I'm still newbish at compiling, most of my software installing has been done via the urpmi commands, I'm running Mandriva 2005 LE and have OpenOffice 1.x installed. I am downloading 2.0 right now and was wondering about a couple of things. Should I completely remove all traces of the older openoffice version first? Also will installing it from source automatically put the shortcuts in my application menu?

Nevermind, everything is in .rpm format, I'm good to go.

This all depends on what flags you passed when you were running "configure"

Just as a reminder, while compiling OO2 it might need as much as 5 GB of diskspace and it takes very long, I've heard up to 20 hours. Why don't you install the binary? the speed that you gain from compiling is neglicible.

Got it, for some odd reason the install didn't work if I ran the rpms individually via the gui, but when I su'd into the rpms folder after I untarred it and ran -Uvih *rpm it worked perfect, I could run the applications via command before the shortcuts were in the menu even, but now everything is working perfect. Thanks for the tip, when you said install from binary I thought, hey wait a minute I'll bet this is something I need root privlages to make work properly.

PS. Where did you hear 20 hours and 5 GB? I lost .1 GB of root partition space and it took like 2 minutes, lol.

That is when you install the binary version. If you compile openoffice2.0 from source (like in gentoo "emerge openoffice" instead of "emerge openoffice-bin") it will consume several GB's during the compiling process and it will take very long to compile all of it (especially when you use java with it)

That's why I chose the openoffice-bin version, that indeed takes about a minute or 2 and 200 MB of diskspace

Dudeman,

Can you tell me the exact line you entered when you say -Uvih *rpm?

Unpack the tar into my home folder
go into the RPMS directory (that ark just created) in a terminal
login in by typing "su"
enter root password
and then enter what?

After directing yourself to the "RPMS" folder and entering root, I just run:

rpm -Uvih *rpm

Hope this helps. :-)

I wouldn't install OOo from source. The process can be very long and it needs lots of temporary disk space. On FreeBSD the ports installer says that OOo needs about 9 gigs of free space to build.

Don't forget to install the mandriva menus packages in RPMS/desktop-integration.

I did do that (use the command line to install all rpm's at once, then install the desktop integration rpm's that came from the tar file found at openoffice.org). OpenOffice 2.0 installed quite nicely.

Why
when using the GUI, having entered the root password, does rpm refuse to install the rpm's one at a time, claiming dependancy after dependancy, when you eventually find out a circular dependancy between two files
but
when using the command line and installing the rpm's all at once, this does not happen?
If I used the command line to install just one rpm, would i still have received the dependancy error? Or will using the command line to install an rpm always force install?