I've read through some of the other threads discussing ways to get the OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta running on Slackware, and an idea crossed my mind. I know it can work with scripts and tweaking and rpm2tgz, but what about using the actual rpm program to install the rpms. I know that's a bad idea for packages in general on Slackware as you'll mess up the pkgtool system, get duplicates, version conflicts, etc., but if it's just for this one program how would that work? Will rpm start running around installing dependencies you already have, or can you have it just install the software and leave it at that? Just an idea...

<ranting>Also, do the developers have anything written anywhere on their motivation to only do rpms and refuse to release source? Will everything from 2.0 on be solely available in rpms? What happened to the goal of OOo in the first place, or are they assuming all Linux users are using rpm-based distros? </ranting>

As far as I understand, Slackware has no RPM database. So yes, you can install it (and OOo has few dependencies, as it's a static built binary), but trying to get it off properly would not be fun.

Also, the menu packages are all very strange and have to be rebuilt anyway to work properly on Slackware.

It's LGPL, and IIRC, the source code can be found in the same directory as where you download the Linux binary build.

<Sarcasm>Absolutely not! They released a (1!) menu package in .deb form for Debian!</Sarcasm>

Unfortunately, yes. There is a strange reference in their material on OOo2 referring to RPM as the 'native' form for Linux.

You can get the source, but building the thing takes forever and a day -- and at least 4Gb of disk space. (One person reported that he needed 9 Gb of space to build it!).

I think OO should be handled the way KDE is: if some generous soul could take responsiblity for building, maintaining and uploading Slack tgz packages of OO, that would be great.

Actually, you can get fairly recent Slack packages of OO at www.linuxpackages.net (for a long time they just had 1.9.79, but they just added 1.9.100, I believe). Also, an Italian site -- www.slacky.it -- sometimes offers English-language versions of recent OO packages.

I am sure when 2.x is stable they will release an installer similar to the one on 1.x.

I honestly don't think they will, based on what they've said so far:

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/f...2.0/index.html

(Scroll down to 'Native Installers')

Plus, from this document: http://specs.openoffice.org/installa...-officecfg.sxw (found from Guide to New OOo2 "Features" http://marketing.openoffice.org/2.0/...l#installation)

As far as OOo is concerned, RPM is native installer 'enough' for us and that's all we're getting.

Alls I did was download, extract and do `rpm2tgz *.rpm` then `installpkg *.tgz` and I never had any problems with it.

It would obviously be a bad move if they only supported rpm because its not the only native package format on Linux systems. Anyway we'll wait and see what happens when the 2.x is stable.

Hi guys, don't know if it's useful, but you could use the .tgz built for Minislack, a slackware-based distro. It works good, and should be Slackware-compatible.

They'll have to release source tarballs. It's Open Source project. Otherwise, it all smells as if they were going commercial. Which in fact can happen in near future.

Up to 1.9.m113 they did, but CVS is still available.

Can Sun ever take away the code?

no need to go very far. SCO is the fair example

There is a Slackware package for 1.9.100 at http://www.linuxpackages.net/pkg_details.php?id=6600

I have it installed and it works great. Kudos to Armando :-)

There's one program that is installed on my machine via RPM (yes, RPM is included in Slackware), and that is OpenOffice 2. I don't see much point in using rpm2tgz first, because you get exactly the same result.

You must use the --no-deps option to the RPMs, for example: rpm -ihv --no-deps *.rpm

The install creates two scripts that you should edit, that is /usr/bin/openoffice.org-1.9 and /usr/bin/openoffice.org-1.9-printeradmin

Just open them in a text editor and you will understand, because OOo installs in /opt, and that path is not used in those scripts.

OpenOffice.org 1.9.x in Slackware
By: Miguel Manuel Meléndez Gómez (miguelmmg at yahoo dot com dot mx)
Traduced by: Fernando Flores Ortiz (gplsource at gmail dot com)
First release: 20050720-1-es
Updated: 20050810-en


Description

This document describes the procedure to install OpenOffice.org 1.9.x in Slackware and optionally to generate compatible an installable file .tgz with the own system of packages of this distribution.


Requirements

. Slackware 10,1 or current (I have not proven it in previous versions).
. OpenOffice.org 1.9.xxx (downloadable of the official site). In order to write this document version 1.9.118. was used. Package of Spanish language for OOo 1.9.xxx (downloadable of the official site).
. It is required to have installed the packages: cpio, tar, pkgtools of series A; rpm of series AP. Optional the package of Gnome 2,6 that comes in Slackware, some superior version of Gnome of alternating projects like Gware, Freerock or KDE 3.x.
. 500 MB of temporary space in disc if a package is not generated (OOo occupy already installed about 280 MB), 700 MB if it is going away to generate a package. When finalizing the used archives and temporary directories can be eliminated, releasing between 200 and 300 MB).


Considerations

- $HOME is the personal directory of the actual user.
- $OOTMP is the directory where I will extract the rpm archives from installation.
- $TMPROOT is the directory where I am going to extract the content of each RPM.

- When commands be executed:
($) Executed by user
(#) Executed by root.


Procedure

We extract the content of the downloaded file of the site of OpenOffice.org in a temporary directory:

$ cd $OOTMP
$ tar zxvf OOo_1.9.118_LinuxIntel_rpm_install.tar.gz

The 'RPMS' directory contains the installation rpm archives and an additional directory called 'desktop-integration' with some additional rpm archives. We are going to extract the content of each one of the rpm archives within an additional temporary directory to the previous one with the purpose of analyzing "the installed" product.

$ cd $TMPROOT
$ for i in $OOTMP/RPMS/*.rpm; do rpm2cpio $i | cpio -id; done

As result we obtain the directory opt/openoffice.org1.9.118 that is where is all the necessary to run OpenOffice.org in english.

Note: If you're not interested for generate the Slackware package either the integration of OOo with Gnome or KDE, the procedure finishes here moving the directory opt/openoffice.org1.9.118 to another one where you have rights to access and run. To run OOo, you need to run the command 'soffice' within the directory 'program'.

Now, we need to extract the necessary files to integrate it with Gnome and KDE (assumed with any compatible desktop with the freedesktop.org specification).

$ cd $TMPROOT
$ rpm2cpio $OOTMP/RPMS/desktop-integration/openofficeorg-freedesktop-menus-1.9.118-1.noarch.rpm | cpio -id
$ rpm2cpio $OOTMP/RPMS/desktop-integration/openofficeorg-suse-menus-1.9.118-1.noarch.rpm

The freedesktop file contains the icons and MIME information to register the application with the applications that are compatible with the standard freedesktop, like Gnome 2.10.2. Nevertheless, if we used Gnome 2.6, the last one which it comes with Slackware of official form, we will need additional archives to register OpenOffice.org. I selected the package for SUSE because it contains part of which we are going to need to integrate it with KDE and Gnome 2.6. When extracting these archives we will observe additional directories to opt/openoffice.org1.9.118:

usr/bin
usr/share/applications
usr/share/icons
usr/share/mime
opt/gnome
opt/kde3

Here it is necessary to make some corrections, since usr/bin make reference to '/etc/openoffice.org1.9.118' (link that don't exist).

$ cd $TMPROOT
$ cd usr/bin
$ rm soffice
$ ln -s /opt/openoffice.org1.9.118/program/soffice soffice
$ sed 's/\/etc\/openoffice\.org-1\.9/\/opt\/openoffice\.org1\.9\.118/' openoffice.org-1.9 > OOotmp.tmp
$ mv OOotmp.tmp openoffice.org-1.9
$ sed 's/\/etc\/openoffice\.org-1\.9/\/opt\/openoffice\.org1\.9\.118/' openoffice.org-1.9-printeradmin > OOotmp.tmp
$ mv OOotmp.tmp openoffice.org-1.9-printeradmin
$ chmod a+x openoffice.org-1.9*

NOTE: A text editor can be used to change the content of ' openoffice.org-1.9 ' and ' openoffice.org-1.9-printeradmin', instead of the previous commands.

We need to fix the links in the .desktop files:

$ cd $TMPROOT
$ cd usr/share/applications
$ rm openoffice.org-1.9-*.desktop
$ for i in base calc draw impress math printeradmin writer; do ln -s /opt/openoffice.org1.9.118/share/xdg/$i.desktop $i.desktop; done

Now we completed the KDE and Gnome integration moving the necessary directories to its own locations within Slackware:

$ cd $TMPROOT
$ cd opt/gnome/share
$ mv application-registry mime-info ../../../usr/share
$ cd ../..
$ rm -rf gnome
$ mv kde3 kde

Finally we are going to create a Slackware package from the structure which we have in $TMPROOT. For it is necessary to create a file (inside the install directory) called 'slack-desc' with a brief description of the content of the package, we can use this as example:

|-----handy-ruler------------------------------------------------------|
openoffice.org: OpenOffice.org
openoffice.org:
openoffice.org: OpenOffice.org is both a multi-platform and
multi-lingual
openoffice.org: office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with
all
openoffice.org: other major office suites, the product is free to
download,
openoffice.org: use, and distribute.
openoffice.org:
openoffice.org:
openoffice.org:
openoffice.org:
openoffice.org:

$ cd $TMPROOT
$ mkdir install
$ cd install

After created the 'slack-desc' file (like the previous example) we need to creat a 'doinst.sh' file that contains these two lines:

( if which update-mime-database; then update-mime-database/usr/share/mime; fi ) &> /dev/null
( if which update-desktop-database; then update-desktop-database; fi ) &> /dev/null

You need to give execution rights to the shell script ' doinst.sh':

$ chmod a+x doinst.sh

The previous thing is for regenerate the cache of /usr/share/mime and menus. The file 'doinst.sh' is executed when the installation of the package finalize.

The final step is to generate the package:

$ cd ..
$ su
# chown -R root: *
# makepkg -l y -c y -p openoffice.org-1.9.118-i586-1xxx.tgz
# installpkg openoffice.org-1.9.118-i586-1xxx.tgz

NOTE: Instead -1xxx you can use anything (1= version, xxx = personal identifier). Example:

# makepkg -l y -c y -p openoffice.org-1.9.118-i586-1extz.tgz


Final Comments

In Gnome 2.6, the icons of the archives with own extensions of OpenOffice.org 1.x are replaced by which it brings OOo and are added again the design for version 2.

In Gnome 2.10.2 (of Gware) they were already had contemplated the icons for the applications of OOo 1.x and 2, except OpenOffice.org Base and Draw 2, reason why only in the odg and odb files you will see the new icons. A solution, that I will not explain here at the moment, is to replace the icons of the Gnome theme for the new MIME types of OOo 2.

The OOo RPM's has scripts of installation, nevertheless, do not have effect (according to me) in Slackware, reason why I have not included them here. If you wish to see scripts contained in each RPM you can use:

$ for i in *.rpm; do echo $i; echo -----; rpm -qp --scripts $i; echo -----; echo; done | less

I would like to receive comments and contributions about this guide and I hope this will be useful for you.


Miguel Manuel Meléndez Gómez (miguelmmg at yahoo dot com dot mx)

Files:
Original guide in spanish
Guide in english

I like this idea, though I'd want to test it out first. Is there a dl link for Minislack's OO package, or do you have to use the netpkg script? I'm reluctant to use anything on my precious Slack installtion that resembles an automated package manager.

One way or the other, with OO 2 betas and snapshots, I've never had any problems with the rpm2tgz solution.