Open Office under Ubuntu

For reasons unknown after setting up STAF on my work machine Open Office 2 and Open Office stopped working. Since I loath the thought of setting up MS Office under WINE I started trying to find the root of the problem. After an hour I got sick of playing with environmental variable and java installs. Instead I downloaded the latest 1.9 milestone and set about setting that up instead. After some mucking around and googling this is what I put together that works.

First download the latest build here.
Unpack the tarball: tar -zxvf OOo_1.9.113_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
Change into SRC680_m113_native_packed-1_en-US.8930/RPMS
sudo alien -k *.i586.rpm to convert all the RPMS to debs
Install with: sudo dpkg -i –force-overwrite *.deb
Run: /opt/openoffice.org1.9.113/program/soffice

This isn’t perfect I’m still getting some command line errors that I think are due to a funky java thing. but we’ll see…