OpenOffice

Those who have epm installed, beware !! When you run dmake, OpenOffice.org build makes use of system installed epm (if you have one), and the epm (version-4.0) complains that the productname contains characters other than letters and numbers ( Productname used by OpenOffice.org build contains hyphens and dots) !! Thus, the build process stops without any package being built.

The solution is to pass the argument --with-epm=internal to the configure script while running configure. This would make OpenOffice.org build to use the specially patched version of the epm included in its source tree and the package gets delivered successfully.

Since OpenOffice.org 2.1.x (SRC680_m175) you don't need to install tcsh if you pass --with-use-shell=bash to the configure script.

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OpenOffice from Binary distribution

If you just want to use OpenOffice, or don't have the massive resources to compile it from sources, it's easy to install from the rpm distribution. You need to install ​cpio from the book, and ​rpm2targz, then download the distribution as a .tar.gz from the ​website or a mirror. If you already have JDK installed, get the version without an included JRE (that's the version without a '_wJRE' in it's name.)

Unpack the distribution, and cd to the resultant directory, and then into RPMS. Convert all the RPMS to tar.gz by running 'rpm2targz *', delete the rpms with 'rm *.rpm' and install the tar.gz's with 'sudo tar -xf -C *.tar.gz' - this will put everything into /opt/OpenOffice.orgX.X.

The work of a few minutes and 6 Gbytes of disk space not required!