I often export my X display with export DISPLAY= and xhost because I regularly work from several different Linux machines on the same network. OpenOffice is a one-instance application; therefore, if I have it running on e.g. Machine 1 and I want to edit a document from e.g. Machine 2 (running from Machine 1) I have to close the instance that's running already.

Example:

1. document.odt is on machine1.edu
2. I have OpenOffice running from machine1.edu
3. I xhost machine1.edu from machine2.edu
4. I ssh -Y to machine1.edu from machine2.edu
5. I setsid soffice -o document.odt from the ssh session
6. Nothing happens because it's already running on machine1.edu

I've tried using the -env and -display command-line options, but both seem to only apply to the initial instance. Thanks.
Kevin Barry

I have an idea that I haven't tried on Linux. Since nobody has responded in almost three days maybe this idea is worth mentioning.

Can you use the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to connect to the machine 1 console X session? This idea is inspired by the Windows Remote Desktop application where one Windows machine connects to and takes over another machine's primary display. This way you would see and use the instance of OOo that is already running on the console session.

I've been intending to test this idea. Maybe you can test it for me and post your findings here.

If that doesn't work then maybe your remote session could log on to machine 1 as a different user. That should take care of the single instance problem in OOo.

I know it's not exactly answering your question, but in the case of firefox, you can run with the command-line option -no-remote to force a new instance, which should open in a new window (though I haven't tried this, ref).

The options for OpenOffice seem less well documented, but I suspect you may have some luck by passing -nolockcheck and -display.

Hope that's of some help,

—Robert J Lee