms. That’s great for a majority of the people who can install them, but in a couple of situations I’ve found myself wanting to use the most updated version but didn’t have root access to do the install of the package properly.

Here is how I installed it for my own user. You will need the cpio utilities installed including ‘cpio’ and ‘rpm2cpio’ which are installed on many rpm based systems.

Download the gzipped rpm files from OpenOffice.org

Unpack:

tar xzvf OOo_2.2.0_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz

You should now have a directory similar to OOF680_m14_native_packed-1_en-US.9134/
cd to the RPMs directory inside this new directory and unpack the RPM files locally:
```
ls *.rpm | while read file; do rpm2cpio $file | cpio -idmv; done
```

You should see the files from the RPMs created, e.g.

./etc
./etc/.java
./etc/.java/.systemPrefs
./etc/.java/.systemPrefs/.system.lock
./etc/.java/.systemPrefs/.systemRootModFile
./etc/init.d/jexec
...
opt/openoffice.org2.2/share/xslt/export/xhtml/header.xsl
opt/openoffice.org2.2/share/xslt/export/xhtml/master_chapter_numbering.xsl
opt/openoffice.org2.2/share/xslt/export/xhtml/master_document.xsl
opt/openoffice.org2.2/share/xslt/export/xhtml/master_refs_workaround.xsl
opt/openoffice.org2.2/share/xslt/export/xhtml/master_usability_links.xsl
opt/openoffice.org2.2/share/xslt/export/xhtml/ooo2xhtml.xsl
opt/openoffice.org2.2/share/xslt/export/xhtml/table.xsl

I like to keep all of my personal packages in a single directory. Usually I make a directory in my home called pkg/ which I will move openoffice to. So first, move the openoffice directory under opt/ that was created above to ~/pkg/:
```
mv opt/openoffice.org2.2/ ~/pkg/
```
I also like to use symlinks for my current most updated version of a software:
```
cd ~/pkg/
ln -s openoffice.org2.2/ openoffice.org
```
Then I create some scripts in my ~/bin/ directory that I include in my path environment. The first one is openoffice.org itself. I create an executable file called ~/bin/openoffice.org that looks like this:
```
#!/bin/bash
exec ~/pkg/openoffice.org/program/soffice "$@"
```
It’s also nice to create one for the openoffice.org printer administration gui. I create an executable script called ~/bin/openoffice.org-printeradmin that looks like this:
```
#!/bin/bash
exec ~/pkg/openoffice.org2.1/program/spadmin
```