Screenshots of Installing Open Office.Org 3 on Ubuntu or another Debian based Linux distribution. This guide has detailed steps for even Linux beginners.
Installing software in most Linux systems is as simple as opening the package manager, selecting what you want, and hitting the Install button. Unfortunately, sometimes the application you want isn't in your distribution's repositories. It could be because the distro hasn't yet packaged the newest version of the application, or they supply their own version. Such is the case with the Microsoft Office rival, the Open Office.org suite. Many distributions choose to use a custom version, either a fork or disto-native release of Open Office. The popular Ubuntu uses the Go-OOO version, which at the time of this article has not been updated to 3.0, which is the official version of Open Office. However, on a system which uses .deb packages (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Mepis, gOS, Freespire, and many more) it is very simple to install the latest version of Open Office. You also will first want to remove any earlier versions of Open Office that are installed.
Download Package Files
First thing is to check the OOO system requirements to make sure your computer is ready for Open Office 3. Once you're sure it will run, it's time to download the package file. On a Debian-based system, you'll want to bypass the "Download Now" and instead click "more platforms and other." Here's a direct link to the downloads. Find your language and system type, then click the appropriate link.
Uncompress the Files
The file that you download should end in .tar.gz and is actually a compressed archive of a number of package files. We'll need to decompress this either by using the terminal command or with the file archiver. To use the terminal, move into the folder with your download then type (without quotes) "tar -xvzf OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz" Replace the file name with that of your specific download. If you're curious, which I was, about those options after the tar command, "x" means extract (decompress) a file, "v" outputs a verbose list of what the process is doing, "z" tells tar that we are using a gzip archive (.tz), and "f" indicates that a file name follows, in this case our OOO archive. Typing "info command" in the terminal will give you all these options for that command.
Now that you have the download unpacked, you should have three folders and a file. The "DEBS" folder holds the install files and the "readmes" folder has a lists some program changes, system requirements, and other information. We'll be using the "DEBS" folder to install Open Office.
Installing the Core Program Files
Open up the "DEBS" folder. Wow, that's a lot of files! Don't worry. By using a simple terminal command, we'll install everything except the folder "desktop-integration," which is for later.
To install the core files for Open Office, open up the terminal and move to the "DEBS" folder. Type "sudo dpkg -i *.deb". In this command, "*.deb" means install any files in the current folder that end with ".deb" The "*" is called a wild-card, which can refer to any letter or number.
