A Code Monkey's Blog

How to install OpenOffice 3 without root privilege

The default openoffice of my desktop Linux was aging and I just wanted to update to the latest openoffice-3.2. But my problem was I didn't have the root privilege to do that. The official installer of OpenOffice failed again over again without notifying you that the reason of failure was the lack of root privilege. Finally I found this great post. I followed what it said and it worked like a charm. Only one thing I want to add: if you use color ls, use ls --color=never to disable the color output.

  1. Download the installation package from OpenOffice website.

  2. Unzip it into a directory.

  3. for i in ls --color=never OOO320_m18_native_packed-1_en-US.9502/RPMS/*rpm; do rpm2cpio $i | cpio -ivd; done

  4. cd OOO320_m18_native_packed-1_en-US.9502/RPMS/opt/openoffice.org3/program/

  5. run ./soffice

  6. (option) create symbolic link to soffice.

  7. (option) set file association in Nautilus. Right click a doc and choose Properties->Open with -> Add...